In my last post, we looked at the “Titus Blueprint” and challenged the headcount trap—the cultural myth that your leadership is only as significant as the size of your staff or the square footage of your office. But recognizing the trap is only half the battle. How do we actually escape it? How do we protect our souls from the constant, subtle pull of title-envy, metrics-obsession, and the need for corporate validation?

The answer is not found in modern management theory or a new productivity hack. It’s found in an ancient, repeating chorus tucked inside Psalm 80. Three times in that single psalm, Asaph cries out a desperate refrain:

“Restore us, O God; cause Your face to shine, and we shall be saved!”

According to Spurgeon, this psalm is a prayer for national and spiritual revival that begins by acknowledging that we are broken and that returning to Him is the only remedy to receive diving favor. Note that - we have to admit we are broken first! Clearly, the modern-day view of leadership is broken, but have you personally confessed that fact?

When we unpack the original Hebrew behind this prayer (and I am by no means an expert), we find a three-step theological sequence that serves as a manifesto for a leader’s soul. It boils down to three simple, counter-cultural actions: The Turn, The Gaze, and The Freedom.

1. The Turn (Shuv)

The psalm begins with a plea for restoration: “Restore us, O God.” In our modern vocabulary, “restore” sounds like fixing an old building or repairing a broken organizational structure. But the Hebrew root word here is Shuv, which literally means “to turn back” or “to return.”

Furthermore, the grammatical structure used here is causative, meaning that it is not something that we can do alone. In short, the psalmist is literally asking the King of kings and Lord of lords, “Cause us to turn back.”

As leaders, our first step toward health is a radical reorientation of our hearts. We have to stop looking at the world, our competitors, or our industry peers for our definitions of success. When we fixate on worldly metrics—team size, budgets, and titles—we are looking in the wrong direction. Shuv is a moment of deep recognition and repentance where we turn our backs on the world’s hierarchy and turn our faces entirely to the Source of our calling.

2. The Gaze (Owr)

Once we turn around, where do we look? The psalm continues with his ask: “cause Your face to shine.”

The Hebrew root for shine is Owr, meaning “to become luminous, to kindle, or to break day.” In the ancient Near East, when a king or ruler had his face shine toward you, it meant you had his favor, approval, and pleasure. It is a direct callback to the famous Aaronic Blessing in Number 6: “The Lord make His face shine upon you.”

Think about the profound relief of this reality. When you turn away from the exhausting demand to impress the crowd, you catch the gaze of the Father. And what do you see? You see a face that is already shining with favor toward you - not because of what we have done but, simply because of Who He is and how much He loves us.

Your leadership validation doesn’t come from a stellar annual review, well-earned promotion, growing team, or plush office. It comes from living under the bright, smiling approval of God’s face. When His gaze becomes your primary focus, the opinions of onlookers lose their power to define you and your leadership.

Remember, we serve an Audience of One!

3. The Freedom (Yasha)

Finally, the sequence hits its climax: “...and we shall be saved.”

Our modern ears hear “saved” and automatically think exclusively of eternity. But the Hebrew root is Yasha is different, In fact, it shares the same root behind the names Joshua and Jesus and literally means “to be open, wide, free, or delivered out of a tight space.”

When we captivate ourselves with the organizational chart trap or headcount lie, we are living in a very “tight,” suffocating space. It is a prison of comparison, ego, and constant anxiety over whether we are “important” enough.

But look at the divine sequence: When we turn (Shuv) our hearts back to God, and lock our gaze (Owr) onto the light of His smiling approval, we are instantly delivered into freedom (Yasha). We are brought out into a wide-open space of spiritual safety where the world’s criticisms can no longer box us in.

Look at what David Jeremiah said in his book Life Wide Open: "You have inside you the capacity to invest your mental, emotional, and spiritual gifts in a way that glorifies God, impacts the world, and satisfies your own soul." That’s brilliant leadership theology.

Leading from the Wide-Open Space

True alignment never happens when we finally get the title or the direct reports we think we deserve. Alignment happens when we realize that an empty office can still be a wide-open space of immense kingdom freedom. When you are freed from the need to manage an image, you are finally free to actually lead people.

Stop measuring what’s behind your desk, and start resting in Who is ahead of you.

Let’s take our leadership cue from Psalm 80: turn your heart, lock your gaze, and step into the wide-open space. After all, if you want to lead better, you have to live better—and you cannot live wide open while hiding in a tight box of comparison

How have you experienced the “tight space” of comparison in your own leadership journey? Let’s talk about how we can encourage one another to walk in true freedom in the comments below.

In my last post, I shared a comment that really forced me to stop in my tracks: “Oh. It must be hard not being a leader anymore.”

It was a backhanded perspective delivered simply because my current role did not have an office or a team of direct reports - things often associated with positional leadership (rather than personal leadership). It was an “ouch” moment that God quickly turned into an “aha” through a reminder that true leadership comes from our sufficiency in the Father, not our reliance on a crowd.

But that interaction left me wrestling with a deeper question: Why do we automatically equate leadership with teams, positions, or perks?

In our culture—and unfortunately, within many of our ministries—we are deeply conditioned to measure a leader’s worth by the width of their organizational chart. We look at the person with dozens of direct reports, a packed calendar of performance reviews, and a sprawling executive suite, and we say, “Now there is a leader.”

