In his excellent book Lead Like It Matters to God: Values-Driven Leadership in a Success-Driven World, a book I feel should be required reading for Christian leaders, former World Vision President Richard Stearns writes that he believes that God is far more concerned about how a leader leads than he is about the success that leader delivers. The book is about why he believes the values Christian leaders embrace are more important than the success they achieve. He tells us that while our culture rewards success, God’s bottom line is faithfulness.
In the book, Stearns writes about seventeen values and leadership qualities that he believes are essential for a Christian leader to embody: surrender, sacrifice, trust, love, excellence, humility, integrity, vision, courage, generosity, perseverance, forgiveness, self-awareness, balance, humor, encouragement, and listening.
He believes that leaders who embrace these characteristics will lift not only their own performance but also the performance of their teams. Stearns writes with authority, having been a successful CEO at Parker Brothers and then Lenox, before being called to World Vision.

In the organization that I spent my entire career, leaders were evaluated on both the results they achieved, and how they demonstrated competencies, which are similar, but not necessarily the same as values. Although performance evaluation systems would change over my career, at the end, we would be given a numerical rating (1-3) for each, with results being weighed more heavily when it came to our overall compensation award.
I often write about the attributes of a leader, some of which (vision, listening, and integrity) are the same as the values that Stearns writes about. Stearns tells us that God is looking for leaders who will submit to his leading and trust him for the outcomes.
I enjoyed Stearns book so much because I resonated with his thesis that it is the values Christian leaders embrace that are more important than the success they achieve. He is writing about servant leaders.
There is no doubt that a leader needs to achieve results. If they don’t, they will be replaced. But we have all probably worked with leaders who have achieved great results at the expense of their team members. They may be promoted and promoted, but nobody really wants to be on their teams and they will have a reputation as being a self-serving leader. How much better to work for a servant leader who embraces the values that Stearns writes about.  Ken Blanchard, in the book Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results, writes that servant leadership is the only way to guarantee great relationships and results.
What is your experience with working with self-serving leaders and servant leaders who demonstrate values-driven leadership?

This is an Adapted Excerpt From My Book “A LEADER WORTH FOLLOWING:
40 Key Leadership Attributes and Applications to Master”.