Living my new life as a genuine and authentic apprentice of Jesus in the back of that police wagon remains one of the greatest challenges I have faced as a Christian.
These are the stories of my roots. These are the stories that have shaped me as a person, as a Christian and as a leader. I remember as a child feeling that I never really belonged. I often felt judged because I didn’t quite fit. I was in the in-between. I was a Protestant who went to church in a Catholic part of town. I was upper middle class in a struggling neighbourhood. I was a Christian in a police truck. I grew up in a social environment that was sharp and polarized. But I never was able to understand how you could hate people so much when actually you had so much in common. Not then, and never since, have I ever been able to comfortably live in a world of Us and Them.
I am glad my life story starts in the Emerald Isle. Some of the greatest leaders in the world have their roots there. Bono, my favourite of the batch, sings at the end of the song Sunday Bloody Sunday, “No more! No more!” We don’t have to live this way. There is a better way, and we can get there. It is leadership that moves people toward a preferred future and away from an unwanted current reality. Leadership is the core practice that accompanies change. Change requires leaders, and leaders navigate change.
Up from the roots of my life, inspired by Bono’s “No more!” cry, shaped by my apprenticeship with Jesus and influenced by the words and thinking of so many others, here is how I define leadership:
Leaders are people who look at the world and say “It doesn’t have to be this way” and do something about it.
My story started in Northern Ireland, but it doesn’t end there. For the past two decades, my life has been in Canada. I work as president and CEO of Muskoka Woods, a Christian youth resort. I’ve moved across the ocean, but I still live and work in the in-between. Canadians are known the world over for being peacemakers and intermediaries, bridging the distance between conflict and calm, and modeling a peaceful society of multiculturalism and diversity. That’s the cultural ethos I am proud to live in.
I work with young people—those who are in an in-between stage of life, neither children nor mature adults. About 25,000 of them, primarily aged 7 to 25, come through Muskoka Woods each year. We train another 350 staff members to live out our mission, “inspiring youth to shape their world.” That is the group of young people I aspire to influence.
Although I am a Christian minister by training and vocation, I spend much of my time in sparking conversation with young people and other leaders who do not share my faith, creating space for connection and experiences that bring us together.
My role is to be a leader, and these in-between spaces are where I thrive. I know what it is to live in a context of conflict and judgment. But I am comfortable in the tension. I am not afraid of ambiguity and mystery. I thrive in a diverse place. I believe I am called to be a bridge builder, to bring people together, to create space. I’m wired in my spirit to see the best in people, to not judge people on what they believe and to exercise patience with people who would normally get written off. I was knit together in a context of complexity. I was formed in the in-between—and I believe that the in-between is where the greatest leverage for leadership lies.
The Muskoka Woods Leadership Studio is one of my favourite places to be—not just because of the beautiful weathered timber and the incredible design of the physical space, but also as a metaphor for leadership development. Getting to the front door and into the studio requires you to traverse a 210-foot suspension bridge that spans the gap between regular camp life and the studio.
We built the bridge because we were inspired by a medieval Welsh myth about the good king Llyr. Llyr is a man of immense proportions, as big as a mountain. His daughter, the beloved maiden Branwen, is promised in marriage to the king of Ireland. But when she moves across the sea, she is badly mistreated. When word gets back to Wales of the punishment and disgrace that have befallen her, the Welsh king Llyr is enraged. A host of ships sail to Ireland to rescue her, with Llyr wading alongside them because no ship can contain him. When the Irish see them coming, they burn the bridge over the river so that no man or ship can cross. Arriving at the river’s bank, the Welsh nobles ask their giant king for counsel. Llyr says, “A fo ben, bid bont”—“The one who will be a leader must also be a bridge.” Then Llyr lays his body across the river, and his men walk across his back to the other side.
The leader is the bridge across the in-between. The bridge between the now and the not yet, the bridge between the current reality and the preferred future, the bridge who inspires change. The bridge is my dominant metaphor for my identity as a leader. I can look across the span to see where something needs to happen and then be the bridge.
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
This book is about leadership, but perhaps not the leadership you think you know.
When I did my first course in the Master of Organizational Leadership program at Cairn University in Philadelphia, the chair of the program, Dr. Jay Desko, put six words up on the whiteboard: strong, visionary, successful—and chaos, confusion and complexity.
The dominant expectation of leaders today is that they must be strong, visionary and successful. Much of the thinking and literature on leadership development is centred on creating these qualities. We expect our leaders to be heroes, their capes trailing in the wind behind them. We expect them to hold within them all the right answers. And as a result, many leaders live with horrendous pressure to operate in a way that makes them appear to fit the part.
However, the daily realities of leadership are not strength, vision and success. They are chaos, confusion and complexity—and it is these qualities for which we must equip our leaders. This has probably never been truer than it is right now, when the pace of change in our world is unparalleled. We need to let go of the caricature of the strong, successful visionary leader and instead embrace the image of leaders who humbly and authentically know who they are, who mobilize the collective strengths of those around them and who excel at navigating systems and diversity. We need leaders who can work in the in-between and be the bridge to positive change.
I was doing a spiritual formation exercise with Muskoka Woods senior staff, most of them in their late teens or early twenties. As we walked, we came across an old tire that had washed up on the beach. I stood there praying, discovering in this tire a great vehicle for me to talk with God. I picked it up and carried it back toward our meeting room to use as an illustration. On the way, various people tried to take it from my hands and throw it out, but I said, “No. I realize that I feel like this tire. I’m worn out, bald from running on the road for a long time. I know that if I don’t tend to some dangers, I will have a blowout.” People in the room were surprised by my vulnerability.
Often, a leader’s followers want him or her to be a strong, visionary, perfect picture. But, instead of an illusion of perfection, you want a leader who humbly understands what she or he is not. When all leaders say is “I’m fired up and strong,” there is no room for growth in their lives. Much of the leader’s life is coming to the end of ourselves and saying “I need others.” Effective leaders know how to gather around them what they need to move themselves or their team or their enterprise in the right direction.
This book addresses leadership in all three spheres—self, team and organization.
Over time, people have asked me, “Why do you spend so much time thinking about and reading about leadership? Not everyone is a leader, and not everyone needs to cultivate the core practice of leadership.” I disagree—at least in part—because leadership operates on three levels.
The first is the sphere of leading self. In this sphere, none of us are excused. We lead to live. Without taking on the mantle of leadership, how can you lead yourself out of bed each morning into purposeful action? If you cannot lead yourself, you are powerless to respond to the change that comes at you in your everyday life and live into your preferred future.
The second is the sphere of team leadership. While we all lead at the level of self, a smaller but substantial subset of us also leads others. Team leadership may show