Peter Kritas Mailpost: Leadership and Criticism

The Test of Criticism

If you lost your position in an organisation or censured for your work, does that arouse hostility and resentment in our hearts and cause us to fly to immediate self-justification? Or do we simply go to a place of acceptance and understanding and move off to a place of wisdom?  Do we hasten to criticise the critic?

Popularity

There will always be those unwise souls who grant undue deference to their Leaders and advisors, and who tend to exalt one above another forgetting that we are all fellow-workers for one common purpose. Popularity is the most dangerous Spiritual state imaginable, since it leads one so easily to Spiritual pride which drowns men in a state of Spiritual ruin. It is a symptom to be watched with anxiety since so often it has been purchased at the too heavy price of compromise with the world.”

An exaggerated yielding to Leaders is a mark of Spiritual immaturity. And an acceptance of such fawning deference by the Leader is an evidence of the very same weakness. It is not wrong to be greatly loved by those whom one has endeavored to serve, but there is always the danger that devotion may be deflected from the Master to the servant. Leaders are to be “esteemed very highly in love for their work’s sake,” but that esteem should not degenerate into adulation.

That Leader is most successful who attaches the loyalty of his team more to the outcome of the Project than to themselves. He can rightly draw encouragement from the fact that his service has been fruitful and appreciated, but he must refuse to be idolized.

What Leader does not desire to be popular with his constituency? Certainly there is no virtue in unpopularity, but popularity can be purchased at too high a price. Jesus made that crystal clear when He said, “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.” And He expressed the complementary truth when he said, “Blessed are ye when men revile you and persecute you, and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake.”

Success exposes a man to the pressure of people and thus tempts him to hold on to his gains by means of physical methods and practices, and to let himself be ruled wholly by the dictatorial demands of incessant expansion. Success can go to one’s head, and will unless one remembers that it is the Team as a whole and the divine that accomplishes the work, understanding that everyone is dispensable, and that the organisation will be able to make out with other means whenever a Leader is cut down to size.