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Great Leaders: Thankful for the Virtues of Seven Women

Great Leaders: Thankful for the Virtues of Seven Women

Last updated on: November 24, 2015 at 4:09 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Great Leaders: Thankful for the Virtues of Seven Women 2015-11-24T16:09:48-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Leadership as an act of service.

We need leaders. Talent we can find, but good leaders have talent with character. I have been blessed to be surrounded at all points in my career and education with leaders, listing seven men was difficult enough, but choosing seven women was nearly impossible. Having a mother and a wife who lead made this list gets me to nine without trying. So here are seven with two.

Nancy Balentine is prudent.

There is no virtue less in favor just now than prudence and none we need more.

Prudence combined with moderation is the ultimate mark of a civilized person. The narcissism of a bad leader will destroy an organization, but forcing everyone to follow his or her plan until failure is the only option. Yet there is also the rash leader who will change directions or plans out of sheer boredom. If it is broke, this kind of leader will decide to “fix” it.

Miss B (as those of us lucky enough to be her English students discovered) would have none of this folly. She taught us that there were rules and we were to master them and then be creative. She helped me learn to color in the lines of writing and only then try the bolder move. She valued excellence, but balanced a respect for rules, the glue that holds a classroom together, with a willingness to let the crazy kids (!) do our weird thing.

How great is that?

Karen Brown was creative.

A bad leader imitates what has been and throws money at a problem to solve it. A great leader is creative . . . and can make something out of nothing. Karen Brown could find a way to direct a play, make a music group, or get all of us to have fun under “Think!” she said, any circumstance whatsoever.

There is never a moment when I write or direct a play when I am not using what my Aunt Karen taught me. With Uncle Roddy she was outrageously fun, but not in conventional ways. If you went to her house, she might convince Rob, Daniel, and me that we had discovered a treasure map on the bottom of a drawer. Or she would set up microphones and get us to record “radio” programs where I was Announcer John. We would ad lib for hours.

She could make a party out of nothing but her desire and we followed her . . . all of us. This much I know: she is ahead of me getting something really fantastic ready in Paradise.

Deborah Modrak is rigorous.

Professor Modrak had the patience to supervise a dissertation on Plato’s view of the human soul over the years it took me to write it. I have known many people now whose dissertations will never be done because they worked with fools, cads, or bad scholars. Dr. Modrak was wise, rigorous, and compassionate.

It was the rigor, however, I most admired, the absolute clarity of thought. I would jump from P to Q without filling in the steps and she would force me to clarify, argue, and check the text. Once she crossed out pages of work with this very precise comment: Avoid flowery Platonisms.

I have not been able to do so at all times, Dr. Modrak, but if I do then you were the leader who modeled running a department, teaching, and keeping rigor alive. My views are not your fault, but any rigor I have is partly due to you. I am thankful and will keep examining my premises!

Cassandra Van Zandt is insightful.

When you are a department chair, you pray for a good dean. At Biola University, I only had good deans (Shanebeck in particular), but nobody modeled being a dean better than Dr. Van Zandt. She was new to the role at the time and would listen to those of us on her team, but never lost strength.

She listened, would gather all our opinions, and form a consensus around an idea. Many leaders are willing to make the hard call, she certainly was, but she was also willing to consider not making the hard call. She would wait for consensus if she had time and get the right insight and then act.

If a leader doesn’t have this kind of insight, he or she better hire someone who has it and listen.

Nancy Pearcey is strategic.

Imagine getting to work with someone who thinks five moves ahead. Bad leaders react as opponents expect, Nancy Pearcey considers new options because she will amalgamate knowledge from scores of different sources to produce something new.

Pearcey can connect seemingly unrelated topics and show the rest of us how they fit together. This is vital to any organization that wants to flourish. Why? Strategic thinking does not lock up by considering too much data and yet strategic thinking does not ignore the right data. Colleges, in particular, often move at glacial speeds because we get information overload. What to do? We end up doing what is safe as higher education changes around us or simply trying whatever some smooth talking sales person suggests.

Nancy Pearcey has led an apologetics revival precisely because she reads enough to make sound guesses (all we ever get), but not so much that the footnotes swallow up the page.

Find a Nancy Pearcey or become like her.

Doris Warren has patience.

Every organization needs the patient person who knows people and plans come and go, but the core mission remains. Professor Warren has educated generations of pre-med students by being patient. She knows what she is doing as a pioneer woman in Texas chemistry and higher education for decades. She rejects faddishness and would always look at me urging us “to keep the standards high.”

