If You’re a Perfect Leader, You’re Not

by. Matt Monge

Teams, groups, organizations, churches, clubs, families, homeschooling groups, etc, don’t need perfect leaders. They need real, human, vulnerable ones. They need leaders who have faults and talk openly about them. Faults, after all, are part of our inherent humanness.

If you tell me you don’t have any real faults or flaws I’m telling you that you’re either entirely delusional or extremely dishonest with yourself and/or others. Or both. Aren’t many other options.

Stop chuckling. That can actually end up really, really, really badly for all involved. Don’t believe me? Well, there’s always jokers like this popping up all over the place. And that’s just in one tiny little snippet of the religious world that I happen to be a bit more familiar with than others.

But it happens all over the place.

There are few things more frustrating than being on a team with someone who perceives themselves to be flawless, or at least darn close to it. You know they’re not, yet somehow, on some weird level, you find yourself feeling somehow compelled to try to be as well. The problem is that you can’t be that perfect person. You don’t even really want the pressure of being that person.

continue reading »