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Why Leaders Need to Put Other People First

My start in making a difference as a leader was surely small. It happened in June 1969. In that month I graduated from college, married my high school sweetheart, Margaret, and accepted my first position as the pastor of a tiny church in rural Indiana, in a community called Hillham. The town had eleven houses, two garages, and one grocery store. Does that sound small enough?

I had high hopes and unlimited energy. I was ready to help people, so I jumped in. The first service I held in Hillham had three people in attendance. And two of them were Margaret and me!

I was not discouraged. I saw it as a challenge. I started doing what I could to help people in the community. I visited the sick, offered counseling, invited people to services, and taught messages to help people improve their lives. I did everything I knew how to do to add value to people.

Margaret and I spent three years in Hillham. Those were fantastic years. We loved the people, we learned a lot, and we worked hard. When I first accepted the position, the board offered me a part-time salary because that was all they could afford to pay, but they said I was welcome to seek additional employment at the same time if I needed to. Margaret wouldn’t hear of it. “John’s called to lead and grow this church, and that’s what he’s going to do,” she told the board with all the confidence of a twenty-year-old. “I’ll do the extra work.” She then proceeded to juggle three jobs to help us make ends meet. She taught school, worked in a jewelry store, and cleaned houses. No doubt you can tell that I married way above myself.

Word started to spread about the good things we were doing in Hillham. People heard about our service, which had increased to 301 in attendance, and they marveled that a little country church like ours had been able to grow so dramatically. Regular attendance was so good that we had to acquire land and construct a new building to hold our growing congregation.

I was also starting to receive a positive reputation for innovation and leadership. I was getting to be known as an up-and-comer.

Moving Up

I was very pleased when I received a call from the largest church in our small denomination. They were interested in hiring me to become their new pastor. It was in Lancaster, Ohio—a big step up from tiny Hillham. We saw it as a great opportunity, so we accepted the invitation and felt we were on our way.

In Hillham I had received the inspiration to build a large church. In Lancaster I felt we would get the chance to actually do it. “We will build a great church here,” I told the congregation after we arrived, and we set about doing exactly that.

Lancaster did, in fact, grow to be the church I had dreamed of. We helped a lot of people, and we made an impact on the community. It wasn’t long before we were outgrowing our facilities and had to look for expansion options. We started buying up as much of the land around the church as we could. The lot closest to the church was owned by an older man named Charlie. When I first went to see him and ask about the church buying his land, he said he didn’t want to sell it. “I want to die here,” he told me.

I didn’t pressure him. I just continued to visit him every week and build a relationship with him. After several months, one day he said, “I can tell you’re helping a lot of people. Young man, I want to help you, so I am going to let you buy my land from me.” So we did. And we drew up plans to build a new sanctuary and to repurpose and refurbish our existing buildings.

That same year, 1975, our church became recognized as having the fastest-growing Sunday school in the state of Ohio. That may not sound big to you, but it was huge to me. It meant my leadership had gone to another level. And people in larger pastoral circles were starting to notice, too. I was receiving recognition. It was a validation of all the hard work we were doing.

Those were heady days. My enthusiasm and emerging charisma got lots of people to join me and support my vision. And I started receiving favorable comparisons to people I admired. Because I had been born with leadership ability, I had the ability to see things before many others did, which gave me a head start in seizing opportunities and using my leadership giftedness to my advantage. I felt like I was winning all the time. And I liked it.

But there was another aspect to my personality that was threatening to limit my potential and derail me in the area of significance: my inherent competitive nature. It had been an asset when I played high school basketball, but it went to a whole new level during this season. I wanted to help people, but my motives were wrong. They were selfish. The things I was accomplishing fed my pride and my ego.

This could most easily be seen when I received the annual report of the denomination. It was a document that included the stats for every church: total attendance, percentage of attendance growth, total annual giving, number of baptisms that had been performed, number of people serving, total Sunday school attendance—everything of note that had occurred in each church during the given year. It was a snapshot of every church in the denomination.

No matter what I was doing, no matter how busy I was, no matter how important the thing I was doing might be, the moment the annual report arrived in the mail, I stopped everything. I went off with it and spent two solid days analyzing all the numbers and comparing my church’s results with everyone else’s.

Where do I rank?

How am I doing?

What am I doing well?

What do I need to improve?

How do I stand out now?

What can I do to stand out more?

I was obsessed with finding out where I stood in comparison with the other churches. I became completely consumed with figuring out how I could move up and keep climbing the ladder while taking our church to the next level. I didn’t stop until I had every possible scenario for personal advancement figured out.

I already had an inclination to hoard good ideas, and that desire got stronger. I gave in to it. I leveraged every good idea to increase the size of my organization, and I didn’t want to share my secrets with anybody else.

