21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (38 page)

But Smoker misquoted Mother Teresa, who actually called abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace today.” Whatever your opinion on abortion, you have to agree that Mother Teresa, in her Nobel speech, advanced a thoughtful rationale for her claim, saying, “if a mother can kill her own child—what is left for me to kill you and you kill me—there is nothing between.”
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Others (notably Christopher Hitchens) disparaged Mother Teresa for accepting donations from corrupt sources, such as the Duvalier family (which once ruled Haiti) or financier Charles Keating. Hitchens suggested that Mother Teresa should have returned Keating’s donations to those who lost money on investments in his company. He reasoned that Keating’s donations, which he made to the Missionaries of Charity long before the collapse of his financial enterprises, somehow constituted “stolen money.”
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Hitchens offered no evidence that Keating had “stolen” the donated funds. As for the Duvalier family, we could argue that Mother Teresa redeemed donations from corrupt dictators by using them to serve the poor.

A decade after her death, Mother Teresa’s private journals and letters were published as
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk. These private writings reveal Mother Teresa’s fifty-year struggle against doubt and depression. For example, in a 1959 letter to Father Lawrence Picachy, her Jesuit spiritual guide in Darjeeling, she wrote:

These words are painful to read—and such a contrast from the message she received from God in September 1946 on a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling. A decade after Jesus told her, “Come, be my light,” she was struggling with spiritual darkness, feeling forsaken by God, bereft of faith.

Yet she seemed to cling to a perspective like that of the grieving father in the Gospel of Mark: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
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In that same 1959 letter, she commits herself to serving God to the end of her life, in spite of her doubts: “If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this—if souls are brought to You—if my suffering satiates Your Thirst—here I am Lord, with joy I accept all to the end of life—& I will smile at Your Hidden Face—always.”
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The revelation of Mother Teresa’s long struggle with doubt stunned many people. Her critics and detractors claimed she had “lost her faith.” Some accused her of “hypocrisy,” claiming to serve God after having lost her faith in God. But there is no hypocrisy here. Mother Teresa honestly expresses her struggle and her commitment to serving God in spite of her doubts. The Mother Teresa we meet in these writings is not an atheist, but a tormented believer steadfastly clinging to her faith. She struggles with her emotions, but her will is unshakable. Her commitment to serve God and others is steadfast.

Though she doubted her faith, she also doubted her doubts, clinging to faith. She continued serving God in spite of her feelings of emptiness, vowing, “I will smile at Your Hidden Face—always.”

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s faith in the extreme.

Many saints have experienced similar crises of doubt. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross expressed almost identical doubts in his collection of verses,
The Dark Night of the Soul
. Mother Teresa’s own namesake, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, experienced decades of spiritual darkness and doubt. Even Jesus, in the depths of his suffering on the cross, cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
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Most leaders and servants experience the dark emotion of doubt from time to time. Whatever Mother Teresa’s doubts, she maintained her faith. She remained a faithful servant.

The Seventh Side of Leadership is a serving heart. Mother Teresa teaches us that servanthood is not a means to an end. It’s an end in itself. A leader with a serving heart doesn’t serve others to get something in return. Servants expect nothing in return. Her life suggests a number of key leadership principles:

1.
A genuine servant is a shrewd strategist
. Mother Teresa was amazingly astute and street smart. One of the first things she did upon founding the Missionaries of Charity was to create a visual “brand”—the Indian-style habit—that would become recognizable the world over. She had excellent people skills and used them to persuade wealthy, powerful people to help her financially and politically.

Great servants use all the skills at their disposal to accomplish their servanthood goals. Mother Teresa charmed the rich and powerful into supporting the Missionaries of Charity, and countless poor people, sick people, and children benefited from her skills in networking, marketing, and persuasion.

2.
Effective servants think win-win
. When Mother Teresa needed a building to house the poor and sick, she went to the city leaders and cut a win-win deal with them. As a result of that bargain, Mother Teresa got the building she needed, and the city received help in solving its image problem. Great servants find ways to achieve their own goals while helping to solve the problems of others.

3.
Publicity is better than obscurity
. A leader with a serving heart welcomes fame and uses publicity to achieve even greater works of servanthood. Mother Teresa labored in obscurity for many years. In 1969, Malcolm Muggeridge brought Mother Teresa to the attention of the world. Mother Teresa parlayed that publicity into support for her ministries.

A serving leader remains committed to serving and uses fame only as a means to serve on a bigger scale. Mother Teresa never lost her humility, in spite of the fame and accolades she received. To her, fame was just another tool she used in serving God and others.

