Leading from the Empty Office: The Ouch to Aha
A simple comment started me down this road. Read on to learn more...
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.