Leadership That Seeks the Best for Others

The word “best” is getting a lot of airtime. Ben Johnson, the Chicago Bears football coach, is known for his fiery postgame victory chant that begins, “Good, better, best.” We often hear this idiom, “Julie is living her best life.” When I ask Mike Jones, a locomotive engineer, “How are you doing?”, predicably, he repeats his credo: “Every day is my best day.” Even my friends at the DePree Center have gotten into the act. Among the many insights their Flourishing Leaders Research Project has revealed, this finding is relevant: “flourishing leaders seek the best for others.”

The obvious question is how might we seek the best for others? Before attempting an answer, let’s ask some other journalistic questions: What distinguishes a flourishing leader from one who is not flourishing? Who are the “others”? Where do we seek the best for others?

Who is the flourishing leader?

To seek the best for others, the leader must be relentless in investing in their own flourishing, knowing that when their people flourish, they also flourish, and vice versa. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. coined this reciprocity “the principle of mutuality.”

We see this principle also in Scripture. The prophet Jeremiah, in his letter to God’s exiled people says, “Also, seek the peace and prosperity [well-being] of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7, NIV). Yet how can one become a flourishing leader?

America’s cultural script defines flourishing as individual freedom, happiness, and self-expression. Leaders must eschew this script because this is not true for everyone. Those who want to become flourishing leaders know that true flourishing begins and ends with communion with God; the same closeness that co-workers Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden before Genesis 3. My beloved late seminary ethics professor, Dr. David Clyde Jones put it simply: “Human beings flourish by knowing and loving God.”

To flourish as leaders, we must know God deeply and love God wholeheartedly. The Apostle Paul expressed his desire to know God deeply when he wrote, “I want to know him (Christ)…” (Philippians 3:10). To know Christ is more than knowing facts about Christ like his occupation, height, or weight. This deep knowing is personally experiencing Christ as we would a close friend. This deep knowing requires the flourishing leader to choose the better part—sitting at Jesus’s feet to absorb his teaching undistracted (Luke 10:38-42). Rabbi Jesus teaches us that to know him is to obey him.

To flourish as leaders, we must know God deeply and love God wholeheartedly.

Christ summed up the Old Testament with two commandments, “Love God with all our heart, with our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves” (Matthew 22:37-40). This love for God is marked by our obedience and expressed by loving our neighbor with the same quality of love we lavish on ourselves. Love for neighbor requires that flourishing leaders seek the best on behalf of others. Loving our neighbors (or others) in this fashion requires a leader who steadfastly pursues knowing and loving God. Are you making steady progress in this regard?

One way we can measure our progress—maturing in Christ—is depicted in the Cross Chart below. How do we read it? As we grow in knowledge of Christ (moving left to right from conversion), we will become more aware of our sins (the bottom line). And as we clearly see our sinfulness, we also clearly see the deep chasm between our holiness and God’s holiness (the top line).

The Good News: as we become more aware of our sinfulness, Christ’s rugged cross looms larger. The cross is a lovely reminder—that our Redeemer’s intense love covers our many sins (1 Peter 4:8). As we become more acquainted with our sins, we will not only sing joyfully the lyrics of Glory in the Cross, “Let us ever glory in the cross of Christ and the triumph of God’s great love,” but this great love of Christ compels us to seek the best for others (2 Corinthians 5:14-15, NIV).

Who are the “others”?

Recall that the DePree research concluded that “flourishing marketplace leaders seek the best for others.” Who are the “others”? The “others” whom we seek the best for are those entrusted to our care, those whom we report to, and the many others in our workplaces.

The flourishing leader knows a few things about these “others.” The flourishing marketplace leader knows that we report to/supervise people who are more than brains or skills on a stick. The “others” are a complex amalgam of deeply human, spiritual, and emotional persons. Each person (like us) comes to the marketplace as a beautiful mess. They come to the workplace with a personal story, replete with cascading joys and sorrows. So, it behooves leaders to get to know the story of each person entrusted to their care. Data collected by listening must inform how we seek the best for each employee. For example, I learned from one of my direct reports how narcissistic her dad was. Seeking her best meant not acting like her dad and providing a safe and compassionate place for her to cry (which she did). In other words, seeking the best for each person must be tailored-made. We must channel Curious George and study those entrusted to our care. We must become like ethnographers and observe them.

The “others” are a complex amalgam of deeply human, spiritual, and emotional persons.

Where do we lead?

We lead in a context. Leaders seeking to become flourishing leaders and seeking the best for their people must also be students of their where—their workplaces. We must study our workplaces because our workplaces are a microcosm of our American culture. In our workplaces, we will invariably find religious, generational, ethnic, political, and moral pluralism. This means, of course, that our people will bring their beliefs and values to their workstations. These beliefs and values may or may not align with ours. Our workplaces have a culture, and this culture is governed by an ethos. This ethos may or may not align with our own Christian ethics. Imagine those instances when the workplace ethos, a direct report’s ethics, and our personal ethics do not coalesce but rather collide. The flourishing leader, thus, carefully navigates such places by using wisdom and discernment to seek the greatest good for the “other”.

