Leadership Lessons

Our neighbors in Canada have lately been giving us some valuable lessons on what leadership isn’t, how not to run a city, and who not to vote for. Normally, news from up north gets buried behind the obituaries, unless they are having an Olympics or sending a Polar Express storm our way. But most cable news networks in the U.S. haven’t been able to resist beaming live feeds from the chambers of Toronto, Ontario’s City Council chambers. That’s where an unsightly saga has been playing out, a real-life melodrama featuring that city’s disgraced mayor, Rob Ford. After consistently denying moral lapses for years, Ford has now openly admitted to driving while drunk, buying illegal drugs, and smoking crack. He’s been actually caught on camera hanging with gang members, threatening to murder a man, speaking salaciously about his private sexual activities, and engaging in alcohol-fueled rampages of profanities. Other council members have voted by a wide margin to all but fire him, yet Ford says he’s staying on the job no matter what. What’s really embarrassing is that Ford is a fiscal conservative that a Tea Party member could love. Morals aside, he’d vote with Republicans any day, were he an American. Meanwhile, he makes Bill Clinton look like an altar boy.

Scripture has much to say about leaders like this. Proverbs 17:7 warns, “Arrogant lips are unsuited to a fool–how much worse lying lips to a ruler!” “By justice a king gives a country stability,” adds Proverbs 29:4. The good people of Toronto would do well to head the wisdom of a leader named Solomon, the smartest man who ever lived, who also wrote, “Through the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is destroyed”(Proverbs 11:11). There is more at stake here than the embarrassment of a metropolis or a nation. A leader should exemplify the best of what the citizenry ought to strive for, not lower the barrier of political expectations. Ford says he’s doing his job and deserves to stay on the job. But the “bully pulpit” of leadership is as much about how those in power live as it is what they do politically. Their lives need to preach a message of sobriety and decency for the next generation to admire. Leadership is about more than a job description. It’s also about obeying the same laws a leader is sworn to uphold.