single portion of our spirit, we increase their ability to achieve organizational and personal goals, and we help the organization as well. It’s a
win-win. And to that we can also add a ‘‘win’’ for the mentor, who
usually grows from the experience and gets a tremendous sense of ‘‘gen-
erativity’’ by helping another person achieve his or her goals.
Talk to a mentor and a prote´geíndependently, and you’ll often find
that they are both committed to the same goals. When Noel Tichy
asked Larry Bossidy what his goals were, the answer was ‘‘customer
satisfaction, integration of activities and processes, and make the num-
bers/meet the commitments.’’ When he asked Bossidy’s prote´ge´, Mary
Petrovich, the same question, he got the same answer.10
But Bossidy left Petrovich free to devise her own methods for reach-
ing the goals. Brinker did the same for his prote´geś. Mordechai did the
Leadership Development
205
same for Esther. That’s the difference between coaching someone and
telling them exactly what to do. The former develops leaders; the latter
only creates a clone of the original.
DEVELOPMENTAL ASSIGNMENTS AND
ACTION LEARNING
Most management experts agree that traditional seminars have their
place, but that most learning takes place back on the job through actual
job assignments, or through ‘‘action learning’’—experiential exercises
aimed at solving real-life problems that have immediate relevance to the
company. Noel Tichy observes that ‘‘winning leaders . . . push people
not just to memorize the organization’s values but to wrestle with them,
to internalize and use them.’’ He advocates putting people ‘‘in progres-
sively more difficult situations where they have to make decisions, and
then give them feedback and support.’’11
Jay Conger adds that ‘‘challenge, hardship and derailment,’’ if experi-
enced at the right time and in the right amounts, also create and
strengthen leaders. Burt Nanus and Warren Bennis believe that ‘‘nearly
all leaders are highly proficient in learning from experience,’’ and Mor-
gan McCall observes that ‘‘it’s what a person has to do, not what he or
she is exposed to, that generates crucial learning.’’
In the Bible, anyone who wished to lead needed to be properly in-
structed, but the closest thing to a seminar room was the tent in which
Moses mentored Joshua. Most of the development took place through
challenging assignments that usually involved a great deal of ‘‘action
learning.’’
Earlier, we discussed Timothy, a young apostle whom Paul dis-
patched to the church in Ephesus. Paul knew that this assignment
would force his young prote´ge´ to stretch, but he felt he had picked the
right developmental assignment for him. He advised Timothy to ‘‘stay
there in Ephesus, so that you may command certain men not to teach
false doctrines any longer nor to devote themselves to myths and endless
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THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP
genealogies.’’ (1 Tim. 1:3–4) Anyone entrusted with such a difficult
assignment would need words of encouragement, which Paul added
soon after outlining the task: ‘‘Timothy, my son, I give you this instruc-
tion in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by
following them you may fight the good fight, holding on to faith and a
good conscience.’’ (1 Tim. 1:18–19)
Moses realized that if Joshua was to lead the nation of Israel, he
needed a series of progressively responsible developmental assignments.
One of these was to lead a reconnaissance mission to explore the Prom-
ised Land prior to invading it. He instructed Joshua to ‘‘see what the
land is like and whether the people who live there are strong or weak,
few or many . . . What kind of towns do they live in? Are they unwalled
or fortified? How is the soil? Is it fertile or poor?’’ (Num. 13:18–20)
All Moses was asking of Joshua was that he perform a comprehensive
agricultural, political, military, and socioeconomic survey in unfamiliar
territory in the midst of a hostile enemy. How’s that for a developmental
assignment? It’s the type of mission that literally separates the men from
the boys, the fainthearted from the courageous. And Joshua was up to
the task; he was also one of the few who came back believing the Isra-
elites could successfully take over the land despite the strength of the
opposing forces. His leadership skills would be further developed as he
tried to convince the majority of the people that this task could be
accomplished and that they should not give up by returning to Egypt.
