Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands by Nancy Ortberg Read Free Book Online Page B

way? By insisting on that, we honor the individual that God made each person to be. We free ourselves from making people over in our image for our own validation.
    To be sure, an enormous part of developing leaders is about teaching and training. We cannot do it without imparting truths out of our own learning and wisdom. Here we are again, at that increasingly familiar place of tension. But in addition to imparting our wisdom, we can encourage people to do things their way. We can ask the question “What do you think?” We can allow for mistakes and room for different ways of approaching issues.
    As leaders, we need to offer the armor, but smile when others try it on and politely decline. We watch in amazement as those we lead approach a problem differently than we might, but solve it well. We get excited when the direction and freedom we provide leads to fresh, new change. And we grow ourselves when we realize that this learning process is beautifully reciprocal.
    A number of years ago, a young man named David Hubbard became the president of Fuller Seminary. He was the youngest man to have ever taken that post. One of the gifts God gave David to help him lead well was Max DePree. Max was a successful business leader who came alongside David and offered him six words.
    Six powerful words.
    “I am committed to your success.”
    And then Max, a Fortune 500 company president, moved joyfully into the shadows. He positioned himself behind David.
    From behind the scenes we can say, “If you need me, I’m right here. From time to time, I will whisper in your ear some of the most significant thingsthat God has been good enough to teach me. You can decide what you need. From time to time I will stand next to you and I will speak encouragement and a call to persevere, because sometimes that is just what a leader needs.
    “I am committed to your success.”
    “I will believe in the gifts and ability and character that I see in you, and I will point you to the God who is the giver of all of those things. I am steadfastly devoted and faithfully committed to you as the leader of this place.”
    When someone who is a little further down the road than you are stands behind and beside you like that, it spurs you on. It’s exciting at my age to see young leaderslearning, apprenticing, and then striking out on their own. And it’s even more exciting to look around at the rest of us who are giving, teaching, directing, and celebrating as we all head toward the same finish line.
    Together.

Rock, Paper, Scissors
    PERHAPS ONE OF THE most powerful things a leader can do isto deeply value the contributions of everyone in the organization. Unfortunately, many leaders have bought into the celebrity culture (I don’t have time to cover it here, but when a nineteen-year-old pop star makes more in one appearance than the average schoolteacher can hope to make in a lifetime, we need a new culture). When contributions are unfairly measured against each other, it creates an environment of favorites and pits those who ought to be collaborative colleagues against one another in destructive ways.
    It is not reasonable to assume that janitors will be financially compensated along the lines of the CEO, but an equal valuing of contributions is not about money. In fact, it doesn’t have to cost anything at all. And the power it creates in an organization can be amazing.
    For a number of years, I worked as a nurse in a large hospital in the Orange County area of Southern California. For part of that time I was assigned to the emergency department. Every day was different, and most of the time, the work was interesting and action packed. But some days were definitely better than others, and it all depended on which of the doctors was working that shift.
    I was not alone in my assessment. Any time we came to work and found this particular doctor on duty, we all knew it was going to be a great shift. Why? Because that man knew how to value people. He knew