Why did I do all this? Because I wanted to win. I wanted to be first, and it felt like I could be first. I had the vision. I had the energy. I had the ability to attract people to myself and my cause. And I had the work ethic. When you have the potential to win, to be the best, how do you respond? Do you reach for it? I did!

However, there was a problem. You’ve probably already figured out what it was. It was all about me. All my goals and my desire to reach them were totally self-centered. I wasn’t intentionally doing anything wrong, but my pursuit of success tainted my motives. I was in it for myself more than for others. I saw the stats as evidence of my success as a leader. I didn’t care about the other churches. I didn’t take into account that I was part of a larger team: the denomination. The only church I wanted to help was my own. And the only leader I wanted to win was me. I had been the high scorer for my high school basketball team, and I wanted to be the high scorer again.

While I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with achieving goals, charting progress, or tapping into natural competitiveness, I do think it’s wrong to be self-centered, and that’s what I was.

Shifting from Success to Significance

As I look back now, I can see that significance was beginning to be within my grasp, but instead I was reaching for success. Back then I didn’t get that I couldn’t have a life that mattered when it was all about me and what I accomplished. I didn’t really understand that significance and the true value of leadership are about what we can do for others.

Publisher Malcolm Forbes said, “People who matter most are aware that everyone else does too.” Think about this. Self-centeredness is the root of virtually every problem—both personally and globally. And whether we want to admit it or not, it’s a problem all of us have.

If you’re tempted to believe it’s not an issue for you, then let me ask a question. When you look at a group photo that you are in, who do you look for first? You look for yourself. So do I. We all look for ourselves before we look at others. If the image of us looks good, we say, “What a great picture,” no matter who else might have their eyes closed, their mouths open, or their heads turned. Our opinion is based on how good we look.

So what’s the problem with being a little self-centered? From my point of view, there are many. Self-centered people don’t create communities that endure. Selfishly believing that we are not our brother’s keepers is not sustainable. If you want to tap into the true power of your leadership, then you need to become intentional about getting beyond yourself and putting other people first. We all do. It may not stop us completely from being selfish or from thinking of ourselves first, but it will help us to curb our self-centeredness. It will help us to shift our mind-set. It has been my observation that good leaders value people and can see the potential significance in each person.

I look back now and realize that as a young leader, I lived a very self-centered life. I had a me-first attitude that showed up in many areas of my life. My competitiveness was often unbridled, and my desire to win oftentimes overwhelmed my judgment. The thing that opened my eyes to this was a conversation with Margaret in the early years of our marriage. In those days, whenever Margaret and I disagreed, I used every skill I had to win the argument. Not just occasionally, but every time. It didn’t matter if the issue was large or small, philosophical or practical, personal or organizational. Every time it was a full-court press. And I won!

Have you ever been in a situation where you lost by winning? For quite a long time, Margaret just put up with it. But then one day as I celebrated another victory, Margaret said simply, “John, you’re winning the arguments, but you’re losing my love.”

Whoa! By winning, I was actually damaging my marriage, hurting the person I most loved. And it suddenly occurred to me that if I stayed on that same path, I had the potential to lose Margaret—the love of my life and the best gift God ever gave me.

That was a wake-up call. It opened my eyes, perhaps for the first time, to how selfish and self-centered I was. I think marriage has a way of doing that to us. If you’re married, maybe you agree. At any rate, that was the beginning of change for me. I wish I could say that I instantly became unselfish and never hurt Margaret’s feelings again, but that wouldn’t be true. However, I can say that it began a journey of change. Whenever I felt the desire to put winning ahead of my relationship with Margaret, I was intentional about putting her first.

That opened the door for me, and before long I began to see my self-centeredness in other situations. So I started working on them, too. My improved attitude began to spread into these other areas of my life. As a leader, I started thinking more about others, about what they wanted and needed. You need to care about others and help them to get what they want. Do it not only because you want them to help you, but because it’s the way to make a difference in the world.

I honestly didn’t even notice how big a difference this was making in my life until one year when the annual report arrived in the mail. Instead of dropping everything and spending two days charting my progress, I put the report to the side and thought, I’ll look at it when I have time. It wasn’t until later that I realized the significance of that decision. I had grown. I still possessed high intensity. I was still curious about where I stood. But it no longer consumed me. Why? Because helping others and leading them had become more important. My focus had begun to shift. I was starting to become preoccupied with how to help others improve rather than with how to improve my personal position.

Tapping into Significance

What drives you when you get up in the morning? Most people settle into one of three areas: survival, success, or significance. If you’re like many people, you may be struggling just to keep your head above water. You’re in survival mode. Whether because of circumstances, setbacks, or poor choices, you have to put a tremendous amount of effort into just making it from day to day.

If you’re working hard to make life better for yourself and your family, then I applaud you. Keep working. But once you’ve gotten to a place of stability, then what? What will you live for? Will you serve yourself or others? Will you put all of your energy into your own personal success, into trying to get farther ahead than others? Or will you work with others and use your leadership to help them achieve significance? Will you try to make a difference by helping others get ahead?

