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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday February 10, 2003 Volume V Number 6 |
FOCUS - Oval Office
One of my best pals gave me a book of prayers for my birthday. Written by a college president, this contemporary collection, each a kind of short prose, conversational prose, is called “Leadership Prayers.” Since he gave me the gift (I guess the idea of “Leader Prayers” reminded him somehow of “LeaderFOCUS”) early in the morning, I stumble into my favorite chair with a steaming cup of stiff black coffee (I even have a favorite mug, one of those heavy ceramic mugs, this one from The Black Dog on Martha’s Vineyard), open the little book, and make those prayers my own.
I’m clearly not a college president, though in my academic years, I’ll confess I aspired to be one. I looked around campus back then and thought about the different professional roles people played - administration, business, development, athletics, performing arts, faculty (professors in all manner of disciplines) - and as the months and years passed through the prescribed program of study I considered the career path of each and wondered which might fit, and I suppose it says something about my psyche when I admit that the only role that really appealed to me was the role of University President. I think it may have something to do with birth order – I’m the oldest of seven.
Some guys dream of professional football or baseball. Or making the PGA Tour. Or playing the leading man in a string of mega-hit feature films. Or becoming an industrialist or a venture capitalist, or a Top Producer. Or maybe a winning litigation attorney or talk show host or surgeon or an airline captain. Or the evangelist asked to succeed Billy Graham. Me, I wanted to be a college president.
Most of us eventually get over these youthful illusions. Dreams, they say, are healthy. They keep us focused. They give us motivation to achieve. In these fantasies, when we imagine ourselves playing those lofty roles, we read books and learn the dynamics and adopt the language, and well, develop and grow. Some of us stay at it long enough ultimately to occupy that office. The name on the door is ours, and just underneath the name, the position. Kenneth E. Kemp, University President. When I walked by his office in those student days, that’s what I saw.
In my case, that never materialized.
But now years later as I track the thoughts of a real university president and the prayers emanating from his heart and his spirit, his reflections on over-booked days, and challenging conversations, debates with faculty, demands from donors, complaints from students, conflict among staff, disagreements over budgets, long, needless conferences in the board room while a punch list of crises waits on the desk down the hall, critical calls that should have been made yesterday, in the early hours of the morning this president spent time in the quiet of pre-dawn, and entered into a genuine conversation with his God. And because he wrote down some of those prayers, I pray too, right along with him. (He didn’t say anything about coffee or his favorite mug.) And there in the quiet, he claims he found comfort and strength and perspective, and the ability to carry on. I have, too.
Larry King this week asked Dr. James Dobson point blank, in classic Larrykingian style, leaning forward into the microphone, “Dr. Dobson, what is prayer?”
Dobson, now a veteran in the world of sound bytes and talking heads, didn’t blink. Didn’t even hesitate.
“Prayer is a relationship,” he began. It’s not a religious exercise. Or rote repetition. It’s not pleading with the almighty, attempting to force your own agenda on the all powerful God of the Cosmos. Nor is it marshalling a brilliant argument effective enough to alter the mind and plans of a Sovereign God, or maybe change the course of history, Dobson continued. (Though, I suppose, it doesn’t hurt to try.)
“It’s really quite simple. Prayer is a straightforward and honest conversation with God, a God with whom you are in relationship. That’s what prayer is,” Dobson explained to Larry King and along with him, a global audience.
This little book is just that. A simple, straightforward conversation between a leader and his God.
Kind of like David and his Psalms.
* * * * * * * *
Ronald Reagan may not be aware of it, but he is now (as of this week) at age ninety-two, the President who lived the longest. It’s a historical distinction now added to the Reagan legacy, but it is hardly the most significant.
Visit
his Presidential Library in Southern California, and you will see an exact
replica of the Oval Office. It is eerily real, and because you have seen
photographs and video so often through the years of that distinctive room, the
focal point of power for the most powerful nation in the world, so noteworthy,
where Kings and Princes and Presidents and Ambassadors and Prime Ministers have
exchanged greetings and entered into private dialog and made agreements and
built friendships and issued warnings and laid down the gauntlet and marked
history, well, as you enter, it feels something like sacred ground.
The occupant of the Oval Office is honored by the world for simply holding the position. And yet in our system, the occupant’s power is limited. Limited by the people. Limited term – a limited stay in office. Our President is subject to the scrutiny of a watching world. Ever monitored. Ever the subject of debate. Ever the theme of comedic routines and scholarly evaluation, both at the same time.
