Transcript: Timeless Truths of Effective Spiritual Leadership // Richard Blackaby, Blackaby Ministries International

The Flourishing Culture Podcast Series

“Timeless Truths of Effective Spiritual Leadership“

January 31, 2022

Richard Blackaby

Intro: What is your secret weapon as a leader? Well, today, Richard Blackaby shares his timeless truths for effective leadership, including effective spiritual leadership. Join us as Richard shares his wisdom and coaches us on the secrets of spiritual leadership.

Al Lopus: Hi, I'm Al Lopus, and you're listening to the Flourishing Culture Podcast, where we help you create a flourishing workplace. The problem employers are facing today is that more of our employees are quitting than ever before. Some people are calling this the great resignation. And now with millions of open jobs, how can churches, Christian non-profits, and Christian-owned businesses face this tidal wave of resignations while attracting new, outstanding talent? And we know that having a flourishing workplace with fully engaged employees is the solution. I'll be your guide today as we talk with a thought leader about key steps that you can take to create a flourishing workplace culture.

So, now let's meet today's special guest.

There are so many important topics in leadership and voices telling us how to be better leaders. But as Christian leaders, what is distinctive about our leadership? How do we steward God's agenda for our organizations and develop as a spiritual leader? We address the topic of spiritual leadership in our discussion today and focus on moving people onto God's agenda.

I'm delighted to welcome Richard Blackaby, and he's the president of Blackaby Ministries International and has written and coauthored many books, some with his father, Henry, including the revised Experiencing God and Spiritual Leadership. Spiritual Leadership has been out now for several years and is still highly influential on this important topic. So welcome, Richard.

Richard Blackaby: It's good to be with you.

Al: I'm really glad you could be with us. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

But before we focus on spiritual leadership, I'm interested in your own background, Richard. You have a Ph.D. in church history and enjoy reading biographies. I enjoy reading an occasional biography. So maybe what period of history fascinates you the most, and can you suggest maybe a few favorite biographies for us to consider?

Richard: Well, I like to tell people I prefer past history. I like all eras. I think I love the Roman era. I’ve got a whole shelf of books on Roman emperors. I’ve got biographies on all the American presidents, a lot of the kings and queens of England, and the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth century.

I was impacted years ago by Proverbs 13:20, which says if you spend time with wise people, you'll become wise; and hang out with fools, you'll become foolish. And I think that's a very important principle, but I discovered that through biographies, I can hang around with the greatest leaders of all time. Of course, none of them were perfect, but you get to see people in action, facing unprecedented challenges and problems, and watching how they developed a team, how they overcame adversity, how they resisted temptation or they didn't, and how they mobilized people to literally put their life on the line for a cause. And you watch generals in the past who could have their soldiers march headlong into cannon fire, musket fire, almost certainly facing death, and barely flinching at it. And then today's leaders, sometimes we can't get people to attend a meeting, you know? It's like, well, what do you learn from those folks?

So, I love just getting my life around that. And of course, when I started out in school, there weren't a lot of classes on leadership, and so the closest I could get to it was biographies and history. To me, history is just about people who made a difference.

Al: Yeah. I love that. My daughter is a history teacher, basically, loves Roman history herself. We’ve been to Rome, and we've been to Spain, actually, looking at the aqueduct—

Richard: Oh.

Al: —and some of the old Roman ruins. Yeah.

Richard: You know, some of those folks—yeah. When you look at that, you realize that has lasted thousands of years—

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Richard: —and you and I probably have been a part of stuff that won't last a year. And you think, wow, how do you invest your life in a way that two thousand years from now, people are still coming by to admire your work?

Al: Yeah. Well, that's fascinating.

Well, as we talk about leadership, Jesus's example of servant leadership is central to us as we live out our life as Christian leaders, and we hear a lot about servant leadership. But what are a few characteristics from your perspective that our listeners can internalize about this important quality of servant leadership as we exhibit leadership?

Richard: It is an important topic, and sometimes, I think, especially for Christians, we get that a little bit confused. Sometimes we think that our primary service as Christian leaders is to our people, and I would say that's not necessarily true. I would say we are servants of God. That's who we ultimately serve. Whenever you read a book or article about servant leadership, 99 percent of the time, they'll mention Jesus washing His disciples’ feet in John 13. Of course, if He was truly their servant, He would have washed their feet all the time. That's the only time we ever know He washed their feet. And we know that because not only is that the first time it's recorded, but Peter was flummoxed that Jesus would even do that. Clearly, it was not a normal habit. And so what I would just say with that is the reason Jesus washed His disciples’ feet was not because He was His disciples’ servant. It was because He was God's servant, and God the Father is the One who told Him, right now, that's what I need You to do to these guys. And Jesus certainly loved his disciples, would do anything for them. He's going to lay his life down for them. But the agenda for Jesus was not the disciples. The disciples did not set the agenda for Jesus; His Father did.

