Leading with a Limp: Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness

Most books on leadership describe how to find your strengths and use them. Leaders say, “Work on your strengths, forget your weaknesses.” The opposite is true for Dan Allender’s book Leading with a limp.

The best chapter was “Escaping solitary confinement” where he lays out the burdens that leader’s carry:  no one can understand, no one wants to understand, no one is allowed to understand. These lead to leadership being incredibly lonely, but then he walks through how to get out of that mindset.

Here are some things that jumped out:

• If you’re a leader, you’re in the battle of your life
• To the degree you face and name and deal with your failures as a leader, to that same extent you will create an environment conducive to growing and retaining productive and committed colleagues.
• To the degree you attempt to hide or dissemble your weaknesses, the more you will need to control those you lead, the more insecure you will become, and the more rigidity you will impose – prompting the ultimate departure of your best people.
• Leadership has been described as wearing a bull’s-eye on your chest during hunting season.
• It is crucial to know who holds the power to set an organization’s direction and tone.
• We require our leaders to be perfect – or at lest much more perfet than we are – and then we reserve the right to pick them clean like vultures that have patiently waited for the wounded beast to stop twitching.
• Leading is all about moving toward a goal while confronting significant obstacles with limited resources in the midst of uncertainty and with people who may or may not come through in a pinch.
• One price of formal leadership is being alone
• A leader leads by the stories he tells and the myths he creates on behalf of his people.
• If the community of God refused to gossip, most crises either would not start or would not last due to the absence of fuel.
• Leading invites humiliation and brokenness.
• Our brokenness results not in being crushed but in the capacity to flex and change rather than to remain brittle and vulnerable.
• The reality of leadership chaos is the same as juggling flaming chain saws.
• Honoring confidentiality puts a leader in the direct path of the mack truck of gossip.
• The leader who doesn’t feel pressed to the wall often is not involved in a work that is advancing sufficiently against the forces of darkness.
• Busyness is the moral equivalent of laziness.
• It is far easier to build a sense of who we are on the grounds of what we oppose than on what we dream of creating.
• Followers want change only when they aren’t happy and usually when it doesn’t require much risk or sacrifice on their part.
• We live in a culture where the acknowledgment of wrong or the ownership of risk and failure is paramount to forfeiting the game.

Recently, I have read some great books on leadership, it has been a great trend. This one did not disappoint at all. Great take on leadership from a different angle.