Growth: The Clues of a Stuck Leader

GROWTH • FAITH @ WORK • LEGACY JOURNEY

MARKETPLACE AMBASSADORS • MONTHLY THEME

Growth: The Clues of a Stuck Leader

Jesus grew — and so must we. The clues to where we have stopped growing almost never show up on a scorecard. They show up in the people who live with us and work for us.

I have to open with a confession, and it is not a flattering one. For a long stretch of my working life I would have told you, without hesitating, that I was a growth-minded leader. I read the books. I set the goals. I could recite my numbers for any quarter you named. What I could not have told you — what it never occurred to me to ask — was whether I had grown as a spouse in the previous five years. Or as a friend. Or as a boss on the days when things went badly. I was measuring growth almost entirely in the one area where I already knew I was good at it, and calling the result a growth mindset.

Luke gives us a single line to cover the hidden years of Jesus: He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. Mind, body, soul, relationships. The Son of God grew — and He had nothing whatsoever to correct. Which settles something important. Growth was never the remedial track for people who have fallen behind. It is the design. God calls us to grow the way Jesus grew: in every dimension, across an entire life, right up to the end of it.

Here is the harder part. Growth almost never stops with an announcement. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides they are finished. We simply drift into competence and mistake it for maturity. We get very good at something — running a company, closing a deal, carrying a payroll through a brutal year — and we quietly let excellence in one area stand in for growth in all the others. Those of us who own or lead businesses are especially exposed here, because we are the people no one corrects. We sign the checks. We set the tone. The higher the chair, the thinner the truth that reaches it.

If you have ever been quietly tired of pretending you have arrived, this month is for you.

A Word About Where We Are in the Journey

We are deep into the Impact quarter of the Legacy Journey. Q1 laid the Foundation. Q2 formed Character in the quiet. Last month, Excellence asked a searching question: does what we do reflect the One we do it for? Growth asks the next one, and it is more uncomfortable still — are we actually still becoming something, or have we just gotten better at the parts we were already good at?

ANCHOR VERSE

“And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”

— Luke 2:52

Look at what Luke packs into one sentence. Wisdom — the mind. Stature — the body. Favor with God — the soul. Favor with man — relationships. Half of that list is relational, and that is not incidental. It is the diagnostic. Skill can hide inside a spreadsheet. Revenue can cover a multitude of things. But character cannot hide at a dinner table, and it cannot hide from the people who watch us under pressure. So when we want to know where we have quietly stopped growing, we do not look at our results. We look at our relationships.

And the clues are usually sitting in plain sight. A few worth praying over:

• The same argument with my spouse, in nearly the same words, for the last five years.

• A child or grandchild who has stopped bringing me the hard things.

• A key employee who agrees with me a little too quickly.

• Turnover I explain rather than examine.

• The flash of heat I feel when someone questions a decision.

• The sentence, “that’s just how I am.”

• And the loudest clue of all: no one has told me anything difficult in a very long time.

Clues like those tend to cluster in five places. I am not going to hand you a framework to fill out — most of us have enough of those. I would rather walk through them the way they actually surface in a life: one honest question at a time.

Is my time with God still a conversation — or only a report?

“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.”

— Psalm 139:23

The first place stuckness hides is the only place no one else can see. Prayer that has slowly become a status update. Scripture read for material rather than for correction. We keep the appointment, but we stopped bringing anything we did not already have an answer for. Growth here does not begin with effort — Jesus said we did not choose Him, He chose us, and fruit grows from staying connected rather than from striving. Which means our assessment with God is not a performance review. It is an honest conversation with the One who already chose us. David’s prayer is the risky one because God actually answers it, and that is precisely why most of us quietly stopped praying it.

God is rarely silent with a person who genuinely wants to hear. The question is whether we still ask Him questions we do not already have answers to.

What would the person I married say I have refused to grow in?

“These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children...”

— Deuteronomy 6:6–7

Home holds the long view. Our spouse has a five-year, ten-year, twenty-year read on us that no board and no scorecard can match — and so do our children. Notice the order in Deuteronomy: on your heart first, and then impressed on the children in the most ordinary moments, sitting at home and walking along the road. Nothing transfers that is not actually growing. If I have been stuck in the same defensiveness, the same temper, the same absence for years, my family has already named it. They simply may have decided it costs too much to say so. And here is the encouraging flip side: our families do not need finished people. They need growing ones — someone they can watch apologize, learn, and change course when God corrects them.