And so, but a couple other things to say, also, servant leadership just reminds us to stay in a posture of humility. You can't be anyone's servant if you're not humble. Whether you're serving God or you're serving people, it requires a humility that sees that you are a servant and it's not about you. It's about others. It's about God and His glory.

And then, lastly, I would just say servant leadership is about bringing the best out in others. If you truly are a servant leader, then you're going to always have in mind, what is best for my people? And, you know, I think sometimes we miss this. We're also a servant of our organizations. If you're hired to run a hotel, your job is to make the hotel better. You can’t sell the farm, pay twice the going rate to all your staff. The staff will love you until you go bankrupt. You’re a servant of the organization, and your task, your mission, is to make it the best it can be. And of course, if it is the best it can be, then, the employees, the staff, the customers will all benefit from that.

But I think sometimes there's a bit of confusion about exactly who we're even serving. And I think we need to kind of sort that all out and say, “Who is it we're primarily accountable to? Who hired us? What did they hire us to do?” Well, maybe we're a servant of that mission. So I hear servant leadership bantered around a lot, and when I start asking people, “Exactly who are you serving?” there gets to be some confusion, and we realize perhaps we’re not even serving the right people or the right mission.

So, all that's important. But I think it comes down to say one thing we know it's that you're not there to get others to serve you.

Al: Right.

Richard: You're in the posture of service, and find out who it is you're supposed to be serving and how he's measuring your service, and then get to work.

Al: As Ken Blanchard would say, it's not self-serving leadership; it's servant leadership, right?

Richard: Yeah.

Al: You know, I appreciate your point about humility, too. You know, Jim Collins was really one of the first business writers that said humility, that's part of level-five leadership, other than, you know, before him, other than Christians. I don't think we heard a lot about humility and leadership. That was more your self-confidence and ego, it seems. But yeah, that's a key factor, isn't it.

Richard: Yeah, yeah.

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Well, thanks. Those are great insights.

Many leaders struggle with having enough time to get everything done. We've all got our to-do lists, and there's always more work than we have time to do it. But this is a practical issue, and it's also a spiritual issue. So talk about the leader’s schedule. In Spiritual Leadership, you've written about this. How can leaders make time for what's important?

Richard: Yeah. Well, a very critical issue for leaders, that you'll never have enough time to do everything you want to do. And so a couple things to say about that. One is just, number one, it's you measure your success, not by how much you did, but how important the things were that you did. You can do a lot of trivial things. I've known some people in leadership positions that were constantly rushing up and down the hallway, frantically looking at their calendar and their emails and racing to the next meeting, but they never accomplished anything. They were just harried and busy, but they just never got to the important thing.

So I found, you know, Paul said an interesting thing one time. He said, “This one thing I do.” And of course, he was talking about his life's mission and calling. But I have found that you can really boil down your tasks to really—I think on any given day, there's probably one or two things that you must do. Everything else is great. But if you were to say, “But what are the one or two things today I must do and I must do well?” and I would always start with those. Knock those off, and then everything else is gravy after that.

I'd also just say, if you really want to be doing those kinds of things, you need to be on God's agenda, not yours. Too much of our praying is saying, “God bless my plans. Bless my schedule.” God has a way of completely exploding our plans and saying, “I just put all that aside. I've just decided to, as the Lord of the universe, to interrupt your day. Tell you, show you something you didn't even have on your schedule that's going to be the most important thing you do today.”

And so, really, to get the most important things done, the question is not, how can I fit all of my to-dos on my list into my day? It is saying, how can I be certain of what God has for me to do today, and how can I make sure I get that done?

And just two other things I would say, which just go right with that. I think great leaders are people who always recognize what matters and what doesn't. And they just do not get bogged down with stuff that doesn't matter, and they make a beeline for that which does. And you would think that leaders would just inherently know that. I mean, if they had three things to do, they would immediately know, “Now this is the priority, obviously.” But we might know that at one level, but then we'll tend to, “Well, let me just check Facebook real fast, check my emails real fast. Let me just see if anyone called.” And we had some really important things we needed to address, but we’ve already just frivolously wasted some time. It didn't seem like a lot of time. But we actually, some of us, we have a tendency to not want to get to the heavy lifting right away. So we’ll start off with something light, and then we never get to the heavy.