Daniel’s developmental assignments were to read the writing on the
wall and survive the lions’ den; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had
to undergo the fiery furnace. David’s developmental assignments in-
cluded an apprenticeship as a shepherd (an entry-level position in which
he honed his organizational skills and sharpened his combat skills by
killing lions who threatened his sheep) and a truly ‘‘stretch’’ assignment
for which he courageously volunteered: the killing of the combat
champion of the Philistines.
It is not surprising that the most successful modern organizations also
develop their leaders through action learning and developmental assign-
ments. In 1994, KPMG handpicked thirty-five initial participants (high-
potential partners) in their Leadership 2000 program, which was de-
Leadership Development
207
signed to develop the company’s future top management. Rather than
sit passively through the traditional leadership seminar, the executives
were put through a ‘‘trial by fire’’ in which they were asked to:
1. Play the role of the CEO speaking on a controversial topic to
a hostile audience (the action learning included actual lights
and cameras to duplicate a press conference).
2. Commit to development activities back on the job, such as
spending a week in a client’s office interviewing and shadowing
the client’s upper management, or chairing the annual partners’
meeting for a particular line of business.
This type of learning and the follow-up assignments had significant
and measurable results. One-half of the group was given more responsi-
bilities, and many were appointed to key task forces. All reported feeling
more confident in their leadership roles. Two years later, KPMG de-
cided to add another class of thirty-six, and to intermix the two classes
so that the ideas and energy were magnified.12 Perhaps it is a coinci-
dence, but Jesus formed a group of apostles of almost identical size (‘‘the Seventy-Two’’) when he wanted to expand the message of his church.
Jack Welch was a firm believer in action learning. Before a session
of GE’s Executive Development Course, he sent out a memo to the
participants, in which he asked them to think about and be prepared to
discuss the following situation:
Tomorrow you are appointed the CEO of GE:
❖ What would you do in the first thirty days?
❖ Do you have a current ‘‘vision’’ of what to do?
❖ How would you go about developing one?
❖ Present your best shot at the vision.
❖ How would you go about ‘‘selling’’ the vision?
❖ What foundations would you build on?
❖ What current practices would you jettison?’’13
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THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP
These are probably similar questions to the ones that Moses asked
Joshua in the tent, or that David posed to Solomon before transferring
the crown. One thing is certain: Neither Welch nor any of these biblical
leaders would trust pure ‘‘book learning’’ or lectures to prepare the
leaders of the future. Action learning was key if the organization was to
create a strong new generation of leaders.
In running his ‘‘Building the Business’’ top-level executive develop-
ment sessions for PepsiCo, Roger Enrico incorporated both action
learning and developmental assignments. At the end of the first five-day
workshop, all participants were asked to return to the workplace to
initiate or continue work on real projects, which would then be dis-
cussed and analyzed when they returned for a three-day follow-up
workshop several months later.
Gary Wendt, CEO of GE Capital, annually would take several hun-
dred top performers and their spouses to China, India, or some other
‘‘exotic’’ site, which also just ‘‘happened’’ to be an area envisioned as a new market for GE. In this expedition, Wendt and his executives would
soak in the area’s culture, probe for growth opportunities, and form
relationships with key businesspeople and politicians. Although pleasur-
able, this was not a ‘‘junket’’ dedicated to the serious pursuit of drink-
ing, eating, and playing. Such an approach would be too close an
approximation to the revelry surrounding the worship of the Golden
Calf. These ‘‘tours’’ were more like developmental learning events—
windows to the future—than hedonistic celebrations that merely dissi-
pate the organization’s energy and distract it from its purpose.
If leaders are created from difficult or challenging experiences, it
should be no surprise that the trying experiences of the people in the
Bible were the forge out of which a host of new leaders were created.
Jay Conger and Beth Benjamin cite a number of challenges that, if ne-
gotiated successfully, lead to the development of even stronger leaders.14
Each of these can be matched with a number of biblical leaders: