Two Leadership Lessons for When Personal Attacks and Trials Pounce upon You
Over the past twenty years, I’ve been blessed with the wonderful challenge of living Christ’s calling through leadership roles in secular universities. As you can imagine, it has been fraught with complexity but also filled with valuable lessons. I’ve come to think of these as “practical proverbs for leadership and life.” Here are two of the proverbs that have carried me through tough times. Whether most of your leadership primarily occurs in your home, a secular work place, or a church, I hope these proverbs will encourage you as you strive to lead those around you in Christlike ways.
It’s Not Personal
And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
If you prompt anyone who’s been a leader for any length of time, you will hear stories of conflict. Frequently, the conflicts became nasty, including very personal attacks. Just a few weeks into a new leadership position, a colleague sent out an all-hands email saying, “I am convinced that Tim is the worst thing ever to happen to [this organization].”
My first reaction was “Seriously!? I haven’t even been here three months! There just hasn’t been enough time for you to hate me that much.” And in that moment, I also realized the attack wasn’t personal. Hatred, like love, requires nurturing. In this case, there simply wasn’t enough time to develop that level of animus.
“Hatred, like love, requires nurturing.”
Practice makes perfect. And unfortunately, people who make it a practice of attacking others typically get quite good at it. They’ve learned the power of the personal attack; if you want to really hurt someone, make it personal. It’s probably the most effective approach to eliciting a response, the goal being not resolution but conflict. And they are masters of conflict.
When I counsel colleagues embroiled in conflicts like this, I ask, “If you were to leave, would so-and-so follow you and continue to make your life miserable?” The answer is “Of course not.” “Rather,” I’ll continue, “it’s far more likely that the minute the next poor soul moves into your vacated leadership seat, so-and-so will be in the new leader’s face making her/his life miserable.”
This highlights the fact that most attacks you’ll experience really aren’t personal. They’re usually a manifestation of issues completely unrelated to the situation. The personal attack is just the way that individual has chosen to engage with you. Sadly, people who use such strategies are often reacting to brokenness in their lives that have nothing to do with the battle they are waging with you.
I’ll not be so glib to state that such folks need Jesus. On several occasions, I was gob smacked to learn the person with whom I was in conflict was a very active and engaged churchgoer. When you discover you’re in conflict with a fellow believer, you really should double down on your introspection. I do recall the words of a dear friend, Ella Haver, who, at the tender age of 96, told me she did taxes for old people. Once when I remarked that we shouldn’t judge others, she quickly retorted, “Yeah, but we’re fruit inspectors!” Far be it from me, then, to callously dismiss someone as a non-believer. But anytime you end up in these situations, honestly explore your own motivations and tactics.
After looking inward, make sure you look longer to the cross, to an outcropping of rock outside Jerusalem called Golgotha. From that vantage point, Jesus had nails pounded into his hands and feet. He had a crown of thorns rammed onto his scalp. He was mocked, insulted, struck, and spat upon. And his response was “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). In that moment, Jesus took far more personal attacks than you or I ever will. And he knew those attacks weren’t personal; they were manifestations of the brokenness of the people attacking him. The pain and isolation were likely no less intense. But he accomplished his goal because he saw past the attacks to what lay underneath. We should do the same.
Live Joyfully and Victoriously in All Things
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . .” Rev. 21:1a
This practical proverb is universally important, but its articulation resulted from an abrupt end to a leadership role. The only negative job performance review I ever received came after five years in a senior leadership position some thirty years into my career. The job had been challenging, but tangible progress had been made and the administration who hired me had been very positive and supportive. At the end of five years, however, there was a change at the top and the new leader called me into his office and said, “Tim, I’ve talked to everyone, and you have no support here. So the right thing to do is to not renew your appointment.” He followed that up with a damning quote about me in the newspaper a few days later.
Needless to say, that was a career changing moment; it was the start of a four-year period of sometimes painful and lonely wandering in the desert trying to find the calling that God had for me next. At the same time, however, it was also time my faith and my marriage grew stronger, and I had opportunities to help and minister to people that I never would have had time for otherwise.
It is said that throughout life, you are either entering, exiting, or in the middle of a season of pain. While it’s possible you may be at least partly responsible for your trials, quite often circumstances happen, like a life-threatening disease, loss of a loved one, or some act of cruelty inflicted upon you, which are beyond your control. These moments are painful, but they are also opportunities for growth, what Ann Voskamp calls hard eucharisteo—hard “thanksgiving.”
As I walked away from that meeting, I had two thoughts—well, three actually—but you can probably guess what the first was. The first thought I can share was that this individual had just given me the gift of not having to work for someone like him.
The second was that I needed to live joyfully and victoriously in all things. There’s a decision in these moments, either, by God’s grace, to rise above the earthly setbacks and live out God’s victory or allow the situation (and perpetrators) to break you down and steal your joy. The former leads to a closer walk with Jesus and the ability to minister to others in their moments of pain and disappointment. The latter leads to cynicism, anger, and pain.
It’s easy to say, “I will choose joy.” And doing so is a huge part of healing. But figuring out how to be joyful, particularly amid dark circumstances, is not always obvious. Over the next four years, my wife, Sally, and I went through a protracted period of uncertainty. Please don’t get me wrong. Life continued to its fullest. As I said, there were wonderful opportunities for mentoring and ministry that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. But there was also this pervasive, extended period of both spiritual and professional searching, a search for calling, that put us in an emotional state of limbo that was unsettling and difficult.
“There was also this pervasive, extended period of both spiritual and professional searching, a search for calling, that put us in an emotional state of limbo.”
Perhaps I’m just not that bright, and it took me four years to figure out that limbo can be a condition of choice. Sometimes we choose to be in limbo or choose to stay in our state of pain and uncertainty. But after four years of not “hearing” from God, or perhaps more correctly, not hearing what we wanted to hear from God, we decided we needed to step out, make some decisions, and trust that God would lead us if we allowed him. The decision we made was that we were going to pick up, step out, and build a new life in joy and victory having absolutely no idea what that meant or looked like.
Once we made that decision, the next challenge was how. We knew our very first step must be to lay our entire situation before the throne. Sally and I walked through a process of prayer and study that took us through Psalms, Matthew, the Epistles, and Revelation. It was built around three phases: i) crying out to God, ii) listening to God, and iii) responding to God’s instruction. Our study led us to a better understanding that Revelation 21:1, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” has to be our constant reference point in all things in this life if we are to rise above our trials. We have to look to the future when we suffer in the present.
And if we understand that every season in life is a finite transition, then we can bear all things in light of the eternal joy that has already been won through Jesus’s death, resurrection, and the promise of his second coming. This is not Pollyanna Christianity. It’s an understanding and a perspective that helps us not be crushed while we persevere through our tribulations. This reassurance not only allows you to live joyfully and victoriously in all things; but is the basis of your comfort and discipleship ministry for every day from now until you go home to be with Jesus.
Timothy (Tim) Wei is an aerospace engineer by training and motivated by the call in Matthew 25:35–36. He has been a professor, department head, and dean of engineering and currently leads an initiative developing technologies needed to “feed the hungry.” He and his wife, Sally, are active at Capitol City Christian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. Their two young adult children, Nathan and Carissa, are actively involved in Christian ministry.