And the last thing I would just say is avoid time wasters. And there are so many time wasters. I mentioned this in our book. And people can be time wasters, our hobbies, our interests, our procrastinating tendency can all be time wasters that lead us to involve our—we’ll be busy. Our whole day will be filled with activities and conversations, but if you’re really brutally honest, you’ll realize, you know what? These conversations are just wasting time. These meetings are just—there's no fruitfulness coming from this meeting. We do it every week. There's nothing of value that is worth spending an hour in this room doing.”

And I would just say, especially if you find that you're not getting the important work done, then just roll up your sleeves and say, “I've got to just prune away a bunch of time wasters.” And you may have pruned it all away last year. They'll come back in different garb this year with a vengeance again and again. So you just have to keep weeding to keep them out of your schedule, or they'll find a way just to get into your habits. And people will all think “That's what we always do,” and you just need to have the courage to say, “But we don't have to do it like this anymore.”

Al: Yeah, yeah. I love that. What matters most? I mean, we all need to be asking ourselves that question. And then, okay, what is God's agenda? and actually be quiet long enough to actually listen to know what that is.

Richard: Yeah.

Al: Well, that's very helpful.

You know, as leaders, we need to make time to certainly develop our people as well, and that's an important focus. When you talk about moving people onto God's agenda, you make a distinction between excellence and perfection. And I know a lot of leaders who really want to be perfect and are really focused on perfection, but tell us about, how can perfectionism be a problem when you're developing people?

Richard: Yeah. Well, number one, you know, be careful you don't cast any stones too quickly. Unless you're perfect yourself, be careful how hard you are in the imperfect people working with you. Yeah. You know, I hear lots of churches, as well as companies, organizations saying, “Well, we strive to do everything with excellence,” and that's not a bad thing to strive for. You just need to be clear what an excellent organization is and what an excellent staff person is or an excellent volunteer. You know, I know churches that want to do everything with excellence. But what happens is before very long, they discover that they have very few excellent church members capable of singing at the excellent level they want or doing other teaching with excellence the way they want. And so they have to start hiring out. And before long, you've got a professional orchestra or band, and everybody is paid to do things with excellence, and you've kind of missed the whole point of the church. The church was to develop the saints, equip the saints for ministry, not hire professionals to do the ministry.

And so, you know, sometimes excellence means you've taken some raw material and you have brought out their very best, whatever that is. And they serve with heart. They serve with loyalty. They’re growing. They’re trying. They’re learning. They may not have arrived yet, but they’re moving in the right direction. And they certainly aren’t perfect, but they serve with heart. They serve with devotion. They're team players. And you realize, “Well, they've got a few rough edges. Some things we're still working on. But I'll tell you what. We constantly get comments from customers who just tell us how much they enjoyed working with this person. They weren't top-tier ten-out-of-ten kind of professional, but they were sincere. They were honest. They had integrity, and they really won over our customer.” And you realize, “Okay. I guess I need to decide what I mean by excellent.”

If excellent means fault free, always professional, every box is checked, I mean, that’d be wonderful if all your people were that. But the fact is, number one, they don’t get there overnight. If you want an excellent organization, you’re going to have to put the time in, and you’re going to have to equip people. Some leaders want everybody to be excellent, but they don’t want to put the time in to train them and equip them to be excellent and to learn from their mistakes and move toward excellence. Excellence is a process. Sometimes we just want to take a shortcut, just hire a bunch of excellent people. And that's not really leadership. That's just you're hiring out instead of doing your job. Leaders develop people and bring out their very best.

And I would just say, you know, your best is not necessarily my best. I may never be as good as you. But a leader will look at me and say, “But Richard, I want to bring out the best of what you’re capable of, and then I’ll give you an assignment that matches what you’re capable of.” And that’s, I think, what leadership is.

Al: Yeah.

Richard: And so be careful. I just hear a lot of people bantering around that phrase, and sometimes I think they forget what it means to lead. If you’re leading, you take the people you've been given and you bring out the best in them. And that means you don't just fire everybody and hire a bunch of professionals that are being outsourced to you. But look at who you've got and say, “How can I bring the very best out in them?”

Al: Yeah. That's great. Bring out the best in people.

You know, in the revised edition of Spiritual Leadership, you had chapters on leading through change and building effective teams. And so let's start with leading through change. You know, it's such a relevant topic for today. And here we are, coming out of COVID. We've experienced a lot of changes. Pivoting is a word that we never want to use again.

Richard: It’s like Zoom.

Al: Yeah. So, how can leaders be most effective when they're leading through change in their organization? What can they, what should they focus on?

