7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership: Overcome Self-Defeating Behavior in Work and Ministry

By Kate Coleman and Elaine Storkey

Unleash your leadership by identifying and overcoming the limitations you place on yourself in the workplace.

Women are called by God to flourish in areas of leadership. And for the first time in modern history, women are making their way into strategic positions of influence and leadership within the ministry, public, corporate, charity and voluntary sectors.

Certainly, there are still external disadvantages that women leaders face in the professional world, and there's still a lot of work to do. But there are internal hinderances, too, and those you can take charge of today.

In 7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership, Kate Coleman considers what lies at the root of the many challenges facing today's leaders—women and men—and proposes ways of dealing with them. Effective leadership starts with you. Based on her 35 years of leadership experience, Kate explains how you can:

• Overcome limiting self-perceptions
• Establish boundaries
• Develop a tailor-made personal vision
• Cultivate a healthy work/life rhythm
• Stop being a people-pleaser
• Learn to confront not collude
• Be intentional with your inner circle

Written for every leader from any sector or gender (men could learn a few things from this book too), this proven and practical guidebook will enable you to identify and overcome self-defeating patterns of behavior, in ways that will radically transform your leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9780310119982

Kate Coleman

Rev. Dr. Kate Coleman is the founding director of Next Leadership. She has 35 years of leadership experience in the church, charity, voluntary, and business sectors, and is a mentor and coach to leaders from diverse sectors, backgrounds, and communities.  Kate was the first black woman Baptist minister in the UK and has been recognized as one of the 20 most influential black Christian women leaders in the country. A popular speaker and lecturer, Kate has gained a reputation as a pioneer, visionary, and an inspiration to many. She now serves as a strategic advisor who mentors, coached, and supports leaders and organizations locally, nationally in the UK, and internationally around the globe with a network extending across all sectors and church denominations. Her contributions have been featured in the mainstream press, radio,and TV. She is a Certified Stakeholder Centered Coach and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the many wonderful women and men in my life, without whom this project would not have been completed.

I am particularly grateful for the insistent and persistent encouragement of my friend and colleague Reverend Cham Kaur-Mann (your surname may look different but it certainly sounds the same as mine!): I count you among my own sisters. Thanks for your commitment to staying up late, talking over and painstakingly reading through my notes (again!): you definitely went way beyond the second mile. I am extremely grateful to Elaine Storkey, who has mentored me through some very sticky moments in my own leadership journey. Thanks, Elaine, for your effort to get the book out of my head and into print by subtly encouraging me to avoid getting knocked over by a bus!

Thank you seems an inadequate way of acknowledging the support of all those who enabled the first project to get off the ground, including my sister Grace Owen who was both a wonderful cheerleader and an awesome coach. There are many others I should thank, including my amazing prayer partners, many of whom regularly cheered me on throughout the major upheavals surrounding the second project, especially Kay and John Chaldecott who kept on reminding me to just get on with it! Unfortunately, I can’t mention you all by name without writing yet another chapter! The same could be said of the many women I have mentored in both the past and the present, together with the many women participants of the 7 Deadly Sins programme and its younger sibling, She Rises, all over the world. Having said how inadequate it sounds, thank you. Many of your stories are represented in these pages. May God continue to take you from strength to strength! And nearly last (but certainly not least!) I want to thank those who have facilitated this second project, especially Katya Covrett and the team at Zondervan who, thankfully, recognised a good thing when they saw it! It has been a privilege.

It all begins and ends, as we say in Ghana, Gye Nyame, Except God.*

Notes

* The Gye Nyame is a popular symbol in West Africa that conveys God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence together with the belief that no one has ever seen the beginning and the end except God.

Foreword

A book about seven deadly sins might normally raise anxiety levels! Sin is a serious issue and deadly sin is the most serious of all. Most of the time we think of sin as something personal, degenerate, willful, and deliberate. It is something most of us steer away from and try to avoid. Christians understand sin in relation to God and our violation of God’s standards for human life. And when we feel the impact of other people’s sin, it can affect our trust of them, our own self-confidence, and even our sense of identity.

But in everyday life, sin is more complicated even than all that. It can be passive, unwitting, or habitual. It can be something of which we are wholly unaware, part of a mindset we’ve inherited. In its most pervasive form, sin can be built into the very structural background of our lives and become so normalized that we don’t even notice it is there.

The sins Kate Coleman refers to in this tongue-in-cheek title are something like the last description. She is not offering a diatribe of offences against God for which we deserve punishment. Nor is she launching out on a catalogue of our moral ineptitudes to make us feel wretched. Her aim is altogether more positive. She wants to free us from the things that hold us back, encourage our self-awareness before God, and help us to let go of destructive attitudes. The seven deadly sins she identifies are common to many of us. But her message is that they can be overcome and that we can be released to pursue the vision and talents we’ve been given for effective leadership.

The focus on women in leadership is very timely. Even in these days when women have metaphorically smashed through glass ceilings and been appointed to key influential positions in American society, there are battles still to be won. We have seen that only too well over the last few years. The #MeToo movement has raised much greater awareness of the wrongs committed with impunity against women and made their progress difficult. Yet some of the battles we face are not against the limitations imposed by society or culture, or even other people. They are internal battles, struggles against false perceptions that we women can have of ourselves, failure to acknowledge just what we are capable of, or unwillingness to put ourselves forward to take the lead. Kate’s message is that we don’t have to allow these limiting attitudes to thwart our vision. We can move beyond both cultural limitations and self-doubt to embrace the vision and strategies that make a difference. We can be women who lead well and occupy roles desperately needed in our world today.

This book invites us to reflect on those limiting attitudes, blind alleys, and conventional patterns of behaviour that hold us up from serving God better and more faithfully. Kate prompts us skillfully in this. As you read her analysis of self-defeating standpoints, you might be surprised to find that you have taken some of these attitudes for granted for years, without ever challenging them. You might even find that you are one of the victims of subconscious paralysis which Kate identifies as common amongst women on their journey to leadership! There can be no better time than now to claim the victory over these defeats and move on.

Kate Coleman knows and understands leadership. She has been a pioneer in many areas—in church ministry, education, communication, administration, and mentoring. Her outreach is vast, both national and international, for her work is as relevant in Africa and Asia as it is in North America or Europe. She has experienced leadership at the sharp end, including its struggles, and has so much to share with us. Every chapter in the book speaks from her experience. Every illustration is soaked in biblical insight. Kate’s deep faith as a Christian woman who knows God’s leading enables us all as we read.

The stereotype of the rugged, decisive, opinionated, alpha-male leader is still very prominent in American consciousness. But women in leadership do not have to mimic men in leadership. With our own voices, gifts, insights, and discernment, we can make a distinctive and authentic contribution as women. Once we have identified the things that hold us back, we become free to move forward in confidence and trust. We are not competitors but can work together in unity and difference, seeking the common good and following the vision God gives us to reach and enable others. In the era in which we live, leadership that is faith-filled, compassionate, sensitive, and authoritative is absolutely vital.

Kate invites us to reflect, pray, stretch up, reach out, and move on. If you want to be the effective leader God is calling you to be, you have found the right resource. This book will encourage and help you enormously.

ELAINE STORKEY, author

of Scars across Humanity and

Women in a Patriarchal World

Introduction My Journey into Leadership

I blinked again, struggling to understand the implications of what I was reading. Here I was, staying in a flat in what could only be described as the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. I had arrived on retreat two weeks earlier and still had another week to go. I had come here in response to a deep sense of conviction that God would clarify my life’s calling and work. Some friends thought I was crazy, and I must admit I was beginning to wonder about this myself.

For the past few days I had been reading the Bible, allowing myself to be led by the Spirit, and so far every verse I had looked up related to leadership. Many of the passages were unfamiliar to me, as I had been a Christian for only three years. There had also been a number of incidents and compelling coincidences that all seemed to point me to one inescapable conclusion: God was calling me to leadership! That was not as simple as it sounds. There were two problems: first, my church was totally opposed to placing women in leadership roles; second, so was I!

In one sense, very little has changed since I prepared the first manuscript for this book over a decade or so ago, and in reality, many of the ongoing challenges women face in leadership are consistent with the original insights and themes outlined in this book. Yet at the same time, everything has changed. For example, many more books have been written for and about women in leadership, including Christian leadership.¹ Multiple leadership courses and programmes designed with women in mind have sprung up within virtually every sector and major educational establishment worldwide; some are even available online at the click of a button. Similarly, within the same period, many churches all over the world have embarked on some form of training within their church communities for women entrusted with ministry responsibility. The ability of women to support and peer mentor or coach one another (even across wide distances) has similarly been greatly advanced by social media, leading to global exponential growth in women’s networks and support groups. There is also a greater awareness of the sheer magnitude of the task ahead, as many of the previously obscured roadblocks to the normalisation of women’s leadership lie exposed. This is largely due to the groundbreaking research and thought leadership of books such as Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez and Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World by Carolyn Custis James. In addition to all this, a number of seismic events have taken place that have influenced not only our understanding of women’s leadership but also its likely progress and potential trajectory. These include the impact and implications of movements such as #MeToo and #ChurchToo, insights gleaned from initiatives such as A Day without Women, and the push toward the globalisation of women’s empowerment popularised by books, including Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. Then there is the (clearly unexpected, in certain quarters) success of countries led by women in overcoming one of the greatest threats of the twenty-first century, the coronavirus pandemic. All these factors, together with a need to highlight some new thinking while revising some fading facts, have led to this updated edition.

Although I now mentor men and women leaders from across the public, private, charity, and church sectors, my own leadership journey emerged from within the context of local and national church life in the United Kingdom. The church environment poses distinctive challenges for all leaders, particularly women, and therefore generates some unique insights. Historically, perceptions of women in the workplace, at least in the Western world, have frequently emerged from unhelpful views promoted by the church. These have often been at variance with Jesus’s disposition and behaviour toward women. If we advocate Jesus as the supreme model for leadership in every sphere, church leaders are better placed to offer insights on leadership discussions beyond the borders of the church. Unfortunately, we have regularly compartmentalised biblical leadership principles and values in ways that have been wholly unhelpful to the rest of society. It is my desire to contribute to the process of dismantling this unhealthy divide, particularly at a time when there is an obvious need for greater integrity and ethically based leadership prepared to act beyond its own self-interest. Such leadership is intentionally oriented toward the greater good of all sectors and institutions everywhere and aims to benefit the present era and beyond.

Leadership in every field is tough. Within the church, leaders seek to motivate a predominantly volunteer force, who frequently view church involvement as a mere leisure pursuit. It is also a context where people frequently and liberally project and transfer painful emotional baggage in ways seldom replicated within paid working environments. Therefore, leadership success within church life relies almost entirely upon goodwill and the skilful (not to mention prayerful!) exercise of influence.

During my early years of ministry, I learned principles of good leadership largely by observing poor leaders! Please don’t misunderstand me; I was privileged to interact with some great leaders, but I also witnessed some spectacularly unhelpful ones. Consequently, I learned from the good, the bad, and the ugly. However, those who remain indelibly etched in my memory were frequently insecure, fearful, or characterised by unresolved personal issues. These leaders were the ones I determined never to emulate.

I began my leadership journey in the early 1980s. It was a time, in some church circles, when the language of leadership was rarely in use and questions regarding the ministry and leadership of women created even greater levels of tension and anxiety than they do today. Outrageous behaviour was justified and significant ministries discounted on the basis of what sometimes masqueraded as doctrinal conviction but more often resembled cultural captivity, personal preference, or plain bad manners! As a result of this miseducation, many of the unhelpful (and helpful) leadership examples I encountered were from men.

But I intuitively knew there were lessons about leadership only other women could teach me; however, I was unable to articulate these thoughts at the time. For example, I now notice divergences between male and female preachers, particularly in relation to the things each note from the Bible, the illustrations each share from the pulpit, and the emphases each place on specific issues. I find both perspectives unique yet equally powerful. Liz Shercliff underlines that such distinctives are to be expected considering that the whole person (gender included) is present within their sermons. However, it has taken me many years to appreciate what she so very helpfully observes (and which has far wider implications than preaching alone): It isn’t so much that God is going to give us something to say, it’s that God has been forming us to say it.²

Although women leaders were in short supply in my early days, I intentionally sought them out whenever I could. I am profoundly grateful to God for the privilege of meeting so many extraordinary women leaders along the way. I am fully aware that in a world in which different treatment for women seldom means equal treatment, this small group of women helped to ease the challenges of my journey into leadership. I wish to honour and thank them for mentoring me, often unknowingly and from a distance. It is my conviction that the leadership and ministry of women have much to teach us all.

The formation of leaders is not a momentary encounter but an ongoing process of reflection, development, and execution. Liz Shercliff’s earlier comment is a reminder of how an active engagement in God’s process of formation contributes to the ultimate success of leadership development.³ My earliest days taught me the value of learning from the experience, wisdom, and insight of others. The stories shared within the pages of this book reflect many of the leadership challenges we face, particularly as women. This book aims to express all that is unique and wonderful about women’s leadership, while also seeking to identify areas that may be problematic and in need of scrutiny.

There is increasing recognition that men and women bring different gifts to leadership and that both experience significant leadership challenges. Yet while men have been working on their leadership downsides for decades through participation in conferences, mentoring, exposure to role models, and relevant reading, women are still relative newcomers in this arena. Thankfully, significant traction has been gained in recent years, and attention has been increasingly drawn to the many unique leadership challenges women face.

Empowering Women Leaders to Excel

This book is committed to the task of empowering women already exercising leadership within the church, community, and marketplace to recognise and understand what may be unique about their leadership. It is primarily dedicated to promoting leadership development wherever women happen to serve as leaders. It also seeks to enable those who are training for leadership roles to lead skillfully and provide valuable insights together with a framework for those who train and mentor these leaders. These women inhabit every arena of leadership. They may include CEOs, directors, line managers, middle managers, and women running businesses alone or in partnership with others. Women leaders who serve within the church may be responsible for some area of ministry such as evangelism, pastoral care, or children’s or youth work. They are sole leaders or part of leadership teams accountable for small groups, missions, and churches. These women sit on boards or work with committees in large, medium, and small organisations and churches. They are all women of influence but sometimes fail to recognise their significance.

Recognition is important. Sometimes only the prospect of a world without women enables a wider appreciation of the significance and impact of women’s gifts (even by women themselves). A world without women is neither desirable nor possible, but that is not to say that a snapshot cannot give us a glimpse of what that would look like. Unsurprisingly, such attempts to magnify and amplify the importance of women’s gifts and contributions have indeed been tried and coined by some as A Day without a Woman. On March 8, 2017, International Women’s Day, women in more than fifty countries and four hundred cities worldwide participated in such a day by refraining from paid or unpaid work, shopping in stores or online except for local small businesses and women-owned companies, and inviting women (and men) in minimum-wage jobs (unable to take time off) to demonstrate solidarity by wearing red.⁴ Reports suggested that crowds committed to the cause, sometimes in excess of 2 million gathered in US cities alone. This has become an annual fixture for some. However, none have been as successful as Women’s Day Off, which took place on October 24, 1975, when 90 percent of Icelandic women participated. Kirstie Brewer writes, They refused to work, cook and look after children for a day. It was a moment that changed the way women were seen in the country and helped put Iceland at the forefront of the fight for equality.⁵ Single mother Vigdis Finnbogadottir became Iceland’s first female president five years later and said of the day, So many companies and institutions came to a halt and it showed the force and necessity of women—it completely changed the way of thinking.⁶

Part of the task of this book is to enable women in particular to change our way of thinking and to recognise and appreciate the value and purpose of God’s investment in and through us. As with A Day without a Woman, the significance of our leadership in both global and local contexts is often revealed by what fails to happen when we are absent.

Consequently, I want to encourage all women to affirm what is good about their leadership, while also addressing what is potentially destructive. I aim to identify solutions to behaviours, rehearsed knowingly and unknowingly, that effectively sabotage women’s leadership and may even undermine our best intentions!

I have identified at least three major challenges that continue to face all proponents of women in leadership. The first is education (or perhaps more accurately re-education). This involves the task of revisiting what we think we know concerning the contributions of women leaders to both biblical and Christian traditions, as well as social and global advancement. The second major challenge is empowerment. Here the concern is related to how we might actively inspire, equip, and train women who already hold strategic positions of leadership within churches, communities, or the marketplace. The final challenge is related to the task of encouragement, particularly of emerging leaders who may not have been introduced to or even considered the role of leadership.

Elements of this book will address all three concerns. However, I do not intend to present extensive theological arguments that advocate for women in leadership (although I make specific references when appropriate). Others have more than adequately addressed the debate on women’s leadership in church and society.⁷ Instead, I assume the normality of women’s leadership for the sake of those women already engaged in leadership roles! Rather than being concerned with the issue of whether women’s ways are innate or environmental, my interest lies in the fact that these ways are often identified with women. Some of these characteristics possess a potentially destructive shadow side that frequently goes unrecognised by the women in question.

Researchers and writers on the subject of leadership agree that the hidden internal and personal factors pose the greatest dangers to leadership. If indeed self-knowledge is vital to effective performance as a leader,⁸ it becomes imperative to identify and address these negative factors. Christian leadership trainer Jeanne Porter King writes, An essential ingredient of leadership success is the capacity to assess your own strengths and areas that need development—and make changes to your course when called for.⁹

Many men will also benefit from the leadership advice provided within these pages, in addition to gaining insights into the challenges experienced by the women leaders around them. After all, principles surrounding leadership are of value to both men and women. While some women leaders exhibit more traditionally masculine traits, some men will discover that they display more traditionally feminine leadership traits. As a result, some men will find the discussions surrounding deadly sins far more applicable to their own experiences than some women do.

This book does not assume that the nature versus nurture debate has been exhausted, as scholars remain undecided on the question of whether we are primarily products of our parental DNA or our environment and upbringing.¹⁰ Neither does this book assume that views on women’s roles are no longer contentious, particularly within church contexts. However, I do not intend to specifically focus on either of these areas. Although these questions are important, the main priority for women already engaged in leadership roles is the practice of leadership itself. For women working within particularly challenging circumstances, survival is also a necessity!

My early experience of church leadership was energising yet exhausting, instinctive yet challenging, profound yet lonely, exhilarating yet depressing. Almost every week, I vowed to resign on the grounds of personal mistakes, disappointments, discouragement, intense spiritual attack,¹¹ opposition, and resistance. All were compounded by overt expressions of sexism and racism.

Although I consistently received support and input from some remarkable men and women, as a woman in leadership—a single black woman, no less—I often felt that I was clearing a path through challenging terrain, without a map or compass. Quite frankly, it was just as well I had faith! And even though at the time, I had over five years of theological training, what I’d been taught still didn’t make sense of my actual experiences or my personal challenges. My confusion about leadership continued.

