He was maybe twenty-four, sitting across from me in my office with a legal pad on his knee, the kind of earnest attention that makes you want to say something worth writing down. He was preparing to take on his first real leadership role — coordinating volunteers for a community outreach — and he’d come to talk through what that might look like.
We’d been talking for about twenty minutes when he looked up and asked, simply: Why do you lead?
Not how. Not what methods work. Why.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
I’ve been in some form of leadership most of my adult life. Leading a congregation means you’re always doing something — planning, deciding, shepherding, correcting, encouraging. The doing can fill every hour if you let it. And somewhere in the accumulation of all that doing, I had apparently stopped asking myself the question this young man tossed out like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I gave him some answer that day. Something about calling and service. It wasn’t dishonest, but it also wasn’t what I’d call examined. It was the answer I’d rehearsed without knowing I was rehearsing it.
On the drive home, it stayed with me. That uncomfortable gap between the words I’d said and the honest, uncertain place underneath them.
I’ve come to think that why is the question leaders are most tempted to skip. We focus on vision, strategy, communication, resilience — all legitimate, all necessary. But the why is the load-bearing wall. Without it, everything else is decoration.
And the why isn’t static. What drove me into leadership at thirty is not exactly what sustains me now. Some of my early motivations, if I’m honest, were about proving something. About being needed. Those aren’t entirely gone — I’d be lying to say otherwise — but they’ve been slowly, sometimes painfully, rearranged.
I think that rearranging is the actual work of growth. Not acquiring new skills, though skills matter. But returning, again and again, to the question of what you’re really after.
I never did give that young man a fully satisfying answer. But I told him something I believe more now than when I said it: the leaders worth following are the ones still willing to be surprised by the question.
He wrote that down.
I hope I remember it too.