Kindergarten

One thing people notice when they come to my office is the walls of bookshelves jam packed with books. I have some similar shelves at home. I like to read and the number of books I own is not so much a measure of intellectual curiosity, but personal longevity (age)! If you are around long enough and you like books, they accumulate.

         

Safely tucked away next to Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Louis Berkhof’s, Systematic Theology, Sydney Ahlstrom’s, A Religious History of the American People, and volumes upon volumes of Old and New Testament commentaries is Robert Fulghum’s, All I Really Needed to know I Learned in Kindergarten. Fulghum’s premise is that if we master the lessons we learn in kindergarten, Share everything, Play fair, Don’t hit people, Clean up your own mess, Flush, Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you, we have everything we need for the rest of our lives.

I thought of that the other day when I was talking with a man who is in the process of writing a book on leadership. He told me that his four pillars for leadership are:   

          Be Nice

          Listen

          Don’t get caught up in minutiae

          Always, Always, Always...tell the truth

         

Really, those are leadership principles worthy of being published in a book? Then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized as a person who studies and reads about leadership, I realized that as simple as those four things seem to be, they are rarely practiced by leaders.

Are we nice to people, genuinely nice to everyone? We set up parameters, resonate with certain personality types, decide who is worthy of our time and interest and are often abrupt and rude to people. Then there is the other side of being nice. Some people don’t think you are nice if you don’t agree with them, or give them what they want, or if you don’t handle something the way they think it should have been handled.

Do we listen to other people? Listening, real listening is a rare trait. “When you listen to the conversations of the world, most often they are conversations of the deaf.” It is a way of saying, we aren’t very good listeners. Too often we have our own agenda, are planning our response, and only heard words that are spoken, and therefore we are not very good listeners.

Getting caught up in minutiae is easy. Every day is filled with minutiae. And one person’s minutiae is another person’s “this is of ultimate importance”. Sometimes when I refuse to get caught up in minutiae, people don’t think I am very nice.

Always, always, always...tell the truth. It is amazing how few times we really tell the truth to people. We hesitate because it may hurt someone’s feelings, or might cause tension in the relationship. I have found that by not telling the truth about why a decision is being made if often leads to misunderstanding which drags on and raises a lot more questions in the end which is more painful that telling the truth up front.

These leadership principles seem like we should have learned them in kindergarten, which we may have, but somehow we have lost them along the way. Certainly they are principles that Jesus practiced in His ministry and that He passed on to us.

Maybe we should follow Jesus back to kindergarten.