Good Leaders Have a Limp

It wasn’t too long ago that I experienced, “Steve and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” Maybe you’re familiar with the classic children’s book or the 2014 Disney film. And I know familiar with a bad day.

I was just off my game this day. Work-wise and simply as a human. I was up early for a Zoom call with another time zone and from the beginning, I was a version of myself I wasn’t proud of. I was irritable, I was short. All day I wasn’t an encouraging leader, a hopeful follower, a wise business partner. We had the grandkids over for dinner, and I was so grumpy, I wouldn’t have been shocked if my wife had told me to go to my room before dessert.

Some of the bad day was obviously my fault and some of it was stuff that happened to me, but I didn’t handle any of it well.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I had an all-night wrestling match with God. A lot of “You should have’s” and “Why did I’s?”

Here was the nucleus of the wrestling match: What control do I have? I wanted things to go a certain way in my day—in my work, in my family, in my friendships. But I couldn’t get things to line up right. And when I couldn’t, I spiraled down and everybody around me knew it.

It was a day of “God, I’m gonna clench my fist around my plan for my day” because I know how things should go. I’d forgotten the two “hard and incontrovertible facts” of the priest in Rudy.

I’m not the first person to wrestle with like this. There’s a story in the book of Genesis where the patriarch Jacob is confronted by “a Mysterious Man,” and the two wrestle for hours. Toward the end of the night, the God-man touches Jacob’s hip, and Jacob is defeated. The God-man blesses Jacob, leaves him, and from that day on, Jacob has a limp.

Up until this point, Jacob has always found a way to come out on top. But now he has come up against an opponent he cannot beat. Jacob is broken.

But here’s the twist--he is better because of being beaten.

While I’m not proud of how I acted on my bad day, what if the wrestling could have positive impact on me, too? What if the bad days and the limps of leaders shape us in the best ways?

What is a limp?

In three decades of coaching CEO’s, I’ve spent time with a lot of people who, like Jacob, keep coming out on top. But constantly winning can position our confidence and certainty on the wrong person.

However, I have noticed another trait among the most remarkable leaders I have met. They carry a limp. 

What’s a limp? It’s a scar that comes from getting in the ring with God. A limp is the spiritual, emotional, mental, and even physical (at times) recognition that we are not the supreme agent of life. The faster I can learn that I don’t know all, can’t do all, and am not completely the person I need to be…the better. Have you gone through a moment or a season where you realized, as Jacob did, that you do not have the amount of control that you thought you did? I’ve learned it but seem to keep forgetting (case in point, my recent bad day).

Who has the right to rule?

Wrestling with God

Perhaps you, too, spent years winning at everything in life and then, all of a sudden, it was gone.

Maybe, as I did a couple years ago, you suffered an illness that threw your mortality in your face. Or the corporate strategy you spent months designing flopped. The corner office you spent years angling for was given to someone else. You didn’t make the team after working harder than anyone else. Your marriage or your kids didn’t turn out the way you planned. In other words, something broke the “up and to the right” momentum.

As for Jacob, he was having conflict with his brother, but as Ligon Duncan, a Mississippi pastor said, “The real battle was between God and Jacob. Esau was a sideshow. Esau was an occasion. Esau was a circumstance.” (You can read Duncan’s whole sermon on the passage here.)

When the issue is who has the right to rule, it’s always a wrestling match going up against the Almighty. A limp comes when you battle God, and God decides to win.

And that’s a good thing.

Why do we need a limp?

Two things are trickle-down realties of a limp: Humanity and Humility. These two things are inextricably tied, and bad things happen when we lose a grip on either one.

We all can picture people who have lost touch with their humanity, people who act as if they are superhuman. Athletes, movie stars, preachers, business owners, and CEOs come to mind. Well, actually it is more of a mindset rather than a vocational address … and it could happen to any one of us. It can happen to anybody whose life experience has taught them that the rules don’t apply to them. It can happen to people with high authority and low vulnerability, as my friend Andy Crouch says in Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power.

The second by-product of a limp is humility. You can always spot it in people who have wrestled with God and lost.

This wrestling is a good thing because until we wrestle with God, we don’t have to face our humanity. There is no substitute for wrestling with God. Like a wild horse that must be broken before it destroys itself, we must go through the experience of being broken.

“Brokenness” sounds bad, as if something is wrong with us. But what if brokenness is a good thing? The Bible, after all, continually talks about brokenness and weakness being the places where God shines through.

As John Calvin wrote, “Only those who have learned well to be earnestly dissatisfied with themselves … truly understand the Christian Gospel.”

Brokenness for Jacob brought about a new name (Israel) and a reminder for the rest of his life of God’s power over his own—a limp.

The greatest leaders I know have a limp. They have found their humanity and they walk in humility. It might be defeat, disappointment, or any number of things that reframes who has the right to rule.

No humans are immune from bad days. We’re gonna stub our toes and wince. Or limp. These aren’t Damascus Road experiences where we become totally new people, but they are another round in the ring. What do you do when that happens? Let me suggest that you view these days and moments as chances to remember our limits and invitations to embrace our limps. Will you join me?