The leadership principles of Jesus (Part I)

This month, the world at large is celebrating Easter, which signifies the death and resurrection of one of the greatest leaders who ever lived. As a commemoration of this season, I will be reflecting on the life and times of Jesus, x-raying it and drawing out leadership principles for my readers. Amongst other things, Jesus was able to teach us how to build teams, how to sustain cultures, and how to leave something behind that outlasts our tenure. Jesus had no office, no title, no budget, no formal organisational structure, no institutional backing or support from the multinational HQ, and no Harvard MBA or corner office, yet he built a movement that has outlasted every empire, every corporation, and every leadership philosophy that has ever competed with it.

He started with a purpose, not with a plan

The first thing you notice about the leadership of Jesus is that He did not begin with a strategy document. He began with a purpose so clear, so consuming, and so compellingly communicated that it made ordinary people do extraordinary things. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” That is a vision statement.

Every great organisational turnaround in corporate history has been anchored, not in a restructuring plan, but in a purpose that people could feel. When Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks in 2008 to rescue a company that had lost its soul in the pursuit of growth, the first thing he did was not cut costs. He closed every store for an afternoon and retrained every barista. He was not fixing a process. He was recovering a purpose. He was reminding a scattered organisation of what it had always meant to be. Purpose before plan. Jesus understood this long before the business schools gave it a name.

This is an area often neglected in many organisations. People, people and people. Those are the reasons any work is moving on. Nothing can move without people. Even if AI is to get the job done, the initial instruction to the machine will be done by people. Jesus understood the importance of people, and he knew that you are not likely to get a perfect man. He did not recruit from the synagogue leadership pool. He did not headhunt the polished, the credentialed, or the socially connected. He went to the riverside and found fishermen. He found a tax collector whom his own community had written off as a collaborator and a cheat. He found sceptics and people with complicated histories.

He looked at who people could become rather than who they currently were. He saw potential and invested in them accordingly. This is an area where many leaders are not ready to exercise patience. Most times, we hire for current competence and neglect future potential. I know the balance may be difficult with the usual pressure of revenue, P&L and EBITDA. We write people off because of past performance reviews and miss the fact that what they needed was not a performance improvement plan but someone to believe in them and invest in their development with genuine intentionality.

Steve Jobs saw something in Jony Ive that nobody else in the organisation was paying attention to at the time. He cultivated that relationship, created the conditions for Ive to flourish, and the result was the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone. These are devices that have redefined consumer technology. The investment in the person nobody else fully saw produced the products that changed the world. I was Apple’s Chief Design Officer. Jobs famously referred to him as his “spiritual partner” at Apple. When you look at your team, your department, your unit, or your floor, there is someone there whose ceiling you may have already decided. I would like to challenge you to reconsider this.

He stayed the course when it cost everything

The cross is, among other things, a leadership statement about commitment. It would have been entirely understandable and possibly rational for Jesus to have recalculated at Gethsemane. The path ahead was clear, and it was brutal. There is a moment in the life of every leader where the cost of the commitment becomes fully visible and the temptation to recalculate becomes overwhelming. The principled stand that will cost you the relationship. The decision that is right in the long run but painful in the immediate term. What you do in that moment defines your leadership more than any of your successes. Nelson Mandela chose twenty-seven years of imprisonment over a conditional freedom that would have required him to compromise the cause he had given his life to.

Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.