Leadership Lessons from John Paul II

In his weekly column John Allen distills leadership lessons from John Paul II – Never Meet Your Opponents Head-on If There’s a Way Around Them; You Can’t Do Everything, So Be Prepared to Choose; Don’t Be Afraid To Blaze New Paths, If You Know Where You’re Going;Allow Your Reach to Exceed Your grasp.What follows, therefore, is not a kind of catechism. I will offer four lessons in leadership from John Paul II, leaving it to others to decide if there’s anything applicable to their own ministries and vocations. Think of this as a sort of “Seven Minute Manager,” papal style.

(1) Never Meet Your Opponents Head-on If There’s a Way Around Them

This was a lesson that the young Karol Wojtyla absorbed from the “Primate of the Millennium,” Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, who resisted the Soviet domination of Poland for the most part not by direct confrontation, but by keeping an alternative vision of human existence alive. Whenever he could, Wyszynski didn’t fight his opponents, he ignored them.

(2) You Can’t Do Everything, So Be Prepared to Choose

No pope can resolve every question, so all have to delegate. Some, such as Pius XII and Paul VI, take the reins of internal governance more in their own hands; others delegate more, to be free to pursue other agendas.

(3) Don’t Be Afraid To Blaze New Paths, If You Know Where You’re Going

John Paul was known as the “pope of firsts.” In that sense, despite the persistent media stereotype of a “conservative pope,” he hardly fit the bill, at least according to Samuel Johnson’s famous description of a conservative — “a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.”

(4) Allow Your Reach to Exceed Your grasp

If John Paul is eventually remembered as “the Great,” it will be for the grandness of his failures as well as his successes. This was a pope of epic ambition, who was unafraid to come up short.

John’s Allen’s weekly reflections from Rome offer many insights on church matters and can be sent via email for free.