5 Keys to Honouring Leadership.

With the trend in explicitly negative cultural attitudes towards people in leadership prevalent…

With a generation popularizing ‘quiet quitting’ and riding a swinging pendulum of extremes when it comes to work-life balance…

With case studies and podcasts created from leaders who have failed on some of the biggest platforms and stages available…

How do you maintain a Biblically accurate view of honouring your leadership?

The simple answer… It’s a wilful decision to daily choose to respect and honour those in positions of leadership over you. The expanded answer… Easier said than done.

Living a life marked by honour for your leadership requires a soft and tender spirit; one that is willing to continually lay aside personal preference, cognitively placing yourself in a position of servant-leader and allowing your actions to flow from that heart posture. I promise, the rewards of following in obedience and receiving the full covering and blessing of your leader is worth it.

🗝 Here are five practical keys that you can put into use today to help your grow in honouring your leadership…

Get To Know Them

So often, we try to fit our leaders into molds based on our previous experiences or perceptions. Perhaps we study leadership models or other famous leaders and seek to navigate our relationships with our ACTUAL leaders based on what we see outside of our context. Each leader is different — a unique human being with qualities and gifts, faults and flaws. Learning about who they really are will help you appreciate and contextualize their vision, values and decisions. Plus, anytime that you have tension or disagreement, you can immediately come back to the strength of your relationship as a foundation to start resolving the conflict.

Choose to see the best in them.

Trust is an active and wilful decision; one that, based on our individual experiences, may be easier to make for some as opposed to others. One of the most important things that you can choose to believe when it comes to your leaders is that they have your best intentions in minds. They are not treating you in a malicious or destructive manner. Commonly, when we disagree with a decision, feel negatively about a review, are dissatisfied with an outcome — experience conflict of any kind — we can begin to create an internal (or external…) narrative that our leaders are purposefully operating in a way that annoys or hurts us. Rarely is that actually true but that belief can be a root of disrespect that festers and creates bitterness and resentment in us and in our teams.

Be faithful with the little.

Leaders who crave ‘influence’ are commonly misguided in their motives. Influence cannot be given… But authority and responsibility can be. I usually have a good chuckle when I speak with young leaders who are craving more authority because really what they’ll be given is more responsibility; more work, more problems to be solved. If you show that you are faithful with the little tasks and projects that you are given — no matter how underwhelming they may be — you can be sure that a healthy leader will reward you with larger opportunities in the future.

One of my favourite quotes that I’ve held onto came from Brian Johnson of Bethel Music. I remember sitting in a workshop that he was leading and he asked, ‘who in the room would say they are creative?’ Instantly, the majority of the room raised their hands with naive enthusiasm.

“No one cares how creative you are if you can’t show up to a meeting on time.” — Brian Johnson.

Commonly, earning the trust of your leader starts with the basics. Coming as someone who has led many young creatives and budding pastors, I’m usually first looking to see if they can be punctual, organized and prepared. You’d be surprised how many conversations I have with creatives who are frustrated that they didn’t receive more praise or promotion after finishing a beautiful project but who later admit that it was 2 weeks late and didn’t get used by their organization because it was delivered 2 days before the event.

Commit to speaking well of them.

On a practical level, we commonly live in very small circles. With the ready made network of social media available to leaders at all levels, staying mindful about what we say about anyone, let alone people in positions of leadership, is important. To serve someone faithfully and then speak poorly of them with people inside or outside of your local context undercuts the very mission you are trying to achieve.

On a spiritual level, you have to wrestle this question, ‘do you genuinely feel that that person has been placed in a position of leadership or authority over you?’ If the answer is yes, slandering that individual is more than career-suicide. If the answer is no, I would encourage you to do a quick overview of leaders in Scripture and see the models that God has presented. You won’t find any perfect people in the Bible — Jesus excluded — but you will find many leaders that God chooses to use in beautiful ways despite their imperfections.

While I understand, and have had to personally wrestle, the tension between being honest and honouring, I do think the old adage applies here: ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’ I would hazard to suggest that more often than not, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the reason for that conversation was so that we could personally feel justified or vindicated in our frustrations as opposed to finding a safe place to vent and hear wise counsel.

Have honest conversations.

As a young leader, I learnt pretty quickly that I had to be intentional on committing to resolve conflict as directly as possible. I remember doing a conflict resolution survey with the informal hypothesis that I had very little conflict in my life. The results were shocking… While as an Enneagram 9 I do tend to avoid creating conflict as much as possible, what I learned was that I tend to avoid conflict resolution more than conflict in of itself. I think most young leaders do.

Conflict resolution isn’t fun. These are the conversations that will take you from short, relatively fruitless seasons into the beauty of longevity in ministry. And while many of us sit and wait for the other person — in this instance, our leader — to walk down the hallway and knock on our door or pick up the phone and give us a call, it’s worthy remembering that we are just as close to them as they are to us. In most contexts, we have relatively direct access to our leaders. Use that access to air your frustrations or concerns in an honest yet healthy and constructive manner. Honour void of honesty is just blind submission but taking your honesty outside of healthy channels can result in toxic attitudes and a lack of trust between your leader and their team.