Our gifts are our uniqueness, and our greatest spiritual strength is always displayed in the uniqueness of who we are. You reach integrity by being who you are in all the fullness God intended. The false self is the person whom you try to imitate. The most grateful compliment we can pay our Creator is to fulfill and optimize our uniqueness. How can we pray, asking God to make us someone we aren't or to do something we are not gifted to do? Our leadership should be a reflection of the way we are designed.
If the Lord has blessed you with the gift of discernment, use it in your leadership. I have known many excellent leaders who were not given this gift. They could not read people. They could read figures. They excelled in science, engineering, mathematics, and administration. They depended on management skills, behavioral research, organizational charts, methods, and the types of learned skills taught in business school. Those gifted with discernment, however, more easily develop sensitivity, empathy, and intuition. I am one of these types, having used discernment for many years both in manufacturing (twenty-five hundred employees) and in ministry (chairman of several national ministries). I recognized this aspect of my giftedness and worked hard to develop it.
I was fortunate in my career to have both Ray Stedman, pastor of Peninsula Bible Church, and Baxter Ball, vice-president of Mobil, verify my discernment and intuition. They encouraged me to use these in my leadership I had natural leadership gifts and a strong desire to lead but little training in the usual skills. I built a leadership style on my design, and did not make the mistake of building on the strengths that weren't my own.
A word about my background may be helpful to you: My father was pastor of a small blue-collar church. I never heard the word business mentioned in my home. After graduating from high school, I went out to find a job, my first experience in business. At age twenty-six I became head of a corporate function and by my early thirties a vice-president of operations. I was weak with numbers, and disliked the monotony of administration. In addition, I was not blessed with great physical energy. I never had the urge to rush from one thing to another, keeping a lot of balls in the air. I'm not a type-A personality. Early on, my mentor Maxey Jarman emphasized utilizing strength and buttressing weakness. I realized that both numbers and administration were vital. I overcame my lack in the numbers area by always having a capable numbers person with me. I picked an assistant who enjoyed detail to follow up on routine administration. My strength was in vision, picking and placing people, and coordinating their efforts. Here my discernment was a tremendous help to me.
I was encouraged to use and develop discernment skills by a simple statement of the revered retailer John Wanamaker, who said, "A mule balks in his head before he balks in his feet, and so do people." Another confirmation came in reading a survey made of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra about who had been the most effective director. Toscanini won it, hands down. When asked about his strength, one of the players said, "He could anticipate when you were about to make a mistake and keep you from making it." He had discernment. Later I found another confirming illustration. The manufacturing company for which I was vice-president of operations made high-precision instruments. For years the quality control was put on the individual piece as it went through operation after operation. When an operation damaged the piece in the process, it was very expensive. Our engineers developed a method of establishing the control on the machine as well as on the part. When a machine was going out of tolerance, they would shut it down before it damaged parts. While individuals obviously vary much more than machines, I found that if I could read people correctly, I could keep up their productivity and minimize their mistakes.
Discernment, like musical talent, is innate; however, both must be practiced and developed. Simply having the gift of music does not make one a concert pianist. Recently someone asked me what I would do if I had fifty years more to live. My answer was, "spend more time developing my discernment skills." I would study body language and learn more about reading people. Even after 60 years in business I want to continue learning. If discernment is part of your leadership repertoire, work at it If it is not a natural ability, create a plan for the development of this skill.
