Prudence

What is today's most undervalued leadership trait? asks John Ortberg. It's prudence.

Ortberg writes: Allen Guelzo has written a wonderful book on Abraham Lincoln, and he devotes an entire chapter to the role prudence played in the life of the man who was arguably the most influential leader in the history of America. Guelzo notes that 2,000 years ago prudence was considered one of the greatest of virtues; a hundred years ago it was part of moral philosophy; today it is the punchline of a joke.

Prudence, says Guelzo, was prized by the ancients because it was linked to shrewdness, to excellence in judgment, to the capacity to discern, to the ability to take in a situation and see it in its wholeness. Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

Prudence is what makes someone a great commodities trader—the capacity to face reality squarely in the eye without allowing emotion or ego to get in the way. It's what is needed by every quarterback or battlefield general. Thomas Aquinas said it was intelligence about "things to be done."

Leadership by Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book in 2005 called Team of Rivals: the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, which was about the leadership lessons to be learned from Lincoln’s administration. One of the intriguing things Lincoln showed was his willingness to embrace the concept of a leadership team composed of men who were not only diverse in their views, but were his personal rivals as well. (In the last episodes of the last season of The West Wing, we see the incoming President doing the same sort of thing, particularly in relation to asking his Republican opponent to take on the role of Secretary of State.)
Jeff Knowles writes in Leadership online: Goodwin's thesis that great leadership neither punishes nor ignores ideological foes, but rather embraces them, has important implications for our increasingly large and complex church governmental structures. The danger of group-think is ever present in congregations where dissent is seen only as a problem. Church leaders often extol the virtues of 90 percent congregational confirmation votes for the new building program or the new minister, or the elders' "unanimous agreement" that the church needs to take a certain action. But we forget that many of God's commands in Scripture required leaders to go against the tides of popular opinion. If Abraham Lincoln could use the power of diverse opinions and contrary egos to save the nation, then we ought to look more closely at the benefits of dissenting opinions in our churches as well.