Leaders Can Be Forgiven, Too
Leaders are necessary for the efficient and effective pursuit of human flourishing. While it is possible to go it alone and achieve a certain degree of success, general human flourishing thrives when individuals come together, contribute in a productive way, and focus on a shared vision of the good. The leader has the responsibility for casting that vision. The leader must motivate the rest of the population towards a target that would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve individually.
Some people are more naturally suited for leadership than others. Qualities such as enthusiasm, persuasiveness, integrity, and focus are a few examples of aptitudes that would make one a more impactful leader. As we are all different and have different strengths and weaknesses, it follows that some people will be better leaders than others.
No matter how good a leader might be, he or she remains human and, therefore, will make errors in judgment. Even a leader with incredibly strong judgment is still prone to make errors. With more experience and skill, the error rate ought to decrease, but leaders are imperfect. I have led various endeavors, and I still remember my many mistakes. I even remember small mistakes that most people have probably forgotten, but because I was the leader who was supposed to lead us towards a good outcome, they remain in my head.
When I have failed, the people I was leading were kind enough to allow me to regroup, acknowledge my shortcomings, discover a better path, and proceed in that new direction. While my failures have not been the kind of catastrophic things that often require the immediate removal of people from leadership, even much smaller offenses require grace and forgiveness from those who follow for the dynamic to remain healthy.
To be clear, there are breaches of trust that are so egregious that leaders need to be removed from their positions. Taking the responsibility of leading a group of people toward flourishing and exploiting that trust for a perverse and detrimental purpose can have catastrophic implications on individual followers and a movement at large. I do not want anything in this post to be misconstrued as a defense of abusive or exploitative leadership. Please understand that is not my intention.
Nevertheless, in the ordinary, everyday situations that most of us find ourselves in, following leaders who occasionally err, we need to remember that one shortcoming does not mean that someone must be thrown from leadership. If that were true, no one would be qualified to lead, and we would miss out on the benefits of having someone coordinate our path toward human flourishing. Even the best business leaders, for example, have launched products or produced movies that are flops. They have made bad decisions intended for good purposes but actually turned into a detriment. A bad decision is not always an immediate indication that someone must be removed from leadership.
As much as we expect our leaders to show us grace when we mess up, we also need to extend the same grace to our own leaders when they make mistakes but are then genuinely repentant. Forgiveness must go in both directions. Leaders must forgive followers, and followers must forgive leaders.
“Genuine mistakes that are repented of need to be forgiven for the healthy dynamic between the leader and followers to continue.”
There are two difficult parts to the preceding sentence:
1. What are genuine mistakes?
2. What is repentance?
First, one person’s genuine mistake may look like a mortal sin to another person. In a society where it is increasingly common to equate speech with violence, it is very easy for one phrase to be taken in a way that the speaker never intended and create an accusation of a serious offense, whereas the original speaker may consider it a minor faux pas. A recent example of this dynamic can be seen in Oliver Anthony’s song, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Christianity Today ran an editorial on the song and suggested that it does not love its neighbor because Anthony does make statements that can be seen as derogatory towards people who utilize welfare. I am not defending his lyric as appropriate; I think he should have made a different choice because it missed the target that he was actually shooting for. It is clear to me that Anthony did not write the song to insult people on welfare but rather a political system that he sees as corrupt. He missed the mark with that lyric in a way that obscures and distracts from his primary purpose. Therefore, you can see the contrast between my reaction and the commentary in Christianity Today. I tend to view this as more of a situation where he expressed frustrations with the governmental system in a way that came across wrong and should have been done in a better way, whereas Christianity Today suggests that it does not love its neighbor, which is certainly a much more severe charge.
Second, we must consider what it means to repent and when repentance is necessary. Repentance must follow a mistake. That is good and true. Nevertheless, sometimes, a group might call something a mistake and demand repentance even though the action in question was not a mistake in the first place. In business, decisions are made based on the information you have. You must do your best with your decision, and you will be wrong sometimes. If you are, you need to repent of that decision. Sometimes, you must face your Board of Directors and own up to the fact that you made a decision that hurt the company. However, there can be voices on that Board of Directors that bring different charges. They may accuse you of irresponsibility or having improper motives. Much like in The Trial by Kafka, you may be ordered to repent of things you never did. Because of that difference, the appearance of repentance might look different. It is the difference between being told to be more careful next time and being fired for negligence. It makes sense that forgiveness ought to follow repentance, but the demands of repentance can differ depending on where the accusation originates.
The way that we consider these two questions is likely going to be heavily influenced by our prior relationship with the leader in question. If you are at work and really trust your boss, you are much more likely to believe that an error she made was a genuine, good will mistake and not evidence of something sinister. You are also much more likely to accept her repentance.
On the other hand, if you have a bad relationship with the leader in question, your skepticism will suggest harsher penalties. Even though he might protest that he did not mean to cause a problem, he might not receive the benefit of the doubt from those who didn’t like him in the first place. With a weaker, pre-existing relationship, his repentance might not seem as genuine, or you might not understand where he is coming from in a way that would prevent the development of additional offenses.
Therefore, with all of these thoughts in mind about the dynamic between leaders and followers and the necessity of forgiveness, I would like to offer a few suggestions that might help us avoid the evisceration of quality leaders while recognizing that leaders also require accountability and are answerable to their followers.
1. Leaders must know their followers and be involved with them. It is much harder to assume bad intentions of someone you know and have a relationship with. It is easier to assume that you have to take it to the big, bad, amorphous “man.”
2. Leaders must genuinely repent and not spit out PR jargon. We all laugh at professional athletes' insincere apologies if we are honest. Not that we are minimizing whatever conduct led to the press conference, but the whole exercise is kind of ridiculous. It often feels like the person is not actually sorry for what he did but is actually sorry that he got caught. Leaders do not need to apologize for crimes they didn’t commit, but they must be willing to openly and honestly acknowledge their own shortcomings and ask for forgiveness. Leaders who engage in this kind of PR speak lose much of their credibility.
3. If leaders genuinely apologize, forgiveness often should follow from the followers. As I noted above, there are genuinely egregious cases that are horrendous, and I am not trying to excuse bad behavior. As I also mentioned, forgiveness does not always mean freedom from consequences. Bad decisions, or a series of bad decisions, sometimes disqualifies an individual from future leadership. However, our immediate response to every error should not be the leader's immediate removal. A lack of repentance for a mistake ought to raise questions, but a questionable error by someone who seems to have made an error in good faith should not always lead to immediate removal.
We have a shortage of leaders. Not everyone is cut out to be a leader because it is hard to be a leader and requires certain qualities. Good leaders are not perfect leaders; if we are waiting for perfect leaders, we will not find any walking around on the earth today. Good leaders are precisely what the title implies; they are good. They are better than average. They do their best but sometimes mess up. In a world that is incredibly quick to do everything, we ought to be very careful about writing people off or throwing them in the waste bin too quickly. Yes, some situations justify extreme speed and severe consequences. However, we also need to be gracious and forgiving of those who are genuinely trying to do good work but drop the ball occasionally.