If we blew it, and she has seen many an error, Dr. Warren would give her opinion, you always knew what she thought, but then try to make the new situation work. She knew bad ideas would pass and teaching students mathematics and science would endure.

A great leader is patient. This doesn’t mean slow, but it does mean steady. When Warren sprints, and she can get things done quickly, it is the same direction she has been headed since the 1960’s: excellence in higher education.

Find some patience if you want to be a great leader.

Cate MacDonald Gilbert is a visionary.

A great leader can start a program out of nothing because she knows what she wants. She has hopes and uses her reason to gain faith in her dream and then by faith makes her dream reality.

Many people hope, but never think and so they fail.

Many people think, have faith in their vision, but never act.

Cate MacDonald Gilbert will do all three. She started the Academy with just a dimly sketched out dream from her up-line. She did her due diligence, developed a plan, and then made it work. She now is creating a entirely new five day a week school with dual enrollment at The Saint Constantine School.

She did not even have a trash can or an office at the start!

Megan Mueller has practical wisdom.

A good leader knows the right time to fight and the right time to retreat. If there is a season for everything, the successful leader can tell the times and seasons to a turn. They put up the Christmas decorations neither early or late and they take them down just before one would tire of them.

In critical decisions, the timely leader will win. Megan Mueller knows when to strike, but also will advise her team to slow down. JK Rowling invented four houses for her scho0l for wizards, Hogwarts, and is clear that all the houses have something to contribute for good. One house, Slytherin, became dominated by bad people to the great loss of the wizarding world. The cleverness of the man or woman with practical wisdom was lost . . . the good leader will develop the ability to be as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove.

This can go bad, but in a leader like Mueller doesn’t.

Hope Elizabeth Reynolds serves.

The leadership of service is too often ignored. The great leader will put away the folding chairs after the meeting. My wife has the ability to do the work to make the event go and then lead the event. She has created bands and reading groups, but she also does the dirty work needed to make sure those organizations function.

Hope is not loud, she is just correct when she speaks. People learn from her by watching her do things well and so she leads them to excellence. Foolish loud folks, people like I am, think of this as a “Beta” leader and discount the strength of the Martha.

It is true that Martha might miss good things by becoming too busy, but never forget that it was Martha who stopped crying long enough to go out to Jesus, confess His deity with more clarity than Peter, and make sure her brother was raised from the dead.

Martha isn’t the life of the party, but she makes sure the party can live.

We all need to cultivate virtues of Martha while having the sensitivity of Mary.

Ann Kathryn Reynolds is dialectical.

A bad leader will take the first answer and never get to the bottom of the problem. A good leader will poke about for a better answer, but a great leader will think until she knows the truth.

My mother, Ann Kathryn Reynolds, hates giving up on the argument. As a little boy, she would not let me tell a half truth, she wanted to know what was really happening in my life. She was not cruel, but she was relentless for the truth. She wanted us to think . . . so she would challenge even our conventional ideas. What other Mom spends a Saturday making her son defend his intellectually lazy support for the North in the Civil War?

She agreed with my conclusion, but she wanted me to defend it. She made discussion fun because she participated. When we started tearing into an idea, it was so we could know the truth, not just for the sake of talking. If the first person who loves the truth in your life also is loving, nothing is better.

“Think!” she said.

A good leader lovingly goes to the bottom of an issue.

I want to do as these women do, follow their example in prudence, creativity, intellectual rigor, insight, patience, vision, service, and the dialectic. God help me be a good leader.

______

When I tried to pick seven exemplary men and women, I got worried. I have known too many people for whom I am thankful. Why not Uncle Bob Combs? Or Julie Walker and her leadership in home education? There is Fount Shults who was the first great model of a professor, teacher, mentor in my college life. In my career, I worked with outstanding leaders at Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University in both my downline and upline. Some of the best faculty and deans in the world work at Houston Baptist University. Think of the Shield maid of Rohan, Professor Ordway, the Rock star of Reason Mary Jo Sharp… I can’t stop, but I must.

But then…

Al Geier, Socrates for our age, is the greatest discussion leader now living and knows more of Plato than I will ever know. And now I have not mentioned Steve Dement, a great soccer coach, or Brian Larkin and his church history class, or Randy and Kate Gremillion and choirs . . . my teacher . . . I should name them all . . . Thanks be to God, but I have been surrounded with a great many wonderful people!

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