Episode 132 - The Authority and Vulnerability Paradox with Andy Crouch
Andy Crouch, partner for theology and culture at Praxis, joined us to talk about the drama of leadership and how to navigate the tensions of authority and vulnerability as a faith driven entrepreneur.
Andy presents a 2x2 matrix and explains the surprising reality that “authority and vulnerability go together at the moments of greatest flourishing in our lives.” Listen in to hear his call to reconsider the role authority, vulnerability, control, and safety play in our lives.
Episode Transcript
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Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone, to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I'm Rusty. Hey, you know, when we think of CEOs and bosses, we often think of strong, confident and somewhat removed people. There's this conception that authority requires strength and confidence, which is absolutely does the problem with that attitude is that vulnerability doesn't fit into that idea of a leader? Well, Andy Crouch, he sees this differently. You're about to hear the talk he gave at our recent Faith Driven Entrepreneur conference about the relationship between the authority and vulnerability and how a redemptive life happens at the intersection of these two characteristics. I'll let Andy take it from here.
Andy Crouch: I want to talk about one of the most fundamental dramas of our life as human beings, and maybe more particularly as leaders and entrepreneurs, and even more particularly when we're in the midst of crisis. And this is this drama is the tension and in some ways the paradox of authority and vulnerability. So these are two fundamental features of being human. I think human beings have more authority than any other creature and also more vulnerability than any other creature and defied authority not just as a title or a position of power, but any time that you have capacity for meaningful action, any time that what you do makes a difference and matters in the world to you and to others, that's when you have authority and then vulnerability. I think a vulnerability not just as emotional openness or transparency, but more broadly as exposure to meaningful risk that you're vulnerable whenever something that you care about a lot is at stake and could be lost. And a lot of the time we kind of think as if these are opposites that either have authority or I have a vulnerability. But I've actually come to believe that there's this paradox that they actually go together at the moments of greatest flourishing in our lives. There's something about these two things together at the same time when I both have the capacity to act and I also really meaningfully feel that something's at risk. That actually is part of my peak experiences. And in some ways this is entrepreneurship at its best. We're trying to act meaningfully in the world. We're taking big risks. And when it goes well, it's not every day we really feel like we are living right. And I actually think that's because we were meant to have these things together. I actually think we were created by God to have more authority than any creature and more vulnerability than any creature. So the parts of flourishing is to live these two at the same time. And I like to buy tools. So I've set up a little to buy two of these. And we will always want to be up to the right. Right. So flourishing is up into the right.
Higher authority and high vulnerability is where you want to be. Now there are three other corners and let's think about the the kind of total opposite in a way that would be low authority, low vulnerability, and I would call this safety, that when you're safe, you're not being asked to act meaningfully or otherwise and you don't feel like there's any risk.
And the interesting thing is that this is where every healthy human life begins. To the extent that your parents could make it so or whoever played the role of parents in your life when you were a baby, they limited your authority. They did not give you a lot of capacity to act, nor did you have a whole lot. And they really limited your exposure to risk. Right. And I think about my own daughter, who, when she was small, we would wrap her up in a blanket and hold her very tightly. And she felt very safe and held and also not really needing to act. But then that same daughter walked to kindergarten about four blocks away from our house, and then she got on the bus to middle school. And at each point, I as a parent and watching her vulnerability increase, but also her capacity to act in the world. And just a couple of weeks ago, she got in a car and drove off to her college town. And I can tell you that is high vulnerability for me as a dad for her. And yet it's exactly where I want her to be, because the healthy path of human life is from safety to flourishing.
We need to start out knowing where loved and known and held in a way. But the goal is to move out. The goal is to move up and to take more risk and also take more authority in the world. And this is the way every healthy human life is and in a way, the way every life should be. But of course, these are not the only options. So let's think about the other two corners. Let's think about this lower right vulnerability without authority. Oh, my gosh. We have all experienced that in twenty twenty. What is a lockdown if not being totally at risk?
Like you're so aware there's this respiratory virus out there. It's it may get you or people that you love. It's it's cratering. The economy around you and you are lying awake at night thinking about all the vulnerabilities you have, all the risks that you're bearing, and you have no capacity to act. You may not even be allowed to leave your home except for essential activities. So this is what I would call suffering, and it's very vivid to us in 2020. But it's a big part of human life. And long before the coronavirus came along, every one of us had had moments when we had lived down into the right and many, probably a billion people around around the world.
In some ways I've never known anything but this corner. And when you're there, you start dreaming about the other corner. You start dreaming about authority without vulnerability, being able to act meaningfully, but having no risk. And I think the word for this is control. And the quest for control is the quest to be able to act without risk, to have authority, without vulnerability.
And we especially start to kind of dream about it and seek it and run to it when we feel like we are in suffering. And this especially happens in crisis, we look for what are our levers of control? How can we regain a sense of lower risk and a sense of greater capacity to act?
But I will tell you, I don't think the world is set up for us to have control.
It's not designed for control. This is not what we were designed for as human beings and in a mysterious way that I'm not going to be able to talk about at length this time around. I actually think the quest for control authority without vulnerability. For one thing, it often ends up that we end up putting other people in the position of vulnerability without authority in order to get our sense of control. And in the long run, you can have it for a fleeting moment, but you can't keep it.
And the quest for control actually often leads us back to that lower right corner that we were trying to avoid. We really want to be up into the right.