Much of my career as a speaker and writer has focused on helping people who have already achieved a level of success to find true meaning in their lives. For some that’s a fairly smooth transition. For others it’s not. Many people I interact with have gotten to a place where they’ve reached some of their financial goals—or surpassed them—which they thought would bring some kind of fulfillment. They went into their journeys thinking, If I get more for me, I’ll be happier. They thought it would bring them satisfaction and fulfillment. But they’ve discovered that they’re still not satisfied. In some cases they are actually less fulfilled than when they started their journeys. Their lives feel hollow.

Many people tie their significance to their social position, their title, their net worth or bank balance, the car they drive, their prestigious address, the man or woman on their arm, or some other status symbol. Their mentality is, If I do enough and have enough, even if I am self-centered, it will bring fulfillment. The problem is that self-centeredness and fulfillment cannot peacefully coexist. They’re incompatible.

Sometimes people struggling with this issue are uncertain about what to do. Often, they grapple with the idea of making a career change in their forties or fifties. When I encounter someone in this situation, I ask, “Do you really want to switch careers, or do you want to switch to a life that matters?” The problem usually isn’t the job or career. When people are self-centered, they can make external changes, and they won’t be any happier in their next career. No matter where they go, there they are.

Instead, they need to shift to significance by putting other people first. Their thinking needs to change from What’s in it for me? to What can I do for others? Until that change occurs, happiness, fulfillment, and significance will always be out of their reach.

That doesn’t mean success is bad. The reality is that people must achieve a certain amount of success before they’re ready for significance. They need to have found themselves, achieved something, and made themselves valuable before they have something to give to others.

I saw this in my brother Larry. By the time he was forty years old, he had already made enough money that he would never have to work another day in his life. He once told me that his temptation was to quit working, but he knew retiring wouldn’t make him happy. “So now I work for another reason,” he told me. “I don’t work for another home. I don’t work for more money. All of the work I do now is going to allow me to give money away. I now work for a great cause—I work to help other people.”

There’s an important lesson here. Larry understood that he shouldn’t leave his gift zone to get outside of himself. He shouldn’t give up the thing he was best at, which was making money, so that he could do something else that didn’t suit him, like becoming a missionary. He continued to use his talents for a better purpose. His money would work for him and become a river of influence to positively impact other people. That is true intentional living and true significance. He is living a life that matters.

Making the Shift

Like Larry, to pursue a life that mattered I had to learn to get beyond myself and think of others first. But I didn’t try to get out of my strength zone. I stayed in it. I kept communicating. I kept leading. I kept rallying people to a greater purpose. I kept building. The main difference was that I was no longer doing it selfishly, self-centeredly. Maybe nobody else could tell the difference. But I could! My motives had changed.

For me, the process of changing was slow, and looked something like this:

I want to win.

But too often I’m self-centered.

My bent toward competitiveness and selfishness has been one of the reasons I have been successful. And my success has given me influence and privileges. I enjoy both immensely.

But my success now allows me to have options. Do I go for more success? Or do I try for significance?

I am at a crossroad.

I want to use my options to add more value to me.

But I also want to use my options to add value to others.

What do I want my life to stand for? What do I want it to mean?

I will choose to help others.

The first time I chose to think of others first, it was hard. But each time I made the right choice, it became a little bit easier. The selfishness was still there, but overcoming it became a little more natural. And as I became more intentional about putting others first in my life, my need to prove myself to others became less important. I began to focus on putting others first—not coming in first. I had more compelling things driving me and fulfilling me that reached far beyond me.

If you find it difficult to choose between doing what you want for yourself and what you should do for others, don’t despair. The process takes time. Think of it like an actual wrestling match. Most winning wrestlers don’t end their matches instantly. They don’t pin their opponents right away. They have to work at it, and eventually their opponent taps out or cries uncle. And then the match is over.

As you wrestle down your “want-tos,” you don’t have to give them up quickly. Just be sure that whatever you give up, you give up for the right reasons and because you’ve thought it through. Otherwise you will look back with regret—or worse yet, go back and try to pick them up again. It’s hard to move forward with confidence if you’re looking backward.

Are you ready to start putting other people first, not just occasionally, but as a lifestyle? It’s not an easy shift to go from thinking of yourself first to thinking of others first. But it’s an essential one for anyone who wants to transition from success to significance and live a life that matters. I started the shift in my twenties, but it took me until my thirties to really get it.

I hope you haven’t waited as long as I did to serve others. But even if you have, you don’t have to wait another day to change. It may take a while for you to work your way through your issues, just as I had to, but you can start the process today.

Significant leadership is always about others, and serving them intentionally. When you can change your thinking from What am I going to receive? to What am I going to give?—your entire life begins to turn around. And the gratification and pleasure you receive become deep and long lasting.