Authority Makes Love More Necessary

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The Person Across the Desk

The employee sitting across from you has made a serious mistake. His decision has cost the organization money, created additional work for his colleagues, and damaged a relationship with an important customer. Worse, when you first asked him about it, he was not entirely truthful.

You are frustrated, and you have good reason to be. You have invested in this employee’s development, given him opportunities, and defended him when others questioned whether he was ready for greater responsibility. Now you are wondering whether you made a mistake in trusting him.

He knows he is in trouble. You can see it in the way he sits, the way he avoids your eyes, and the care with which he chooses his words. You have the authority to discipline him, remove responsibilities, or terminate his employment. Depending on the circumstances, any of those actions might be appropriate.

But before you begin, there is something you need to remember.

The person sitting across from you is not merely the source of a problem. He is a human being whose livelihood, family, confidence, and future may be profoundly affected by what happens in this room. And you are the person who has been entrusted with authority over him.

You have two responsibilities. You must address what happened truthfully, and you must treat this person lovingly. Neither responsibility cancels the other. In fact, the seriousness of the problem makes your responsibility to exercise both even more important.

The authority to impose consequences must never become permission to abandon love.

When You Are the One Who Has Been Wronged

Now consider what happens when the employee’s conduct has injured you personally.

He did not merely make a mistake. He lied to you about it. Perhaps he later complained about your leadership to other employees, making accusations you believe are unfair. Perhaps he challenged you publicly, embarrassed you in front of your colleagues, or questioned your integrity.

Your frustration is no longer limited to the organizational consequences of his behavior. You are also dealing with the pain of betrayal, disappointment, and perhaps anger. Those feelings are real, and you should not pretend otherwise.

But you have authority over the person who caused them.

That combination creates a particular danger. You can affect his income, reputation, responsibilities, and future opportunities. You may have the authority to make decisions that he has little ability to resist. Some consequences may be entirely appropriate, but being wronged does not mean that every action you are tempted to take is justified.

You now have two matters to address: the employee’s conduct and your own response to it. The employee is responsible for what he has done. You are responsible for what you do next.

Romans 12:17–21 instructs believers not to repay evil for evil or take personal revenge, but to overcome evil with good. That command does not prohibit appropriate organizational discipline. It does, however, require us to distinguish between exercising legitimate authority and using that authority to retaliate for a personal offense.

Removing an employee’s responsibilities could be a necessary response to a serious breach of trust. It could also be an act of retaliation disguised as a personnel decision. The outward action might look similar, but its purpose, evidence, proportionality, and process may be quite different.

This is why a leader must examine his own heart before exercising authority over someone who has wronged him. Would I make the same decision if this employee’s conduct had not offended me personally? Would I apply the same standard to someone I particularly like? Am I seeking the good of the organization and the person, or am I trying to make him feel the pain he has caused me?

These questions are not designed to prevent us from acting. They help us act faithfully. When our personal injury makes impartial judgment especially difficult, involving another qualified leader or an appropriate independent process may be an act of wisdom.

The authority to correct someone must never become a means of settling a personal score.

Authority Is a Stewardship, Not a Personal Possession

Leadership is faithful stewardship applied to people.

A steward has been entrusted with something that belongs to another. He is responsible for its care, development, and faithful use, and he must eventually give an account of how he managed what was placed in his hands.

People, however, are not organizational property. Their employment or participation may be entrusted to a leader’s oversight, but their lives do not belong to him. We have authority to make decisions within the responsibilities of our positions. We do not have unlimited authority over the people affected by those decisions.

Jesus teaches in Luke 12:48 that greater entrustment brings greater accountability. The passage concerns servants who must answer to their master, but its principle should sober anyone who has been entrusted with responsibility for others. Authority is not merely the privilege of making decisions. It is the responsibility of answering for how those decisions are made.

And that includes how we treat people when they disappoint us.

This is especially important when we have been personally offended. Our authority gives us the ability to impose consequences that the other person may have little ability to resist. That difference creates an additional moral responsibility, not an exemption from the ordinary commands to love our neighbor, pursue justice, and exercise self-control.

A leader who has been wronged must not allow his personal injury to become the governing authority over his decisions. He may need to seek counsel, invite scrutiny, or step aside from part of a decision-making process when his own feelings make impartial judgment especially difficult. Such accountability is not a surrender of leadership. It is one of the ways a steward demonstrates that he understands whom his authority is meant to serve.

The greater our authority over people, the greater our responsibility to exercise that authority for their good.

Truth and Love Are Not Competing Responsibilities

We sometimes speak as though difficult leadership requires us to choose between being truthful and being loving. We must either confront the problem or preserve the relationship. We must either enforce accountability or demonstrate compassion. We must either exercise authority or show gentleness.

But these are often false choices.

Ephesians 4:15 calls believers to speak the truth in love. The context concerns the maturity of Christ’s body, yet the command exposes a distinction that matters wherever Christians exercise influence. Truth and love are not rival responsibilities. They belong together.

Truth identifies reality. Love governs our response to it.

Truth may require us to confront misconduct, acknowledge failure, establish boundaries, or impose consequences. Love requires us to pursue the genuine good of the people affected by those actions. It does not promise that the process will be comfortable. Indeed, a leader who refuses to address destructive behavior because he wants to avoid an uncomfortable conversation may be allowing the person to continue harming himself, his colleagues, and the organization.

Likewise, a pastor who refuses to confront serious sin because he fears losing someone’s approval may be neglecting his responsibility to shepherd. But neither leader may use the necessity of correction to justify harshness, humiliation, contempt, or retaliation.

Galatians 6:1 instructs believers to restore someone caught in a transgression with gentleness, while watching themselves lest they also be tempted. There is a real transgression to address, and the person offering correction has a real responsibility to examine his own heart. The wrongdoing of one person does not suspend the moral responsibilities of the other.

A leader can be personally wronged and remain responsible for the person who wronged him. He can require accountability and extend genuine compassion. He can impose appropriate consequences and pursue restoration. He can forgive an offense and recognize that trust may need to be rebuilt.

He can also love someone deeply and refuse to allow that person to continue harming others.

Love does not eliminate judgment. It governs the way judgment is exercised.

The Chief Shepherd and the Failure of Peter

One of the most moving biblical pictures of this responsibility is Jesus’ restoration of Peter in John 21.

Peter had denied Jesus three times. This was no minor misunderstanding. He had failed publicly and personally at a moment of extraordinary importance. Yet after His resurrection, Jesus meets His disciples beside the Sea of Galilee.

There is a charcoal fire, breakfast, and a conversation that Peter could not have found easy.

Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves Him. The conversation brings Peter’s failure into view, but Jesus does not use that failure as an opportunity to humiliate him. Instead, He entrusts Peter with responsibility for His sheep.

We should be careful with this passage. Jesus’ restoration of Peter belongs to the unique circumstances of His relationship with His apostle. It is not a personnel policy, nor does it mean every person who fails must be restored to the same position. But it gives us a beautiful picture of the character of the Chief Shepherd.

Jesus confronts Peter’s failure without treating Peter as disposable. The conversation looks toward restoration and renewed responsibility. And the responsibility Jesus gives Peter is itself a responsibility to care for others.

Peter, who has experienced the restoring love of Christ, is commissioned to tend His sheep.

The shepherd who has been restored by grace must not forget that grace when shepherding others. Every Christian leader has reason to remember that he, too, is a person who needs correction, forgiveness, patience, and mercy.

Shepherding Becomes More Necessary When People Become Difficult

The biblical picture of shepherding brings our responsibility into even sharper focus.

In Ezekiel 34, God condemns Israel’s shepherds for failing to care for the people entrusted to them. They had not strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bound up the injured, brought back the straying, or sought the lost. Instead, they had ruled with force and harshness.

The indictment concerns both what the shepherds failed to do and how they exercised their authority. They were not merely ineffective administrators. They had failed the people they were supposed to care for.

First Peter 5:2–3 similarly instructs elders to shepherd God’s flock willingly and eagerly, not domineering over those entrusted to them, but being examples to the flock. These passages speak directly to pastoral responsibility. Their moral principles can also help Christian leaders in other settings examine their use of authority, without confusing a business supervisor’s role with the office of a church elder.

A shepherd does not cease to be responsible for the flock when a sheep becomes difficult. Difficulty is often when shepherding becomes most necessary.

The shepherd may need to restrain, separate, protect, or pursue. His concern is not limited to the sheep that has wandered or caused trouble; he must also care for the rest of the flock. Yet even difficult actions are governed by the responsibility to care.

For a leader, that means asking more than how quickly a problem can be resolved. What does this person need to understand? What responsibility must he accept? What harm needs to be repaired? What support or correction might help him grow? What must be done to protect others?

And what does love require of me as I carry out those responsibilities?

What Loving Correction Actually Looks Like

Return to the employee sitting across your desk.

You know he has made a serious mistake, and you have evidence that he was not truthful when you first asked him about it. You could begin by telling him how disappointed you are, reminding him of everything you have done for him, and explaining how much trouble he has caused.

Some of those things may be true. But before you speak, consider what you want the conversation to accomplish.

Do you want him to understand the seriousness of his conduct, accept responsibility, and begin making things right? Or do you want him to experience how angry and disappointed you are? Those are not necessarily the same objective.

A loving leader begins by establishing what is known, explaining the consequences, and identifying the concerns that must be addressed. Then he gives the employee an appropriate opportunity to respond. He listens carefully, not because dishonesty is unimportant, but because he wants to understand what actually happened.

He may discover information he did not previously know. He may also discover that the employee is continuing to evade responsibility. Either way, the leader remains responsible for his own conduct (Galatians 6:5).

He does not need to raise his voice to communicate seriousness or humiliate the employee to establish accountability. He can identify specific conduct, explain its consequences, and state what must change. If the employee must lose responsibilities, he can explain why. If rebuilding trust will take time, he can be honest about that. If termination is necessary, he can communicate the decision without treating the employee as worthless.

And if the leader discovers that he contributed to the problem through unclear expectations, inconsistent direction, or unnecessary harshness, he can acknowledge his responsibility without excusing the employee’s conduct.

This is not weakness. It is disciplined leadership.

The research on feedback gives us an additional reason to be careful. In their 1996 meta-analysis, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi examined 607 feedback-intervention effect sizes. Feedback improved performance on average, but more than one-third of the interventions decreased performance. Their proposed explanation emphasizes where feedback directs attention, including the difference between attention to the task and attention to the self.¹

Consider the difference between telling an employee that a report contains three material errors and telling him that he is careless and cannot be trusted to do anything correctly. The first identifies a problem that can be examined and corrected. The second makes a sweeping judgment about the person.

There may be circumstances in which a sustained pattern justifies serious concerns about someone’s reliability. But a leader should establish those concerns through evidence rather than use exaggerated personal judgments as a substitute for correction.

Loving correction does not make the truth less serious. It makes the leader more careful about how he communicates and applies it.

When Someone Says You Have Not Treated Them Lovingly

One of the most revealing moments in leadership occurs when someone tells a leader that the way he is treating them does not seem loving.

Perhaps the person has misunderstood the leader’s intentions or interpreted a necessary decision as a personal rejection. But perhaps he is right. The leader may have been impatient, dismissive, intimidating, or unnecessarily harsh. He may have become so focused on the problem that he stopped paying attention to the person.

A defensive leader may immediately explain why his actions were justified. He may point to the employee’s failure, the pressures of his position, or the difficulty of the decisions he must make. Some of those explanations may be entirely true, but they do not answer the question of whether he treated the person lovingly.

James 1:19 instructs believers to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. Listening does not require the leader to agree with every accusation. It requires him to take the concern seriously enough to understand it before reaching a conclusion.

He can ask what happened, what the person experienced, and which specific actions communicated a lack of care. He can acknowledge the person’s experience without prematurely agreeing with every interpretation. And if he discovers that he acted wrongly, he should repent.

An apology does not diminish legitimate authority. It demonstrates that the leader recognizes he is accountable to the same standards he expects others to uphold. He may need to acknowledge that his decision was necessary but the way he communicated it was wrong. He may need to admit that his frustration became anger, that his words were unnecessarily harsh, or that he failed to listen.

He may also need to repair harm that an apology alone cannot repair. If he publicly humiliated someone, a private apology may be insufficient. If he unfairly removed responsibilities, he may need to reconsider that decision. If his conduct has made people afraid to speak honestly, rebuilding trust may require sustained change and appropriate accountability.

Explanation is not exoneration. The pressures of leadership may help explain why we acted poorly, but they do not make poor treatment good.

And the absence of bad leadership is not the presence of good leadership. It is not enough to stop being harsh. We must learn to be patient, kind, truthful, courageous, and genuinely concerned for the people entrusted to us.

Love does not merely refrain from doing harm. Love actively pursues another person’s good.

Correction Is Not the Same as Disposal

Sometimes a leader must release someone from a position. Serious misconduct, threats to safety, persistent dishonesty, abuse, or other substantial breaches of responsibility may require decisive action. In some circumstances, protecting others makes immediate separation necessary.

Love for one person must not become neglect of everyone else.

But not every failure requires dismissal, and not every damaged relationship is beyond repair. Consider a normally competent employee who has made a correctable mistake or responded poorly to criticism. Before deciding that the employment relationship must end, a responsible leader should examine whether expectations were clear, whether the employee received appropriate feedback, and whether a reasonable opportunity for improvement exists.

He should also examine his own conduct. Has he contributed to the problem through inconsistent expectations, poor communication, neglect, or unnecessary harshness? Has he mistaken disagreement for disloyalty? Is he responding to an actual inability to fulfill the position, or has he simply become unwilling to continue investing in the person?

There are legitimate reasons to end an employment relationship that do not involve illegal, unethical, or immoral conduct. Organizational changes, sustained inability to perform essential responsibilities, and other substantial circumstances may make separation appropriate. But where a person is normally competent and the difficulty is reasonably correctable, leaders should be reluctant to treat dismissal as a convenient substitute for leadership.

The opportunity to develop a person is part of what makes leadership consequential. That opportunity does not create an unlimited obligation to retain someone. It does create a responsibility to consider whether correction, support, accountability, and restoration are appropriate before choosing separation.

Even when separation is necessary, the leader remains responsible for how it is carried out. He can be clear without being cruel, firm without being contemptuous, and honest without making promises he cannot keep.

A person can lose a position without losing his dignity.

What Everyone Else Learns from Your Response

The employee across the desk is not necessarily the only person affected by the conversation. Others may already know that he made a mistake, and they may be wondering how the leader will respond.

Will he investigate carefully, distinguish an honest error from deliberate misconduct, and apply standards consistently? Will he listen before deciding? Or will he become angry, humiliate the employee, and make an example of him?

What happens to one person can teach an entire organization what to expect.

Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study of 51 manufacturing work teams found that psychological safety was associated with team learning behavior. Psychological safety concerns a shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks, such as acknowledging mistakes or asking questions, without expecting inappropriate interpersonal consequences. It does not mean people are exempt from accountability or entitled to agree with every decision.²

A leader who responds to mistakes with disproportionate anger may teach employees to conceal problems until concealment is no longer possible. He may continue to receive reassuring reports while becoming less aware of what is actually happening. The organization can appear orderly while its leaders are losing access to reality.

And a leader who cannot hear the truth about his own conduct has an additional problem. He may have authority over everyone in the room while having remarkably little access to what those people actually know.

Candor determines whether truth can travel. When honesty becomes unnecessarily costly, people begin editing reality before delivering it.

Research on organizational justice reinforces the importance of the leader’s conduct. A meta-analysis of 183 studies by Jason Colquitt and colleagues distinguished perceptions of outcome fairness, procedural fairness, interpersonal treatment, and the information people receive. These dimensions had meaningful relationships with organizational attitudes and behavior.³

A leader cannot guarantee that every employee will agree with a difficult decision. He can take responsibility for the fairness of the process, the accuracy of the information, and the dignity of his treatment of the person involved.

That is not merely a communication technique. It is part of faithful stewardship.

Leadership Helps Shape the World Beyond the Organization

Imagine an employee who leaves a difficult meeting feeling humiliated and afraid.

He drives home replaying the conversation. He is distracted at dinner. His children notice that he is unusually impatient. His spouse asks what is wrong, and he responds more sharply than he intended.

The leader who conducted the meeting may never see any of this.

That does not make the leader responsible for every subsequent choice the employee makes. Each person remains accountable for his own conduct. But it reminds us that the effects of leadership are not necessarily confined to the workplace.

