Most damage done by leaders centers around the use of power:
- The administrator or manager who makes decisions unilaterally...for you and not with you.
- The pastor who mistakes self-righteousness and arrogance for confidence and humble authority.
- The executive who, when confronted with difficult issues, filters decisions through “risk assessment” rather than truth and empathy: Empathy for others is discarded for the sake of the leader's own self-preservation or those the leader is protecting.
- Leaders who abuse power believe that the image or perception of the institution or corporation is paramount, and will be maintained at the expense of higher values.
- Compliance [outward adherence to expectations] is mistakenly equated with change.
- Because of the leader's tragic misunderstanding of power, your relationship with this leader is instantly expendable, regardless of shared history or alleged common beliefs. Personal allegiances with him are tentative and illusory at best.
Too many men are made "kings" too soon, and too many women have mistaken control for love.
Authentic leadership is not the absence of power. Rather, it is power in service to others, even when it requires sacrificing ego, title or positional authority in order to do the right thing:
"...have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather... by taking the very nature of a servant,
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself...