What Leadership is About
By Paul L. Escamilla
And I said to the one who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” Minnie Louise Haskins’ famous lines of verse are no less stirring for having been borrowed so often, as January settles in, for poetry and perspective. It seems a reasonable request: Let me, with the proper set of tools—a light, in this case—turn the unknown into the known. Isn’t that what leadership is about? What I notice in the poem in a new way this year is a response that appears to challenge that notion: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
The implication is that the way we are called to travel is not a “known way”; though it will be safe, it will not be familiar. Rather than find the tools to figure everything out, we’re asked to summon the trust to take a hand that will lead us through amorphous and ambiguous times. In a similar vein, Bob Johansen has written about the importance in our changing world of resisting false certainty and simplistic binary choices, leaning instead toward a different sort of clarity, to be found in broader, big-picture perspectives. Susan Beaumont would call this a deliberate shift from knowing to unknowing. And she has another name for it: leadership.
With rather prophetic insight, Edwin Friedman once observed that the idolatry of the 20th century was certainty, an insistence on establishing a fixed and formulaic answer to every question or dilemma. As we move toward the middle of the 21st century the language of unknown, uncharted territories is increasingly common. The liminal has become mainstream. Setting aside our idols of certainty, we find ourselves increasingly aware of uncertainty as the norm in our life together.
The good news in such a disruption is that the disposition of assurance, so easily displaced by certitudes and platitudes, dogmas and dictums, can perhaps now begin to resume its place as the central disposition of faith. Leaders’ postures of crystal-clear conviction about the way we should go can be relinquished, replaced with an invitation to expressions and practices of trust and reliance on the God who holds our hand as we travel unknown paths. From feeling the need to grasp for visible markers and measurable outcomes to sensing ourselves to be held by a love that will not let us go—this is our faith journey as redefined by the one who stands, as something of a Christ figure, at the gate of the year.
Will we relinquish our grasp in order to place our hand in the hand that waits to guide us, and invite others to do the same? This, I’ve come to believe, is what leadership is about.