Research on work-to-family spillover offers evidence of that wider reach. In one study of manufacturing employees in China, abusive supervision was associated with employees’ undermining behavior toward family members, with work-to-family conflict helping explain the relationship. The study does not establish that every harsh interaction causes family harm, but it gives us reason to take the broader consequences of leadership seriously.⁵

There is also a more hopeful possibility.

A leader who handles conflict with patience, clarity, accountability, and respect can demonstrate a way of dealing with difficult people that an employee may not have experienced elsewhere. An employee can learn that admitting a mistake does not require surrendering his dignity. He can learn to receive correction without immediately becoming defensive, to disagree without becoming disrespectful, and to accept responsibility without blaming others.

Those lessons may influence how he treats his colleagues, spouse, children, friends, and eventually the people he leads.

We should not pretend that one good conversation will transform someone’s character. People make their own choices, and transformation requires more than exposure to a good example. But leadership gives us repeated opportunities to model what responsible human relationships look like.

When we help people develop honesty, humility, responsibility, and the ability to handle conflict constructively, we have an opportunity to contribute to the health of families, workplaces, churches, and communities far beyond our own organizations.

We do not have to control a person’s life to make a meaningful contribution to it. We need to be faithful with the opportunities entrusted to us.

Authority Makes Love More Necessary

Return once more to the employee sitting across your desk.

The mistake was real. The dishonesty must be addressed. Other people have been affected, and your responsibility to them has not disappeared. You may need to impose consequences, establish conditions for rebuilding trust, or conclude that the employee cannot remain in his position.

But another responsibility must govern every part of that process.

You must love the person in front of you.

Not merely feel affection for him. Not excuse his conduct. Not promise an outcome you cannot responsibly provide. You must pursue his genuine good while faithfully carrying out the responsibilities entrusted to you.

You must tell him the truth, listen carefully, exercise appropriate judgment, and treat him with dignity. If you have wronged him, you must be willing to acknowledge it. If restoration is possible and appropriate, you should be willing to pursue it. If separation is necessary, you should carry it out without cruelty or retaliation.

And if he has sinned against you personally, you must be especially careful not to use your authority to settle a personal score.

This is what makes leadership more than the exercise of organizational power. The leader is entrusted with responsibilities that affect human lives. His decisions can help people grow in character, responsibility, courage, and truthfulness. His conduct can also discourage, diminish, or damage them.

He cannot control another person’s choices, guarantee repentance, or manufacture reconciliation. He will not always be able to achieve the outcome he desires. But he can remain faithful to his own responsibility.

The difficult conversation is not an interruption of leadership. It is one of the places leadership is practiced.

The question is not simply whether we will make the correct decision. It is whether we will exercise our authority in a way that is truthful, just, humble, and loving toward every person affected by it.

Authority makes love more necessary because the leader has more power to do harm—and more opportunity to do good.

We do not stop shepherding when someone becomes difficult. That is often when shepherding matters most.

Five Coaching Questions

1. When someone under my authority wrongs me personally, how do I distinguish appropriate accountability from a desire to retaliate?

2. Would I make the same decision, using the same standards, if the person involved had not offended me—or if the person were someone I particularly liked?

3. What evidence would the person on the receiving end of my next difficult conversation have that I genuinely care about his good?

4. Have I ever used a correct decision to excuse an unloving manner? If so, what repair is still my responsibility?

5. How can I protect everyone affected by a difficult situation while giving a correctable person a fair opportunity to accept responsibility and grow?

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Endnotes

1. Feedback and performance. Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory,” Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 254–284.

2. Psychological safety. Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–383.

3. Organizational justice. Jason A. Colquitt and colleagues, “Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review of 25 Years of Organizational Justice Research,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 3 (2001): 425–445.

4. Work-to-family spillover. Study of abusive supervision and family undermining among manufacturing employees in China. The reported associations should not be treated as proof of universal or causal effects.

5. Scripture. Luke 12:48; Romans 12:17–21; Ephesians 4:15; Galatians 6:1; John 21:1–19; Ezekiel 34:1–10; 1 Peter 5:2–3; James 1:19. Scripture references are intended for reading in the Berean Standard Bible.

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