Richard: Well, I think that is where the leader earns his keep a lot of times. It's successfully navigating change. If change was not required, leadership might not be required. But organizations can't stay stagnant. They've got to respond to changing circumstances around them. And for many leaders, that's their Waterloo. When things were going well, when you just had to show up pretty well and just go through the motions for another year, just about anybody could lead then. It's when you have to lead change that suddenly you find your critics and your naysayers and opponents, and that's where leadership has to go to another level.

And so, there's lots of things that I could say about just how to navigate that. A couple of just general thoughts. One is there's three things in particular you've got to ask yourself, and the first is just what needs to change? And I’ll tell you what. Change in an organization is like performing surgery. It’s going to hurt people, and there’re going to be people that feel the pain of it. So don't be arbitrary. Don't be careless about it. If you're going to change something, think through the consequences of that. Who will this affect? What cherished traditions might be set aside? Let's not put these people through pain needlessly. Let's make sure that it's really worth it, and let's be clear what we're trying to do.

But secondly, how you change something. In leadership I find three things so essential. The first is what. What do we need to do?

The second is how. There's more than one way to do something. I've known some people who did the right thing, but they did it the wrong way. Certainly, building buildings, churches have faced that a lot. They knew they were out of space. They knew they needed to build. But then, the process they used cost them a third of their members. And so, eventually, the building has been erected, but they've lost a third of their membership in the process. Not that they were doing the wrong thing, but they did it the wrong way. So to bring about change, again, be careful to think through what's the most effective? What's the most gracious way of doing this so that we keep our people together? We keep our spirit. It doesn't feel like it's a top-down, sort of just crammed-down-their-throat kind of experience. How do we do it?

And then, of course, the third one is timing. When do we do it? Again, I've known people who did the right thing, but they did it at the wrong time. They just didn't have the leadership credits in the bank yet. The consensus wasn't there yet to move forward. We did it too soon, and we had people immediately opposing us right out of the gate. Others, they waited too long to change. I’ve known churches that had been in decline for 20 years. Attendance had declined every year for 20 years, and 20 years into the decline, they finally decided they needed to, “Let's hire a new youth pastor.” It was too late. They're all white-headed, elderly. They have funerals every week, and now it's like, “Well, let's develop a robust youth program.” They waited too long.

And so those are all important.

One or two other things I might just throw in on top of that is just to change things in an organization, you have to change people. And too often we try to change programs, but we don't change the people. And then we wonder why, at the first chance, things go back to the way they were before, or there's all kinds of resistance internally. And so often, the reason is that people don't believe in the change. We haven't changed them. They still value what they used to value. They still believe in the old vision, the old mission, and they haven't changed at all.

So I realize to change anything of significance, I'm going to have to, in some way, change my people to value different things, to have a different perspective, to be willing to release some things that have been important to them in the past. And we miss that too often. We just think we're going to change a schedule. We're going to just change when church is. They got into all kinds of trouble when they started taking the offering at the end of the service instead of near the beginning, or they made the announcements at the end or at the beginning. Like, “Well, what difference does it make?” Well, you don’t understand how important that is to people. Get to the people first.

And well, that's two things I just said. Make sure if you're going to change something, you go deep enough. A lot of leaders, they only get a surface change, and then they're bewildered. I've seen leaders come and they sort of memo through a bunch of very shallow kind of changes. They move on two or three years later, and to their shock, within three months, the organization has gone right back to how it used to be. And they realized that was not a deep change. They just complied with me, knowing that I wouldn't be there long. And then the bureaucracy gets kind of shift back to what it wanted to do anyway. They knew just put up with me for a little while as a leader and I'd be gone. And way too many leaders have surface changes and then never really effectively changed the culture of the organization.

And the last thing I would just say is just if you're going to bring about significant change in an organization, don't do it alone. Leaders, you may be there for a while, but you're moving on. You may think that because you're in the C-suite, you're in the top office, the corner, that you've put out a memo and now everything will change. But there's all kinds of levels of people that have ways of resisting and holding on and outwaiting you, and you'll find a groundswell of opposition at times, and you don't want to be facing that all alone. So build a team, a cohort with you that will help you see blind spots, will help you kind of hear the rumblings going on downstream, that will be able to make your case for you in the coffee rooms and other places. Change is precarious. A lot of leaders have lost their jobs because they didn't handle change well. So don't become the martyr, the guy that was thrown on the altar, because everybody turned on him when he suggested a change, and he was left out to dry.

Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Al: And now, back to today’s special guest.

Richard: So change is much as anything you'll do in a leader is something you need to do with others as a team.

Al: Yeah. I like your observation at the beginning, a true historian. So change can be the Waterloo of leadership.

Richard: Yeah.

Al: And yeah, wow. And as you say, what needs to change? Make sure you know what needs to change. How you change it. Make sure you’ve got the right timing that, of course, it's people before organizations, and you have to bring people along, go deep enough. Don't do it alone. Those are great observations.