As the Docent directs the tour, you'll be told that Reagan never entered the Oval Office without his trademark formal business attire. So you enter into the replica of the inner sanctum of American power and might, and you picture a younger Ronald Reagan with his tie cinched up to the neck in a perfect knot under a stiff white collar and his jacket buttoned, welcoming you into his office, you sense something of the reverence he had for the place, and you realize that the office wasn’t really his. It is ours. He for eight years sat behind that desk and spoke on the phone and signed documents and chatted with dignitaries and tended to the nation’s business.
But from the start, he knew it was temporary. He knew he would be replaced. He knew, in a positive sense, he was playing a role. Not a movie role, but a leadership role. And it humbled him. Energized him. He also knew that he had a life apart from these seductive accoutrements of power.
A good friend of mine attends the church on the hill in Bel Aire Ronnie and Nancy called their home church. It wasn’t unusual, Mike said, even during his Presidency, for the Reagans to show up for worship, take their place like everyone else. They’d hold hands during the singing of the hymns, bow their heads and pray, and then he’d listen attentively to the sermons, jotting down a note or two, because he, like the rest of us, knew his need and humbled himself and listened and learned because he was not only a President, he was a man.
Like the rest of us.
* * * * * * * *
And so the other morning, I read a prayer that became my own penned by a college president, words that could be uttered by most any leader in search of divine wisdom –
Lord,
Do not let this leadership position consume me. Do not let me think that I have become my character. Remind my spirit of who really I am so that when I go home I will not keep acting like a CEO. Guide me to whatever is best for my family and my own health.
Please help me keep it all straight. Leadership is extremely important, and I want to do it right. But sometimes I forget where the role ends and I start. So I want your Spirit to remind me, however and whenever you have to…
It’s not really me, God.
It’s just what I do.
-Richard Kriegbaum, Leadership Prayers (Tyndale House 2001)
As I uttered the “Amen,” my burden lightened a little.
I thought about my friends, many of whom struggle with the identity thing – the demands of leadership at first seem so liberating and exhilarating but later become restrictive and oppressive. Some after awhile, feel typecast and caricatured and misunderstood. The expectations associated with their leadership role almost seem to violate personhood.
Feelings of inadequacy can turn into a terrible and secret self-destruction.
Others, who misplace the capacity to distinguish between the role and a personal life can lose perspective, shrink back into a self-imposed isolation, block out meaningful relationships, refuse accountability and slide into a self-serving mode of leadership-by-remote-control.
The abuse of leadership can be dangerous.
Like a ticking time bomb, it’s an explosion in waiting.
May we all be spared from such hazards.
And the key, it seems to me, is to simply lighten up. To restore a sense of humor. To laugh again. To recognize that my role doesn’t define me. It’s a subset of who I am. It’s temporary. Someone else will someday take my place. I’ve got a life apart from the office. I can leave the work role there. I’m not required to take it home. It’s not expected that I take it home. God’s call for me goes beyond the relentless demands of the leadership role that occupies the majority of my time. I need balance.
I have a body that needs care. I have friends who remind me of a life beyond my to-do list. I have a family who needs me to play other, more important roles – like husband, father and now (I’m pleased to say) Grandfather, to name just a few.
So my work, as important as it is, and as much as I aspire to excellence, and as great as my demand for quality, is not me. It is simply what I do.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Because you are a leader, something in you resonates with these thoughts. Go ‘head, let go of the restraints of your leadership role just long enough to embrace the much larger identity you know is yours. The part of you that goes way beyond the confines of your day-to-day obligations, and knows that your work is just a piece of your life, not the whole.
If you do, your effectiveness will be that much greater.
My niece Stacy, a college senior, is just about to complete her undergraduate degree. She’ll be prepared with a bachelor’s degree and a nursing credential. Part of her program at the University of Wyoming is a required internship, which she is completing at the hospital nearest our home, and she is living with us for the duration of the program. She’s been assigned to the E.R. Stacy is learning that there is a considerable difference between the classroom version of the profession and the real world hands on version she’s exposed to daily now, real life in the E.R. Some days, she comes home exhilarated, because she has chosen the world of medicine, where science works in concert with miracle, and healing happens, and hope is realized. There are other days when the dark side of medicine takes over, when pain and suffering and despair can suffocate the ideals that made her choose this major in the first place. Not everyone can handle the rough and tumble of crisis upon crisis. Stacy’s made of the right stuff. She will be a fine nurse.
It’s a role. She’ll play it well. But Stacy is much more than a woman on the floor in medical clothes with a badge and a stethoscope around her neck.
And you are more than the position you occupy in the workplace.
On this Monday morning, like the Ronald Reagan of the eighties, put on the jacket, cinch up the tie, put on the smile, play the role. You are on holy ground.
It’s your calling for today.
But there’s a whole lot more waiting out there for you tomorrow.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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