Seeking the Best or The Greatest Good

How can flourishing marketplace leaders in the making seek the best or the greatest good for our direct reports and for those to whom we report? I recommend four actions for our consideration: (1) grow in discernment; (2) reimagine our role; (3) visit the well; and (4) actively seek a ‘good agitator’.

Grow in Discernment

My colleague, Matt Perman, wrote the book, What’s Best Next. This title suggests that seeking the best for others is not a one-size-fits-all. Flourishing leaders must seek to grow in discernment. As my elementary math teacher was fond of saying, “Put on your thinking caps.” In other words, discernment is more about choosing between right and wrong; discernment is about collecting the facts, analyzing the facts, and then making a sound judgment or decision. Discernment takes work and it takes time to hone this skill. Sometimes discerning the right decision must be preempted by fasting and praying.

Reimagine Our Role

Imagine means to see with our mind’s eye something or someone that does not exist. As those striving to become flourishing leaders and as those who are striving to seek the best for others, we must create different habits. Here are two habits to practice until they become muscle memory:

1. Seeing ‘Others’ as Human Beings. In a world that is fond of dehumanizing or viewing people as objects, I did my best to view my direct reports not as mere cogs in the wheel. I tried my best to see them as glorious and broken imago Dei bearers of God. The “others” are human beings, and they come to work burdened by their own human issues in life. To seek their best means being compassionate because of our shared human condition of being glorious ruins.
2.  Priestly Shepherding. Priests in the Old Testament not only prayed for and offered sacrifices on behalf of God’s people, but they also instructed God’s people. Pray for and instruct your direct reports. Of course, seeking the greatest good for those entrusted to our care means having difficult conversations for their good and the good of others. Mrs. Guyton, my beloved Adult Sunday School Teacher, said constantly, “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Most people entrusted to our care are bruised reeds. So, we must care for them as we would want to be shepherded.

Visit the Well…Frequently

Some wells are an abundant source of information. Those who want to seek the best for others must visit a deep well frequently—the well that is resourced abundantly with sound theology of work content. A sound theology of work begins with God, who introduces himself in Genesis 1:1-2:3 as a creative and conscientious worker who works and rests. This means that our work is a sacred good. And it is through our good work that we serve “others” or our neighbors. The marketplace leader, therefore, must resist leading by the sacred/secular dichotomy—which posits that some work is more important than other work.

The leader must keep tabs on how emerging technologies may alter our notions of work. For instance, Robert Skidelsky, in his book, Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, suggests that “humans are ‘wired up’ parts of a complex technological system. [And] we depend on this system for the way we work, and the way we live, and the way we think.” Being ‘wired up’ parts raises an urgent question, “What does it mean to be human?” The leader who seeks the best for the other is keenly aware that technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not benign; they will inevitably modify how we view persons and how we view and do our work.

By visiting this abundantly resourced well, the flourishing leader is quite aware that our daily work is one vocation of many vocations, which include parenting, being a spouse, being a citizen, and being a caregiver of an elderly parent. This biblical work-view must inform our pursuit of seeking the best for those entrusted to our care. Seeking the best for others, guided by a biblical work-view, means we will help those entrusted to our care not to make their daily work the ultimate good. We are entrusted with fallen human beings and not emotionless robots. This means being hospitable in welcoming their creativity, thoughts, and imaginations.

Seek a ‘Good Agitator’

Galatians 6:10 states, “Do not grow weary in doing what is good.” Seeking the greatest good, the best, for those entrusted to our care is wearisome. One of my dear friends refers to me as his “literary agitator” because I gently pester him to write. Likewise, we need good agitators to encourage us when we are weary, because when things get dicey in the workplace we might take to flight or flee. We need good agitators to keep us morally accountable to stay the course of seeking the best for others. We need people like Zechariah, who served as a good agitator for King Uzziah (2 Chronicles 26:1-5). Because of Zechariah’s good agitation, “He [King Uzziah] sought God during the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God” (2 Chronicles 26:5 NIV). Seeking the Lord brought King Uzziah flourishing.

Leaders flourish when they have good agitators who urge them to seek the Lord on all matters. I had cataract surgery recently on my right eye; this surgery unclouded my vision. Good agitators will help uncloud our vision; they will prevent us from falling back to our default of rugged individualism, which lives by this motto: “I seek my best, and you seek your best.”

Leaders flourish when they have good agitators who urge them to seek the Lord on all matters.

Flourishing leaders know that our growth and development, spiritually, is a lifelong affair; we never arrive. Christ sought our best by sacrificially dying on a cross and being raised from the dead. Agape love—a sacrificial and costly love—motivated Christ to seek our best. In sum, flourishing leaders seek the best for others as this is the way of Christ.