Richard: And some leaders come in, and they need to make their mark early on. So I'm going to get in here and start changing stuff so they know they've got a high-end guy who’s going to change things up. But they don't even know for sure what ought to be changed yet. They don't know the price of that change. They're needlessly bringing pain into their people's lives, and they haven’t even thought through why yet. So it doesn't mean—I've heard people say don't change anything significant for a year. I never liked to get bound by a particular amount of time, but I would say, just do your homework. Be certain of what you’re inflicting on people. Don't feel like you have to change things right away. Oftentimes, I think that humble posture of coming in and just learning about the organization, talking to people, reading the minutes, checking the history, the sales records, whatever, do your homework first, and then you'll be much better prepared to start into change.

Al: Yeah. That's really good advice. And it's so important. It's easy to lose focus and get distracted when you're in the change cycle.

And your last point there is don't do it alone. That involves a team. Well, let's move on to building effective teams. That's one of your new chapters in this edition. So there's a topic that we work a lot with here at the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, and that is how to help teams flourish in their work. And one of your points is to maximize diversity on the team. Flesh that out for us. I mean, that's a topic for us in this season, but why is it so important for the health of an organization?

Richard: You know, I'm not necessarily talking about just check all the boxes, you know. Do we have enough females in the room, and do we have enough people of color? Hopefully, you do have that. But be careful that you're not just hiring someone just because of that. There's more value than just the diversity by just appearance. What you're trying to do is get a diversity of perspective, diversity of strengths, diversity of experience. The skin color and all that stuff, the politically correct stuff, that is good for optics. But in terms of facing challenges and problems, you just don't want everybody in the room who sees things exactly the same way.

I remember when I was running a faculty at a seminary as a seminary president. We had one guy, one faculty member that just seemed to always be the negative person. I had to make a bunch of changes, and I wanted everybody to be on side. Faculties are notorious for, you know, they make glaciers look like sprinters in the Olympics. And so, you know, trying to get these guys,  they want to think it to death, and I'm trying to move forward. And for the most part they were doing that. But this one guy just wouldn't kind of go along. He always had all these tedious questions he would ask.

But we finally, we did a Myers-Briggs test one day with all the faculty. And basically, one of the things we discovered was he was essentially the only feeler in the room.

Al: Oh, yeah.

Richard: We were all heavy cognitive, and he was a guy who was concerned about how people would be impacted by this and how they’d feel about that, how it'd be perceived. I thought that was just kind of dragging things out here. And we discovered, wow, he's about the only feeling we've got. We need to not get frustrated with him; we need to value him. And every time we look at a change that we thought through, then we’ve got to say, “So, you tell us. What do you think people will—how will this be perceived?” And we began to value that lone voice.

I also, at a certain point, hired someone. I had a person that fit all the boxes, had all the basic requirements. But then I had someone else that basically was a born rebel and a born agitator. Not in a negative, I mean, a harsh way, but he just was always saying it differently than anyone else. And I just felt like he's going to rock the boat. I know he will. But to his credit, he was brilliant. He was very gifted. And I decided—and I also realized he'll never stay long. I mean, if I hire him, I've got him for a couple years, and he'll never stay anywhere for very long. But I decided to hire him. I decided not to play it safe, and he did stay for a couple of years. But I'll tell you what. He brought life to our meetings, our perspective. People couldn’t believe we had someone like him working in this stodgy, sort of theological seminary, and he represented us well. He attracted the kind of students we wanted to come study with us. And I just realized I don't need ten of me. You got enough of me. Let's get people that are different.

And organizations have a tendency to develop blind spots. There's a lot of studies that show that the first solution that a committee, a group, comes up with is probably not the best one. And if everybody immediately just says, “Great idea. Let's do that,” I got worried about that. No one had pushed back. There's got to be, there's something we've got to be missing here. There's probably a better approach. Let’s not just too quickly just grab hold of the first one. And that's where you need diversity.

You need people that have had different experiences. They've gone to school in different kinds of schools. They've grown up in different environments, different family backgrounds. If it’s a Christian organization, they’ve had different spiritual journeys. They're not all grew up in a pastor's home. And I just found that when you do that, you have much more robust discussions. You have a lot more perspective. It's like if you got a bunch of men in the room. They're going to dismiss issues that a woman would pick up right away.

Al: Yeah.

Richard: I just learned never, never just have a room with a bunch of men making decisions. Make sure that you've got some women in there, that have a voice and that you respect to say, “Hey, what are we missing here?” Otherwise, you're going to just have some regrets that could have been easily avoided if you’d just had a diverse team. So, hire someone. If you've already got a bunch of people that all graduated from your alma matter, you don't need another one from the good old boys’ club. Get someone from a very different background, different perspective, and you're going to have a team that no matter what comes at you, you've got someone in the room with some experience and background that can help you.