Leadership Development: The Necessary Key

This was Lisa’s first experience of participating in a Christian leadership development programme specifically designed for women, and she was glad she had come. But some of her friends at church had been sceptical about the event until they noticed changes in her attitude and disposition. Someone even commented on Lisa’s increasing display of confidence in her work and ministry. Her contributions were more considered and focused. Lisa began to feel and behave like a valuable member of the team. In fact, many were preoccupied with the concern that she would seek to explore more attractive ministry opportunities elsewhere now that she was flourishing. Thank God for leadership development, she thought.

The idea of leadership is becoming increasingly important in society. Yet in some contexts, it is still viewed as another new concept, initiative, or bandwagon, threatening to place additional demands on already limited time and emotional resources. From a biblical perspective, the notion of leadership goes back as far as the creation of humanity (if not even further to the creator God), with the mandate to rule or steward the earth’s animate and inanimate resources. In this sense, leadership is a gift from God, delegated by him, and has its origins in the triune Creator who synergistically worked within himself to bring about the creation of the world. While it is true that the term leadership itself is not found within the pages of the Bible, it is everywhere alluded to and assumed. Writer Steven Croft reminds us that the Judeo-Christian tradition provides the longest continuous source of reflection on questions of leadership in the whole of human history.¹² However, whether we want to get on or get off the leadership bandwagon, we cannot ignore the profound impact that leadership currently has on all our lives, for better or for worse.

Increasing expectation and pressure are on those in positions of influence to accomplish more with significantly fewer resources. These leaders are also expected to adapt to rapidly changing environments and to navigate their way through a wide variety of situations with relative ease. All of this requires a certain degree of equipping. Subsequently, governments, corporations, educationalists, and some churches rightly endorse the significance and importance of leadership. Public and private sectors invest time and hundreds of thousands in hard currency to provide leadership training programmes in an effort to maximise the productivity of their employees and to ensure their competitive advantage in the marketplace. Meanwhile, charitable and church agencies invest in the hope of making their leaders more effective. Therefore, any attempt to avoid the subject of leadership unwittingly promotes poor leadership.

We must know who we are, whom we are following, and where we are going if we wish to make a positive impact.

While such training is vital, Christians must attend to another essential matter. Just as every leader needs to be equipped to get things done, keep things going, organise well, and help others in the process, we must simultaneously integrate who we are as spiritual beings into every aspect of our daily lives and work. In short, we must know who we are, whom we are following, and where we are going if we wish to make a positive impact on the people we are privileged to influence and lead. Unfortunately, none of this happens by accident. Leadership mentor Reggie McNeal confirms this in his book Practicing Greatness: Great leaders don’t just appear, they are crafted over time. They practice being great. Extraordinary character and exceptional competence develop over time. Leaders must make countless good choices and right calls to fashion greatness.¹³ Therefore, as intimated earlier, men and women must become responsible for intentionally cultivating and developing their personal leadership. Unfortunately, this is not quite as straightforward as it sounds.

Although the role of women and men in leadership is identical, that is, to lead, leadership experts are increasingly identifying both masculine and feminine facets to leadership. Ironically, some types of leadership development, training, literature, advice, and conferences are largely, albeit often unconsciously, tailored by men (and sometimes women) for men. While all leadership advice should be welcomed, attempts at so-called generic training may fail to meet the specific needs of women leaders. This is also true when leadership development focuses on fixing women to fit into masculine, often hostile work and ministry environments or on empowering women to lead more like men. Attention should instead be focused on equipping us to contextualise and navigate the unique gendered biases and negativity we inevitably encounter. Thankfully, approaches seeking to release women into more authentic expressions of leadership are increasing. Quite frankly, they are well overdue.¹⁴

The Changing Face of Leadership

Wendy climbed into her car and let out an audible sigh of relief. The final interview was over. She had been offered the post and she gladly accepted. Training manager. She smiled as she said it out loud. She was now one of only two senior women leaders in the whole company. Her experience, expertise, and innovative approach to leadership had greatly impressed the company, making her the obvious choice. She was pleased because things needed to change—old management models were simply not working. Wendy felt that