Leadership is hard to define. It is ethereal and slippery. We can coax out clarity if we think of a concreate, real world situation. Imagine a group of people find themselves shipwrecked and washed up on an uninhabited island. Who is the leader?
The leader is not the person with the title. It is the person who convinces the group of a vision of the future. It isn’t necessarily the captain of the ship. It is the person who says “We need shelter, and we need food. Let’s build a hut and find some food.” It covers the What and the Why. It paints a picture of a better world and motivates the group to move toward that future. This is Envision.
Vision is not enough, though. After you know What and Why, you need to know How, and Who and Where and When. The leader also needs to enable the group to bring that vision into reality. Grand ideas will never come to anything without a strategy, structures, and objectives. In practical terms, on the island, this might mean finding out if anyone has fishing, bushcraft or building skills. Then forming teams around those people and sending them off to find out, forage, build, and feed. This is Enable.
You’re not the complete leader, though, if you are only able to say, “I know where we’re going, and I know how to get there.” You also need to be able to say, “… and I’ll make sure you get there.” There is a person, sitting alone on the beach with their knees wrapped up in their anxious arms. Let’s call that person Jeff. The leader reaches out to that person and makes them feel seen, heard, and felt. The leaders makes that person feel that they care not just about the group succeeding, but about them succeeding, as in individual human being. This is Embrace.
The leader, then, is the person who can say, “I know where we’re going. I know how to get there. And I’ll make sure you get there.”
All of that rests heavily on the foundation of Embody. Embody is about character and conviction and is the bedrock of trust. As I follower, can I trust that you are authentic? Can I trust that you are serving us as a group and me as an individual? In the Christian space, can I trust that know God and led by His Spirit? Should I entrust my future, my effort, my time and my resources to you? I decide that on your character and your conviction. This is why it is so important that, as leaders, we Embody the vision.
Finally, as leaders, we need to keep improving our leadership skills. This means we need to constantly evaluate how leadership. That means continual review of the outworking of leadership in the organisations we are leading. And it means constantly honing and refining our leadership skills. The leader on the island may have some good ideas to start with, but the leader needs to keep evaluating how it’s going. Are we aiming at the right thing (Envision)? Are we doing it the right way (Enable)? How are the people doing (Embrace)? Are we modelling character and conviction (Embody)? This is Evolve.