What a True Leader Is: 3 Lessons for Leading in Challenging Times

As part of my job as the executive director of the De Pree Center, I get to spend time with many different leaders across industries. Over the last few months, many of these conversations have played out in a similar way. The exchange goes something like this:

Me: How you doing?
Leader: There’s a lot going on.
Me: Ugh. Tell me more.
Leader: What’s happening on a national level is causing complexity for my organization because (insert all kinds of financial, technical, emotional, and personnel-related realities).
Me: Thanks for telling me all that—that’s so tough. So, how are you navigating it all?

Their answers to this final question have been deeply encouraging. Not because they have it all figured out, but because their responses model how to show up as leaders when things are uncertain.

What follows is three lessons from my conversations with these leaders about how we can show up in distinctively Christian ways.

1. Be Oriented by Hope
Gallup recently released findings from a global survey that asked over 72,000 people representing 52 countries an open-ended question about what they need most from their leaders. One word dominated people’s responses—hope.

As I listen to leaders right now, I hear this theme repeated. One senior level leader explained it this way: People need to believe that I believe.

In theological terms, our hope centers on the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. By tracing the story of the people of God from the Israelites who were brought out of Egypt, through Jesus who came to suffer with us, all the way to the promise that God gives us through the Holy Spirit, we find our hope is in God. And this God is not distant from chaos or volatility, but instead meets us in it. Sits with us in it. Invites us to lament. And the exclamation point on it all is that the resurrection of Jesus emboldens us to know that God conquers death—that suffering is not wasted and that God always has the final word.

As Christians who desire to live out our faith at and in our work, our call is to always show up as people of hope—working toward God’s mission of fixing broken things and reconciling others back to the hope found in God.

Critically, the hope God invites us to embody isn’t just about what might be; it is also about what is now and what has been before. If we’re disconnected from the present or inattentive to the past, we become distant from the very real pain in our systems, and any outpouring of hope risks being shallow and misguided. So the question then becomes: How do we stay connected to what matters most when things feel chaotic?

One example of this comes from a manager who felt anxious about potential layoffs for some of his team and his own job security. But when he and I talked, he revealed a deeper sense of hope. When I asked him how he could be anxious and hopeful at the same time, he talked about empathizing with this very real, difficult situation while at the same time acknowledging that his hope comes from remembering that God has been faithful every step of the way. In both triumph and failure, inside the company and out. He had to not only trust God’s pattern of faithfulness but seek to be part of it as he looked to the future.

In this manager’s story, we hear echoes of God’s call throughout the Old Testament to the Israelites to remember what God has done and how far God has brought the people of God.

In 1986, writer, professor, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, gave a lecture to commemorate his becoming a Nobel Laureate. In it he says, “Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living…it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope.”

We arrive at the hope that the world is so desperately craving by remembering that God has been faithful to his people for a very long time and continues to be active now, meeting us in the chaos and complexity we’re facing at work.

2. Do the Next Right Thing
Many leaders I talk to are really honest: I don’t have it all figured out. I can’t see the whole picture yet. I’m not quite sure if this is the right choice.

It is human to want to have a good, full, and robust plan. But in times of complexity and disruption, that’s nearly impossible. My friend Tod Bolsinger has written extensively on how church leaders develop capacities to lead in uncertain times. I believe many of his insights are broadly applicable to Christians leading across industries and seasons of life. In How Not to Waste a Crisis, Bolsinger reminds us of the encouragement Wayne Gretzsky’s father gave to Wayne: “Skate where the puck is going to be.” However, Bolsinger takes issue with how leadership folks have adopted this line as leadership wisdom. Bolsinger describes how in today’s leadership climate, there are more like fourteen pucks, each going in fourteen different directions. How do you skate to where fourteen pucks are going to be?

For example, one leader described to me the work that their organization is doing to untangle valuable and ongoing programs with DEI labels that have created more contention than help for the work at hand. As he told me more about his context and the various programmatic efforts, I honestly felt overwhelmed by the proverbial ball of knotted yarn this leader described. But he wasn’t overwhelmed. He described to me the deep value of the work they were doing, his hope for the future, and the next right thing being something equivalent to working to pull at one “string.”

I was struck by this leader’s wisdom and what I perceived to be what Edwin Friedman refers to as healthy differentiation. He did not feel caught up and overwhelmed by it all, but was instead clear-eyed about what was his to do.

But sometimes, it can feel very hard to know the next right thing to do. Several tools are helpful here, including Stephen Covey’s “Circle of Control” (which Lisa Slayton and I talk about in Life in Flux) and how it helps us place facets of a situation in either the circle of control, circle of influence, or the circle of concern. And, as Lisa likes to say, it’s natural to accidentally spend an inordinate amount of energy on things that are in the circle of concern over which we have no control. Once we get more focused, the next right thing becomes clearer.

Prayer is a gateway to so much. Whether it’s a small moment of pause ensuring we respond rather than react or something more structured like the Prayer of Examen. One my mentors and author Uli Chi describes how in these moments of complexity he had to start praying his to-do list and doing his prayer list. When we start in prayer, the hope is that we become more aligned with the direction God is moving, helping our next right step be aligned in that direction.

When we start in prayer, the hope is that we become more aligned with the direction God is moving, helping our next right step be aligned in that direction.

3. Show Up with Integrity Amid Complexity
Said another way, do the next right thing. This is probably the most striking pattern I’m noticing. One leader told me, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do, but I do know how we’re going to do it—the right way! Her point was that she wants every action she takes to be something that lines up with her internal compass. The good news for her is that her company’s values are not in conflict with her personal values.

I think about the Old Testament character Joseph (for which the De Pree Center has some great devotional resources!) who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers and eventually rose to a prominent leadership position in Egypt. While there are many twists and turns to Joseph’s story, one of the more climactic events happens when the same brothers who sold Joseph into slavery come to him—not knowing it’s him—to ask for food during a famine. Joseph’s first reaction was harsh, naturally. He used his power to throw his brothers into prison. But then, Joseph changes his mind. He releases his brothers, citing his fear of God. Of course, he also weeps. He grieves. He reconnects.

It’s always a remarkable thing to stand up for what’s right. For a business to choose people over profits or for leaders to work through conflict in a human and healthy way. But it’s even more remarkable for leaders to change course. To say that they were wrong or that they changed their mind. In the midst of an increasingly complex world, I predict we will need to get much more comfortable with changing our minds. Adam Grant has a wonderful book on this that I commend to anyone working with people.

It’s always a remarkable thing to stand up for what’s right… But it’s even more remarkable for leaders to change course.

Part of what makes these conversations with leaders so encouraging is that they’re committed to doing the right thing. This means that they know that as more information comes out, or when they realize they are wrong, they may need to change their minds.

It is also encouraging to me that these three items (and a few others) were present in the Flourishing Leaders study that Meryl Herr and I conducted. Meryl and David C. Wang have recently done all the academic heavy lifting to create The Flourishing Leadership Inventory, which is an empirically validated 16-item, self-report instrument used to measure a Christian’s level of flourishing leadership (more on that soon). For now, thank you for the ways that you are showing up as a person oriented by hope, focusing on the next right thing, and practicing integrity in how you move forward in the world.