What are the two characteristics every leader should have when leading through a season of crisis? Hear from President Scott Hagan, PhD as he shares his advice on this topic of leadership. — Comment below if you agree!
Transcript:
Erik Cooper: Well lets pivot, that is something that I know you’ve been dealing with here, especially all of us, I guess to some extent in 2020 we have been dealing with crisis, maybe in a way that we’ve never dealt with before. So, I mean, you’ve been a leader in the church. Now you are a leader in the university setting. From a leadership standpoint, how do you lead through a season of crisis like this? What would you say? We’re talking to Pastors were talking to entrepreneurs, business leaders who are trying to navigate waters they have never navigated before. So, you know, from a faith-based standpoint from a leadership standpoint. What would you say to those?
President Hagan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the most important word in leadership is poise. It’s my favorite word. Poise represents what I call the courageous middle and a lot of people in this day and age are trying to pull you into this again, civil war. And in order for me to believe this, I must have a subsequent hatred for that? And I have just refused to play the game. Some people call it the compromised middle, but I live in that what I view is the courageous middle and it’s a place of poise. So the two most important characteristics is you gotta keep your cool, which is to stay calm and you gotta keep your promises so you have to really think through the promises you’re making in this day and age so that you can keep your promise and that you can keep your cool under pressure, which is really the elements of poise. I think also that the quality of buoyancy. Some people might call it resiliency. I like the concept of buoyancy that no matter what pushes me down, I have this capacity to absorb crisis without changing my shape. If I had an old ball of Silly Putty that stuff we used to play with back in the day, and if I put my finger into the Silly Putty, that’s the crisis I pull my finger out I’ve changed the shape. Leadership is about the ability to absorb a crisis like a tennis ball. I can press it in and then when the crisis passes, I resume my shape and I’ll lose my shape. So we see way too many leaders, young and old. They’ve lost their shape in 2020 because they have an absence of buoyancy, poise and that calm that comes from the courageous middle of leadership where you are a conduit between two worlds at any given time and as long as I can keep my mindset in that space and stay in that mission, then I’m not just OK, but I think I’m flourishing and fruitful.
