Leading with a Limp: Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness by Dan Allender
Put your flawed foot forward.
Pick up most leadership books and you’ll find strategies for leveraging your power and minimizing your areas of weakness.
But rather than work against your weakness, why not draw from a deeper well of strength?
God favors leaders who make the most of the power that comes from brokenness.
Go ahead and take full advantage of your flaws.
The most effective leaders don’t rise to power in spite of their weakness; they lead with power because of their weakness. It is their authenticity in limping leadership that compels others to follow them.
Flawed leaders are successful because they’re not preoccupied with protecting their image.
They are undaunted by chaos and complexity. And they are ready to risk failure in moving an organization from what is to what should be.
If you are a leader–or if you have been making excuses to avoid leading–find out how to get the most from your weakness.
A limping leader is the kind of person God uses to accomplish amazing things.
Buy through this Amazon link and support Turning the Page
Some quotes to consider
If you love truth and bound to its proclamation, flee the cults of pretense and Christian artifice. Seek out a new context in which to lead. If you find a church or organization that is not bound to pretense but simply be ill equipped to admit what the Scriptures teach about our struggle with sin, you will be in a place honesty has the greatest potential to alter the culture of latent deceit.
It takes humility to name our narcissism, and we’re too married to our image to come clean about how messed up we are. This focus on self strangles authentic confession.
When we at last admit our flaws and failure, we gain a stronger personal center and greater peace.
Our attempt to not feel off guard actually leads to greater self-absorption and the foolish conviction that we can control the world. True core strength is willing to to feel helpless and disturbed, and it results in a self-disciplined and passionate life rather than in a controlling life that fears what may surprisingly arise.
The lie of narcissism is that we can control a world that is spinning out of orbit by narrowing the field of ambiguity in to a simplistic perspective. We choose this perspective-a path of rigidity and dogmatism that limits options and lets us deny complexity in the world.
Only by letting go of dogmatism and embracing complexity can a leader open her mind to a greater capacity for creativity.