Al: That’s a lot. That's great advice. Thanks for sharing your experience along the way. Found the same to be true. Yeah, we want stronger teams, and diversity brings stronger teams. There's no question about it. You know, we want better problem solving. Eliminate blind spots. That's really important.

Over time, we see the pitfalls of leadership, and especially in Christian leadership, we're challenged with this. How does a leader keep building into their character over time so they continue to have character rather than failing as a leader? How do we finish strong from a character standpoint?

Richard: Again, that's an important question, lots that could be said about that. I would begin and just say, well, keep abiding in Christ. Don't ever get so busy you don't have time just to put your life before your Master, your Lord. And He knows you. You can't fool Him. You can't put up a veneer, fool Him into thinking everything is fine. He knows your heart. He knows your attitudes. He knows your broken relationships. He knows the pride, the ego that's been creeping into your life, the prideful statements you've been making of late, the way you've mistreated some of the staff under you. And so if you will just regularly, honestly make your way humbly before your Lord.

And then open up His word, and let Him just sort of wash it over your life, and take seriously what His word says. If He says don't let the sun go down on your anger, then you let Him help you deal with that anger, but don't keep carrying it around. And if you read that He humbles the proud and you know that there’s some pride in your life and you don’t want to be humbled by God, then let Him help you get rid of it. If you just keep doing that day in and day out, God has a magnificent way of helping alert you to the danger signals in your life. And what's happened among Christian leaders, leaders that were traveling around the world, teaching other people God's word, but somehow they just missed out on that humbly coming before their Lord and saying, “I know that people think I'm a big deal. I'm a headliner in conferences. But God, You're not impressed. You know me. And so tell me what you see, and I just love You too much to keep displeasing You.” And so you have to do that.

And coming right out of that just means you keep an accurate view of yourself. As a leader, if you've been around a while, you probably have some successes. You probably have people that appreciate you. You may even have some acolytes who just always tell you what you want to hear. And boy, I tell you. When you've been at it for a while, some people can just start to feel like, “I just don't need criticism. I don't need naysayers around me. I'm going to get people that appreciate all that I've done for this organization,” and you start reading your own headlines, and that's always a dangerous thing.

You know, my wife is Canadian, and Canadians don't tend to put people on pedestals. And my wife certainly fits into that category. And if I start to get any kind of ego or start blowing my own horn, she'll bring that to a quick end. I just need people in my life that have the courage, love me enough, have the relationship with me to just call me out and just say, “Richard, what on earth was that tonight? That sounded way too much of you and not enough of others.” And that's always just helpful to help you. It's a dangerous thing when a leader loses sight of themselves, who they really are and where they're struggling, and they start believing the headlines.

And then, third, I just would say just try to always be in some kind of learning community of some kind, some group of peers. For years and years, wherever I served, I had a group of guys that I would meet with, and we might meet in a restaurant and just talk over our struggles, our needs, the things we were facing. We oft would read a book together. At one period of time, we would go out to a conference center up in the mountains and spend a day or two and just really get to know each other, love each other. We'd hold each other accountable. Say, “Hey, last time we met, you said you're going to change your schedule to have more time with your kids or your wife or whatever. And so how's that going? What did you do?” And you just couldn't get—none of us were in awe of the other. We all felt very free to call each other out. We love each other, but we weren’t playing games. And I'll tell you. Some of the greatest growth probably I ever had in my life was in those seasons where I could regularly meet with some of these guys.

And so, you know, depending on your schedule, I travel a lot now, but I still have some people, associates, friends that know me well enough to just detect when things aren't as they should be and have the relationship to call me out. And so if you want to finish well, don't ever think that you've been at it long enough that you don't need to be held accountable anymore. You don't need a learning group. You're the guy going around teaching everybody else. We all need to keep learning and growing, and we need to have people in our life that know us well enough to know when there's danger signals that perhaps something's not right.

I'm just never shocked anymore when prominent, loved, successful leaders fall, and you just think, “I just can't believe it. How could someone that knew so much, did so much do such a stupid thing?” And invariably the one common denominator people like that had is they weren't accountable to anybody. People just thought they were so godly, so wise that they didn’t need anyone to hold them accountable. And history has proven that's not true. There's nobody that wise that they don't need to be held accountable by somebody.

Al: Yeah. If you ever hear yourself say, “You know, I'm kind of a big deal,” I think—

Richard: Try saying that in front of your wife.

