King Solomon and Leadership

King Saul: Life of a Failed Leader

King David taught many early lessons on leadership. His most notable lesson focuses on the efficiency and the effectiveness of a leader. King David’s early success was marked by this lesson (Beeftu 62). In his battle, he chose five stones to use against Goliath, and only used one (English Standard Version, 1 Samuel 17). David killed the giant, which deems him effective, while consuming only 20 percent of his resources, which is efficient.

Successful leaders understand and subscribe to the importance of efficiencies and effectiveness. In the Bible we see this teaching through the success story of King David. However just as we learn from successful leaders, there are also lessons to be realized from failed ones. The life of King Saul is a great example of how a failed leader can provide important teachings. Soul’s life demonstrates three lessons from failed leadership including: leaders must take responsibility for their actions leaders cannot be paranoid and leaders must be able to standalone (when needed) King Saul could have avoided failure had he been aware of and practiced these fundamental leadership principles. Leadership examples from today can be examined and compared to the success and failure of the past, including the story of King Saul and his demise as a leader.

Accepting responsibility for ones own actions is critical for a leader that intends to maintain their position of authority. Leaders must accept responsibility for their actions, if they expect others in the organization to do the same. An effective leader will hold others accountable to ensure that individual responsibilities are met. If the leaders of the organization do not accept responsibility than others will take the same approach; resulting in continuous finger pointing rather than productivity. An example of this would be a company executive doing a wrongful act and blaming external factors for it. This “blaming” would lead to the...