Your family will forgive an unfinished leader. They will quietly stop following a finished one.

Who is actually close enough to sharpen me?

“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

— Proverbs 27:17

Every teacher eventually discovers the secret: the person who grows most in any lesson is the one who prepared it. Paul prays exactly that over Philemon — that sharing his faith would deepen his own understanding. I have found it true every time. When I sit down to walk someone through a passage or a hard decision, two things happen in me before we ever meet. My awareness grows, because I cannot ask an honest question I have been dodging myself. And my knowledge grows, because I study differently when someone else’s growth depends on what I bring. So the diagnostic question is a simple one. Is there anyone pouring into me? Is there anyone I am pouring into? If the answer is no on both counts, that is not a scheduling problem. Iron does not sharpen in isolation.

Iron does not sharpen itself. If no one is close enough to strike, nothing is being sharpened.

Why does everyone agree with me so quickly?

“The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice.”

— Proverbs 12:15

Work is where most of our waking hours go, and it is where character gets revealed rather than described. But the clue at work is rarely conflict. It is the absence of it. Agreement that arrives a beat too fast. Feedback we receive graciously and never act on. Turnover we explain in the meeting instead of examining on our knees. A meeting where the real conversation happens in the parking lot afterward. Our people have already formed a view of where we are stuck; the only live question is whether we have made it safe for them to say it. And when God is genuinely changing a leader — the temper under pressure, the honesty in a hard negotiation, the patience with someone who is struggling — we do not have to announce it. Like the witnesses in Mark 5, the people who saw it do the talking.

Fast agreement is not alignment. Very often it is just the sound of people who have stopped telling you things.

What have my calendar and my giving already decided without me?

“The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work.”

— Matthew 25:16

Two details in that verse are worth sitting with. He went at once — no delay, no committee, no waiting for certainty. And he put it to work — he moved what he had been given into motion. The servant who buried his talent was never condemned for losing money. He was condemned for letting fear freeze the gift. Stuckness in this area is comfortable and almost invisible, because nothing appears to be wrong. A calendar that has not meaningfully changed in three years. Giving that settled into a number instead of a growing trust. Margin quietly absorbed by things we never actually chose. Our time and our money are the two most honest records we keep — they show what we have decided, whether or not we ever decided it on purpose.

Fear rarely announces itself. Most of the time it just looks like a calendar that has not changed in three years.

The Way Out Is Always a Conversation

Here is what I have come to believe about getting unstuck. Truth has to be spoken. Not privately concluded, not journaled about, not resolved in the car on the way home — spoken, out loud, by someone else. Solomon tells us that wounds from a friend can be trusted. The trouble is almost never that the truth is unavailable to us. It is that the truth is unwelcome. The people closest to us usually know precisely what we need to hear, and somewhere along the way they learned it was not worth the cost of telling us. So if no one is currently speaking hard things into your life, please do not conclude there is nothing to say. Conclude, more likely, that we taught them not to.

Which makes humility the hinge on which all of this turns. Not self-deprecation — the humility of Scripture is far more practical than that. It is the working decision to stop being the smartest person in every room of your life. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and the grace He gives is very often delivered by someone with the nerve to say what we did not want to hear. Humility, in the end, is simply what makes a leader reachable.

And then courage, because receiving truth is hard but seeking it is harder. Do not wait to be told. Ask. Ask your spouse what they have wanted to say for a long time and have not. Ask a trusted friend what they see in you that you seem unwilling to see. Ask an employee what it is like to work for you on your worst day. Then do the two hardest things in the entire process — say thank you without defending yourself, and change one thing. Not five. One.

The Invitation This Month

So my invitation is not a five-area improvement plan. It is smaller and considerably harder. Pick the area where you already suspect you have stopped, and ask one person who has earned the right to answer honestly. Then stay in the room long enough to hear it.

And remember why this matters beyond us. This is the Impact quarter, and Impact matures into Legacy. The people coming behind us — our children, our teams, the person sitting across the table from us — will not inherit our image management. They will inherit whatever was actually growing in us. A growing leader leaves a growing legacy; a finished one leaves a museum.

Explore reality honestly. Move forward faithfully. He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.

“...being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

— Philippians 1:6

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