Al: Yeah. Great advice, Richard. I love it.

You've worked in ministry and on writing projects with your father and now with your own children, three generations working together in ministry and involved in spiritual direction and writing. As you think about the next generation, what does spiritual leadership look like for them? And we've got a lot of people who are developing the next generation into leadership, so what principles are timeless, and what might be changing with Christian leadership in the next generation, from your perspective?

Richard: You know, I think wise leaders recognize those things that are changeless and those that are changeable. Methods are changeable. Methods are not eternal. Methods are not found in the Bible. Principles are there. Values are there. Theological truths are there. But I think too often we hold on to stuff that is not sacred. You can change it like today's socks, if there's a better method, that'll work better.

And I think certainly with Millennials on down, the younger generation, I’m pretty well surrounded by Millennials now. In our organization, I’ve got just one or two old timers like me left. And when we sit down at the table, the majority of folks sitting there are Millennials. All my kids are Millennials, and two of my kids work with me, as well as a son-in-law and a nephew. And I just realized they think differently than I do. And I had to very quickly figure out where in those areas of difference does it matter and where does it not. Maybe there's some things that as the older, wiser guy, I need to help them grow to understand. And where are the things I need to sit back and listen to them and realize, you know what? That's a great idea, but that would never have crossed by Baby-Boomer mind. But that's an excellent idea. I would say right now, most of the good ideas our organization is coming up with is not from the top; it's from leaders that we're developing who think creatively.

I was teaching a bunch of business leaders in Oxford a couple of years ago, and I asked the folks in the room, “What are your greatest challenges today?” They very quickly said, “Working with Millennials.” And I said, “What's your problem with Millennials?” And one older guy, who owned about three different companies, he said, “Well, they're just lazy.” He said, “They're just lazy. They just won't work like they did my generation.” And I kind of laughed and said, “You know, this is what I figured out. They're not lazy; they're just motivated differently. We keep trying to use the motivators that worked for Boomers, and when they don't work for Millennials, we just think they're lazy. As a good leader, we need to figure out what motivates Millennials.”

And Millennials, you know, Boomers, you just said, “Look, just sell me your soul for the next thirty years, and we'll give you a great 401(k), and you could retire early. We'll give you this and that. We’ll give you perks.” “All right. Sounds good to me.” Millennials, that's not good enough for them. It's like, “Well, what about the value my life? I’ve got a family. I’ve got kids. I want vacation time. I want to invest my life in an organization that does good for the world, that I can be proud of what I'm investing my life in. And I want to have a social conscience in the kind of things we do in our work.” And that’s not lazy; they have different priorities, and a lot of those priorities aren’t bad, you know? I kind of look at those say, “Well, some of that sounds downright biblical. I wish that in my day, we cared more about some of that.”

Al: Yeah.

Richard: So it means more flex time. You know, my daughter and son-in-law work for me, and at one point they said, “Dad, we both”—of course, my daughter can get away with a lot with her dad. She's my only daughter. But she said at one point, “You know, right now, in this next couple of months, as long as I've got a laptop and Internet, I can do my work anywhere. I could be anywhere in the world and get this job done.” I said, “Yeah, that's probably true, for the most part.” She said, “So what if my husband and I spent a month in Sri Lanka and worked from there, while we sat on the balcony, looking out on the Indian Ocean?” I’d never had a job request. I'd never had a Boomer ask to work for a month from Sri Lanka, but Millennials will do that. And I said, “Well, okay. We get a system set up where you've got lots to do. You know, we need you to be available now and then to get on a call. You got to work that out. But hey, if you can make it work, why not?”

And so I’ve set all my Millennials down and said, “Listen, I'm not hiring you to punch a time card. I'm hiring you to get results. And here's the results I need. You figure out how to get them, and if you can get it done in seven hours instead of eight, good for you. Go home early and enjoy your family. If you can get it done from Sri Lanka instead of Atlanta, then great. You know, I want you to have a blast working here, but I do need these results. So you produce, and I'll be so flexible you'll just thank God every day that you get to work here in our organization. But you don't produce the results, and then we have to have other talks.”

So, I've actually found it very refreshing to work with the younger generation. I even have a book club right now with all my kids and a son-in-law, and I let them pick the books that interest them and that address issues that they're wrestling with. And then those are—I don't think I would have read any of those books had it been up to me. But I'm sitting around a table, in a book club with all my Millennials, and we're discussing it. I have to buy lunch when we have those meetings. But I tell you what. I sit back and look at all these young minds wrestling with issues and seeing how it fits in with the Bible and God's word. And I tell my wife it's just the coolest thing I get to do is hang out with this generation that wants to change the world, and I get to pour into them and equip them and get them ready. And what a privilege. What a great way to spend my life.