And this, in a way, is the first prescription for leadership, you might say, because really what we're going to need to do is help people who are in those other three corners and and the folks that we are leading the way, whether it's our team members or any community that you're leading. This is also true if you're part of a family. There's times when people are really in the control corner and need to be helped to move to the right. There are times when people are really in the suffering corner and need to be given more authority. It's not so much that they need their vulnerability taken away. They need the capacity to act in the midst of their vulnerability. And then there are people who are in safety who need to be invited into flourishing. And this is kind of the picture of what I would call creative leadership. And it actually corresponds to the three roles of leadership, the three so-called offices of leadership in the in the Old Testament, which were prophet, priest and king. And the prophet is the one who goes to those who are seeking control, who are seeking authority without vulnerability and says, no, you need to take the proper risks and be dependent on God rather than dependent on the things that give you a sense of control. The prophet and then the priest, the priest goes to those who are vulnerable, in a sense, who don't have the authority even to stand before God because they're so conscious of their sin and their smallness and says, I'm going to give you a way to stand up and and present your prayer and your offering to God. And no, that will be heard. I'm going to give you the authority to be in the presence of God. And you can think of the priestly role as any time we meet people when they're in suffering and give them the authority to meet their suffering.
And then the king, in a way, was meant to live this flourishing life and call all the people around him into this kind of fullness of life. So this is leadership in some ways. On the best days, we play these three roles in other people's lives and we ourselves need people playing these roles in our lives as well. But I want to talk a little more about this control corner, because I just want to say we all really want it.
And I think one of the really mysterious dynamics of entrepreneurship is that even though our best days are up into the right, there's something about all of us that slides to the left. We we try to minimize risk. And this actually often especially happens to people who become successful. And the more successful you become, the more people kind of gather around you and start explaining to you how to take risk off the table, how to kind of minimize your vulnerability. And you yourself want that. And maybe the deeper truth is that everyone in the system wants you to have it as well as your employees, your customers, your investors. What they really want to hear from you is I'm in control. They don't necessarily want to hear about your vulnerability. And in fact, you can't really tell them the fullness of your vulnerability, because in some ways, the drama of leadership is what I would call hidden vulnerability, hidden in the sense that you can really be living over to the right. That is your. Living with the authority you've been given in your role and in your calling, but you also are super aware of all kinds of risks, but you're not able to fully disclose them to maybe anyone else in the system. And so other people see you see us as having a great deal of control, even though we're incredibly aware of our vulnerability. And this tension is extremely painful. It's what I sometimes called the drama of leadership is knowing how much vulnerability is present for me and those I'm leading and not being able to really disclose it. And this really feeds what I would call burnout and burnout. This tension gets so strong that where do we go? We just try to go back to safety, except at this point I just call it withdrawal. I think I experience this and some of the moments of the pandemic. I was sleeping more than I ever have. And what am I doing when I'm just, like, trying to retreat into sleep? I'm trying to just get away from the need to act and also get away from my risks. But actually, if we let ourselves go there in the depths of burnout, we ourselves and everyone around us end up in suffering.
How can we break this cycle? Two thoughts. One, you really need friends, you need friends who are not in the system, not in your company, not in your venture, who you can just speak honestly with about the hidden vulnerability that you and your company or your venture bear. And then there's one more thing, and it's kind of the most mysterious move in this whole chart. There is a right time and a place and an incredible power in the move down from the upper right. That is at moments when you actually are flourishing, when you have a lot of authority actually emptying yourself of that authority, but keeping all the vulnerability and entering voluntarily into suffering. And I think the word for this is sacrifice. And this is the heart of what we believe is the most transformative act in human history.
When the person who was all flourishing, he lived with great authority, and yet he was a human being, just like us, with all of our vulnerabilities emptied himself of authority, became like a servant, like a slave, emptied himself even to the point of death. On a cross. And yet after that act of sacrifice, God exalted him, raised him to have the name that's above everything. And what happens in that exaltation, I think somehow it breaks the power of the quest to be invulnerable. It breaks the power in a way of the left side of this graph. And we end up just living this kind of life where we're continually at the right moment in the right ways, emptying ourselves of authority, but finding that it is mysteriously by the grace and power of God restored to us and to those we love in ways we never could have imagined.
I would call this, in a way, the redemptive life and the redemptive life, this life that has nothing to do with being safe or in control, I think is the life we call to live in the midst of crisis and in many ways every day of our lives.
Rusty Rueff: Thanks so much for joining us on today's show. We hope you enjoyed it. We are very grateful for the opportunity to serve you the larger Faith Driven Entrepreneur community, and we want to stay connected. The best way for you to do that is to sign up for our monthly newsletter at Faith Driven Entrepreneur ERG. And while you're there, we want to hear from you. We derive great joy from interacting with many of you. And it's been very rewarding to see people come to the site and listen to the podcast now for more than over 100 countries. But it's even more important to us that you feel like this is your show and that you'll help make it something the best equipped you on your entrepreneurial journey, one that you're proud of and one that you're going to share with others. Hey, this podcast wouldn't be possible without the help from many of our friends. Executive producer Justin Forman and program director Johnny Wells. Music is by Carl Craquelure. You can see and hear more of his work at the summer Drugstore.com audio and editing by Richard Bahle of Cornerstone Church in San Francisco.