Most leaders can't say how they're growing.

You know what leadership is supposed to look like. You’ve read the books, most of them more than once. You’ve taken the assessments and been to the conferences. You’ve got an Enneagram type, you know your leadership voice, you’ve got your Working Genius and somebody’s framework for finding your strengths. There’s a podcast in your queue right now, and a post on LinkedIn today, and someone on your team sent you a link to a thing last week. Most of it was thoughtful and some of it even helped.

And yet, if you're honest, there's one question all of that still hasn't answered.

If you were becoming a better leader, how would anyone know? What would you be doing differently next month, next quarter, next year?

Most of what you’ve read promises a faster way through. Five steps to better leadership, ten habits of effective leaders, the four levels, the three secrets, the one big shift. Some of those books are good. I’ve got a stack of them in my office, and I’ve recommended more than a few of them to leaders I coach.

This isn’t one of those books and I’m telling you now I’m not giving you some quick fixes or a few shortcuts to get people to do what you want.

What I want to walk you through is the long way to lead. It’s slow, faithful, and patient, lived year after year in seasons that don’t always look like progress. I want to convince you, before we go any further, that this is the only way your leadership effectiveness will hold up over time.

I’ve been circling this idea for 25 years myself. Most of that time I was the one being led, then the one learning to lead, then the one trying to help others lead well. Somewhere in there I went back to school for a master’s degree in leadership and spent three years studying what the academic world calls transformational servant leadership. The question all of it kept returning to, the one I couldn’t leave alone, was deceptively simple.

What does a good leader do? And in my context, what does a good leader who follows Jesus do?

Not what they believe, and not what they think about leadership in the abstract. What do they do? How they show up on a Tuesday morning, the patterns they repeat week after week and year after year and how those patterns shape their ability to lead people faithfully toward God’s agenda.

That question is harder than it sounds, and my experience is that most of our conversations about leadership are failing to answer it.

I certainly have times in my life where I’ve led well, others where I’ve done a poor job of it. Thankfully there are people who had enough courage and conviction to point it out in ways I could finally understand. Truthfully, there are probably lots of people who tried to help me understand the way I was leading was missing the mark, but I was too dense to realize it at the time. Yes, I’ve learned some stuff along the way and I really believe healthy leadership matters, but please don’t take this advice as being from someone who’s always had it all figured out. Very much the opposite! Consider this the advice from someone with battle scars and consequences of stupid decisions along the way, given opportunities by God’s grace to keep moving forward.

What I know to be true is that as followers of Jesus we have a responsibility to think differently about how we lead when the world around us says leadership is organizational power, or positional authority, or charismatic personality. Plenty of people have all three and are bad leaders, and plenty of people have none of them and are extraordinary ones.

For followers of Jesus, effective leadership doesn’t concern itself with any of these three. Instead, leadership is how you show up. Leadership is what you do and how you do it.

People rarely experience your leadership as an idea. Nobody who works with you is telling their friends about the leadership theory you’ve learned about. They all meet it in the weekly staff meeting, in the way you handle hard news, and in how the room feels after you leave. It’s behavior and not theory, observable patterns repeated over time which shape everyone around you whether you meant them to or not.

The working definition I use, and the one we’ll come back to throughout this book, is this: leadership is godly influence towards God’s agenda. Sit with that for a second. By that definition, there’s probably a good number of people on your team and in your church who are leaders even though they don’t have an official role or an invitation into your development pathways. And some of the people with the biggest titles in your church aren’t really functioning as leaders at all. It cuts both ways, which is exactly the point.

But a definition isn’t a framework, and you need more than a sentence to shape your understanding if leadership is going to be how you show up.

What you need, what I’ve needed, what every leader I’ve ever coached has needed, is a picture: a shared vocabulary for naming a shared understanding of leadership that’s specific enough to act on and memorable enough to stick.

The definition tells you what leadership is, the framework tells you how to grow in it. As I’m going to show you, the Four Dimensions name who you’re becoming as a leader, the Five Directions name where that becoming gets expressed, and together they turn a one-sentence definition into a picture you can live into.

Together, the Four Dimensions and the Five Directions give you a picture of a whole leader. Not a perfect one, and not a finished one, but a whole one: someone growing in all nine, not perfectly but intentionally.

My hope is that by the end of this book you can name where you’re strong, name where your real growth opportunity is, and walk into your next conversation with language your team can use too. If so, I’ll have done my job.