Top Ten Ways To Be A Great Leader预览

Accessibility

Even Jesus had an open-door policy. He had time for people, especially His inner circle of twelve. Isn’t it amazing how much he got done in so little time? I would think He felt a lot of pressure to accomplish His assigned mission on earth. So why did He not seem rushed? Luke 4:40 says, “At sunset, the people brought to Jesus all who had various kinds of sickness, and laying his hands on each one, he healed them.”

Here’s a similar story from Matthew:

News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. Large crowds … followed him. Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them. (4:24-5:2)

He was accessible to both His leadership team and to the people. When His team tried to push away the crowds, He usually rebuked them and remained accessible.

My wife, Donna, and her team leader, Jennifer, have been working together for fifteen years. Last night, Donna and I were talking about how much we admire Jennifer. Donna commented, “She never seems stressed, distracted, or hurried when you talk to her.” I know she has hundreds of people demanding thousands of things from her every week.

She has built a massively successful business with very smart; demanding people on her team. I really admire her ability to be present in the moment and accessible to her team. In all the conversations I’ve had with her over the years, I can never remember a time when she’s broken off conversation with that stressed-out “I gotta go” kind of spirit. Somehow, I get the feeling that that is the way Jesus was as He walked the planet.

Paul, another of my favorite leaders in the New Testament, had a life-on-life style of leadership. He wrote to the Thessalonian church, “But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children. Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God [meaning the knowledge, the information] but also our own lives, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess. 2:7-8 NASB).

This is the same thing the symphony leader Carlo Maria Giulini was talking about: life-on-life. The more people you have on your team, the more pressure there is to isolate yourself, but don’t get locked in that corner office. Leadership is people work.