A few days ago I posted a quote on my status that “sometimes being responsible means pissing people off,” and that has something I had learned to be true through being a team captain, coach, teacher, wife, friend… pretty much any relationship of learning and growth. This weekend at our volleyball tournament I shared this quote with two of my seniors. This is a difficult lesson to learn as a team leader because by the time you’re a senior or team leader popularity comes naturally, and we all enjoy popularity. We all want to be liked and looked up to by the younger people that work with us. And that is a good goal.
One senior in particular is a very nice, balanced, quite, and well centered person. She really doesn’t like to be mean. I told her that her leadership this weekend was great, but if she really wanted our team to succeed she would have to be willing to hold people accountable during practice and make sure that everyone does the repetitions, no one cheats in conditioning drills, and that if someone is unfocused she could call attention to it and have them focus. Helping to ensure such items are in place would have her doing actions that could be interpreted as mean. This presented a challenge for her. I told her it should never be her goal to be mean, but when she has a dream or works hard for goals, sometimes you have to make people uncomfortable with just enjoying the current time and delay gratification until the goal is reached. She agreed with the idea and put it into practice soon after. Next game in a huddle she told a player directly “if you would have called that ball I wouldn’t have had to dive after it. I don’t mean to be mean or anything, but it would help us out if you talked more.” I was very proud of her, and her teammate handled it well. My leader though kept apologizing to the girl, making it obvious such a comment was still uncomfortable to give, which shows how nice she is at heart. I think she will successfully become a leader who can care about people.
I’ve played on a team where the team captain was very popular and really enjoyed that. She was also good at giving directions. However, she would sometimes break her own advice, drink before games, slack off during practice. She had the leadership skills, she just didn’t have the selflessness to be a truly effective leader. Her game day field leadership was top notch, however the split image of game day, practice, and Friday night didn’t inspire loyalty in all her fellow players, in fact made some envious and bitter. I think she grew quite a bit from the first year she was captain to the second, and I’m sure quite a bit since then, and I really do enjoy her as a person, have a very high respect for her, and am very glad for our years together, but it taught me a lesson of leadership: while sometimes being responsible means pissing people off, true leadership means you walk the way you talk so that you don’t piss people off.
In church today pastor Kim went into how we can convey a point without attacking a person and ruining a relationship and fracturing the good image of Christian ethics. She mentioned an example of a pastor who works to spread God’s message to those who work at pornographic book stores or other parts of the sex industry. I’d read the article she was referencing in a magazine called Leadership which focuses on issues that face the church. The pastor in the article would go to pornography conventions and give out Bibles. He also volunteers to clean the toilets of a local pornographic bookstore every Sunday. In this kind of situation, leadership, help, guidance, assistance, whatever, can’t be done by pissing people off; it has to be done by building relationships and having an open door.
It would be too easy to picket outside the pornography convention and have people walk in perhaps a little ashamed, but we have to ask ourselves: is that really effective in spreading the word of God? People are tricky, and at our heart we are relationship based creatures. And while it is true that leadership does sometimes require us to make people angry, it is also true that sometimes really offering love to someone means to forgo being pissed off, to get over that in order to be able to establish a relationship that allows a subtle message to be heard that if clanged like a gong would be ignored.
The full facebook status said: Sometimes being responsible means pissing people off; you don't gain much by pleasing a den of thieves. And this holds true; however, the key is sometimes. Being responsible sometimes means doing everything your self restraint will allow to not piss someone off. Sometimes what you get by pleasing a den of thieves is the chance to build a relationship and affect change. I’m not saying we should comply, or blend into the ethics of what we don’t agree with, but sometimes you have to consciously look for the person over the fault to be able to be responsible, to be able to show God’s love.
In my opinion the best leaders will have a versatile skill set: they will be able to give difficult advice, they will value a goal oriented environment over popularity and short term enjoyment, they will be able to follow the lines they lay for others themselves, and they will be willing to control those natural emotions of outrage, hate, and fear in order to instead express open arms, opportunity, and love for those who probably already feel forsaken. As Christians we don’t have an easy road in our current society, and perhaps the most important thing we can ask for in prayer for ourselves is the wisdom of discretion.
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