So, hopefully, your leaders are not begrudging these young guys. They've got to figure out and motivate. Great leaders find a way to motivate. If what motivates you doesn't motivate them, quit offering that, and figure out how to be creative. Realize what matters. What doesn't. It's not about getting your eight hours a day in from your employees; it's about getting certain results. Get those results, and if they can do that in two hours, wow, good for them. But you figure that out, what you need from them, and then let them create an environment that works for them and works for you. You could be a very creative, dynamic, energizing kind of place for people to work.

Al: Sounds like creating an engaged employee base, that's for sure.

Richard: And you know all about that. If they’re engaged, they’ll get so much more done for you than if they’re not.

Al: But what a great idea. I love the book club with Millennials. I mean, we're all working with Millennials. They're now the largest percentage of employees in most organizations, and how better understand kind of their thinking than to actually sit down, read the books that they would recommend that you read, and then sit down and talk about it?

Richard: Yeah.

Al: And I'm sure they even appreciate that you're going to buy lunch for them, too.

Richard: That helps.

Al: But to listen, you know, be engaged in that conversation, to understand it, as you say, then that way, you know, you can lead and have a better understanding of what motivates them. Yeah. That's fantastic, Richard. Yeah.

So, well, I've really enjoyed so much of what we've talked about. We've covered a waterfront. We've talked about servant leadership. And again, your advice is let's be servants of God first, and your example of Peter was really great. And how about time for what's important, making sure we focus on what matters most with our time and how we focus on excellence and not perfection. Great conversation. You know, we're all dealing with change, and you had great advice, six points or more, on navigating change, how important it is to have diverse teams, how great tips on how we can finish well, making sure that our character stays fresh and strong as we abide in Christ, and then working with the next generation and discovering how we can just love them and help to lead them effectively and giving them life-giving work, as we describe it. Just a great conversation.

Is there anything else, as you think about all we’ve talked about, anything else that you'd like to add?

Richard: Well, I would just say, maybe as a closing challenge, I call this the leader's secret weapon. And that is the ability to grow. As long as you keep growing, you will inevitably face problems and challenges that seem bigger than you, that you've never faced before, that are unprecedented. And you may just sort of throw up your hands and say, “I've never faced this. I don't know what to do,” or you deal with an employee that is just unlike any that you've ever dealt with before. You just can't seem to figure out what makes this guy tick and how to get the most out of him. But if you're willing to grow, then you don't have to be stuck there. You don't have to—it's a momentary setback, not a failure, if you grew through an experience and as a result you're a greater leader. And my prayer has been that through all of this COVID stuff, that there's a lot of leaders that kind of felt like they hit a wall. But I've seen a lot of leaders grow and improvise and pivot and engage their folks to find answers and change a lot of stuff that wasn't working anymore and discovered that there's actually new ways to have success.

And I work a lot with churches as well that are plateaued. They say as many as 70 percent, but even before COVID, 70 percent of churches were plateaued or declining. And typically, if you see a plateaued, declining church, you'll find a plateaued, declining leadership. They quit growing, so their church quit growing. Their church hit problems that the pastor could not overcome, and instead of growing and developing greater capacity, they just hung on, trying to just keep on just grimly doing the same things they've done for years, even though it hadn't worked for years. And it's just tragic because what I've discovered is when leaders stop growing, other people pay the price.

Al: Yeah.

Richard: And so you have to keep growing because your people need you to. The times, the way they are, require you to keep growing.

So, get in a group, read a book, listen to great podcasts, go to conferences, reflect, get with God, but be honest with where you're at right now. What's working? What's not? Hire a leadership coach. There’s so many ways to grow now, you’re just really without excuse. But if what you're doing is not fruitful, you're not turning things around, you're not getting out of that decline, that spiral downward, don't just hold on like the captain of the Titanic. “I'll go down with the ship.” There's still time to grow. And if you'll grow, you just might become the leader that your organization needs you to be, and you might have the greatest victory, the greatest successes of your life that lie just ahead.

Al: Yeah. Don’t let the law of the lid be true in your organization. Yeah.

Richard: Yeah. Knock the lid off. It doesn’t have to constrain you.

Al: Yeah, right.

Well, you can find out more about Richard Blackaby and his books and ministry at richardblackaby.org.

Richard, I want to thank you for your contributions today. Most of all, I appreciate your devotion and service to our loving God and all that you've done through your writing with the Blackaby Ministries and how you've encouraged generations of Christians and leaders to follow God. So thank you for taking your time out today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners.

Richard: Thanks, Al. It’s been great to be with you.

Al: Great. Thank you.

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