4.
Authentic servants think about others, not themselves
. When Mother Teresa was in Beirut, her only thought was how to get into West Beirut and rescue those children. When the priest kept telling her that it was not safe for her to go, she seemed not to hear. Arguments about her own safety didn’t register. She cared only about getting those children to safety. That’s the mind-set of the servant—and the mind-set of a leader.

5.
Authentic servants act on their faith, not their doubts
. As someone once said, “Never doubt in the darkness what God has shown you in the light.” We may not be able to control emotions of doubt, but we can always control our actions. We can maintain our commitment to our faith, our principles, and our values, even when our faith seems weak. Faith is far more than a feeling. Faith is an act of obedience, an expression of the will.

Though Mother Teresa experienced doubt, she never forgot her experience of God in 1946, when she heard Jesus say, “Come, be my light.” She answered that call—and she never looked back.

A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN

The Great Emancipator

I freely acknowledge myself the servant of the people, according to the bond of service…. I am responsible to them
.

A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN

I
became acquainted with legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden when he was in his nineties. I wrote several books about his philosophy of leadership and character building, and he graciously invited me into his home for many unforgettable conversations. Entering his home in Encino, California, was like stepping into a Hall of Fame. His hallway was lined with photos and memorabilia. The most prominent display was devoted to two people—Mother Teresa and Abraham Lincoln.

“They’re my heroes,” he told me. “I admire them both for their outstanding character traits—their courage and humility, and the way they selflessly served others. I can’t think of two greater heroes to admire. Can you?”

I couldn’t. I still can’t. That’s why I have devoted the last two chapters of this book to Coach John Wooden’s two great heroes, Mother Teresa and Abraham Lincoln.

One of the earliest of the many stories told about Abraham Lincoln took place when he was just five years old—and it’s a story about his serving heart.

Someone asked him what he knew about the Revolutionary War. Well, he didn’t know much about the war, but he knew a little bit about soldiers. He said he’d been fishing one day and caught a little fish. While bringing the fish home, he said, he encountered a soldier in the road.

“I’ve always been told that we must be good to soldiers,” young Abraham said, “so I gave him my fish.”
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Even at age five, Lincoln exemplified the Seventh Side of Leadership: a serving heart.

In 1859, before he ran for president, Abraham Lincoln wrote a short autobiography. Here is Lincoln’s own account of his early life:

This is a humble story, told by a humble servant. He seems to suggest that his education ended when he learned to “read, write, and cipher.” But that’s when his
real
education began. He was a voracious reader from his boyhood to his final days. His education never ended because he was constantly reading throughout his life.

Raised in poverty, he possessed few books of his own. As journalist and historian Alexander McClure records, one of the few books Lincoln owned was one he made himself. It was a book listing a table of weights and measures that he used to learn his arithmetic (or “ciphering”). He borrowed a copy of the printed book, wrote out the information with pen and paper, then hand-stitched the binding himself.

As a youth, Lincoln tried his hand at poetry. On one page of his handmade book, he wrote:

When Abe was fourteen, his cousin from Kentucky, John Hanks, came to live with the Lincolns for a while. Hanks later described what his cousin Abe did every day after they finished their daily chores:

One of Lincoln’s best friends when he was a teenager was Joseph C. Richardson, who recalled that Lincoln was six feet tall at age sixteen, and “somewhat bony and raw, dark-skinned [and] he was quick and moved with energy…. He was exceedingly studious.” Richardson recalled that Lincoln wrote a rhymed couplet in Richardson’s school copybook, and those lines proved to be prophetic in Abraham Lincoln’s own life:

Alexander McClure observed, “In all, Lincoln’s ‘schooling’ did not amount to a year’s time, but he was a constant student outside of the schoolhouse. He read all the books he could borrow, and it was his chief delight during the day to lie under the shade of some tree, or at night in front of an open fireplace, reading and studying. His favorite books were the Bible and Aesop’s fables, which he kept always within reach and read time and again.”
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In 1831, at age twenty-two, Lincoln struck out on his own and settled in the village of New Salem in Sangamon County, Illinois. There he worked at a series of jobs until the spring of 1832, when the Black Hawk War erupted. The Black Hawk War was a brief, small-scale conflict between a band of Native Americans led by Chief Black Hawk and a small United States force comprised of a few army soldiers and hundreds of poorly trained frontier militia men. Lincoln served in a volunteer militia during the Black Hawk War, and though his unit never saw combat, his fellow militia men elected him to be their leader. He later recalled, “I was elected a Captain of Volunteers—a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.”
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