But let’s be honest: if your leadership completely vanishes the moment you no longer sign someone’s paycheck, dictate their task list, or approve their PTO, you were not actually leading people. You were just managing a hierarchy.

Position is the lowest level of leadership. True leadership isn’t about position, title, or headcount. As John Maxwell famously noted, leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less.

Influence doesn’t care about a corporate grid or flow chart. You can influence others from the bottom of an organization, from the side of it, or from an empty office with no direct reports. When we buy into the headcount trap, we reduce kingdom impact to a numbers game and completely miss the weight of our actual assignment.

The Titus Blueprint

As I’ve been dwelling on this, I keep coming back to a piece of Scripture that has completely reframed how I view my current role. In Titus 1:5, Paul writes to his young protégé:

“For this reason I left you in Crete, that you should set in order the things that are lacking, and appoint elders in every city as I commanded you...”

When Paul dropped Titus off on the island of Crete, Titus did not inherit a thriving corporate infrastructure. He did not have an administrative assistant, a marketing team, or a middle-management layer to delegate to. He was, for all intents and purposes, entirely a single-person team in a chaotic, hostile culture. Later on, we see Paul write that Cretans even mention they they are all liars - talk about a challenge!

Yet, look at his mandate. His job was twofold: build structures (“set in order the things that are lacking”) and build people (“appoint elders”).

Titus was a leader not because he had a massive team reporting to him on day one, but because he was an organizational architect. He was creating something out of nothing. He was laying a foundation so that others could eventually step into those structures, grow, and thrive.

Redefining the Advancement Role

That last statement describes exactly my current role in a small school environment. Because this position has not traditionally existed here in this capacity, I get the opportunity to create things from scratch. Like Titus in Crete, my job is to build the communication models, the community networks, and the strategic partnerships that will sustain this institution long after I am gone.

Does my day-to-day work lead to the development of other people? Absolutely. When you secure a major donor, re-engage alumni to come back, inform the board for a decisions, or inspire a community of parents to buy into a vision, you are leading.

But looking at the Titus blueprint has also brought a heavy dose of conviction. I’ve realized something critical: I need to be much more intentional about how I develop people, rather than just allowing it to happen indirectly.

I don’t need to sign someone’s paycheck to mentor them, cast vision, or call out their gifts. If leadership theology teaches us that leadership is spiritual influence for God’s glory, then my empty office—or lack thereof—is no barrier to building people.

Do you need an impressive headcount to leave a massive kingdom footprint? No! You just need to look at the space God has given you, roll up your sleeves, and start building so that He alone gets the credit (Matthew 5:16).

It was one of those comments that hangs in the air for a second before it lands.

I was catching up with someone recently, and our conversation turned to my career. They know my background—that I’ve served as a school principal, that I ran a highly-charged state office in two states, and that I spearheaded effective training teams focused on leadership and teaching.

But currently, I serve as the Director of Advancement at a small Christian school. As we talked about the role, they asked how big my team was, which actually caused me to laugh. I am a single-person team, and I don’t even have an office. (To be clear, this is a great problem to have—our school is in such high demand that we have completely run out of space!)

When this person realized my situation, they looked at me and said, “Oh. It must be hard not being a leader anymore.”

Ouch.

I’ll admit, it stung at first. My immediate, knee-jerk human reaction was to mentally pull out my resume and start defending my honor, but I let that go. Unfortunately, our minds can really start messing with us. The more I sat with it, the more I actually started to buy into that comment.

Then, a simple post on Facebook absolutely leveled that thought.

A fellow alumnus was simply sharing thoughts from her Maxwell Leadership Bible, quoting this line: “He could LEAD people because he didn’t NEED people. His courage came from His sufficiency in His Father.”

Full stop. The point was made.

Tearing Down the Headcount Trap

The combination of that initial comment and that timely Facebook post completely captured my thoughts. It forced me to confront a massive, pervasive lie that the corporate world—and unfortunately, the ministry world—has bought into for generations:

The lie that you must have a “headcount” in order to be a leader, and that successful leaders must always have larger crowds than everyone else.

This post is the beginning of a longer series I’m launching focused on Leadership Theology—an exploration of what God’s Word actually says about authority, impact, and building, contrasted against the superficial metrics the world tells us to care about. And there is no better place to start than tearing down the “headcount trap,” which we will dive into deeply in the next article.

Why a “Theology” of Leadership?

Before we depart, let’s stop for just a second. Why do I use the phrase “leadership theology”?

The answer is simple and rooted in Matthew 20:25-28, where Jesus called his disciples together to settle a dispute about greatness and leadership. He explicitly told them, “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,” but declared, “It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant.”

Jesus threw down a counter-cultural gauntlet and commanded His disciples to be radically different. He was telling them that because their foundational beliefs were different, their practical follow-through had to be different.

In his Everyday Gospel devotional, Paul David Tripp writes:

“In reality, everyone is a theologian… You get your theology either from the Bible or from somewhere else, but you have a theology.”

So, as I always say on my podcast: For us to lead better, we need to live better.

How do we, as broken people, live better? It’s simple—we go to Jesus and we learn to love Him more than anything else. Changing what we love inherently changes our life and our leadership. As we work through these upcoming articles, the surface topic will be leadership, but the underlying reality will be about loving and living as we were designed to.

What you love shapes how you live, and how you live ultimately determines how you lead.

What about you? Have you ever felt like your leadership was discounted or minimized because of your title, your workspace, or a lack of an organizational chart? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.