IVP - Strangely Dim

Inside the Circle of Women

By David A. Zimmerman

If you’re like me (and by that I mean, if you are male), you are likely overwhelmed by equal parts dread and curiosity by the phrase “circle of women.” I remember, back to the fourth grade, a general sense of frustration at having no idea why only the girls in my class were called into a special assembly. I have some idea now, and frankly I’m left a bit nostalgic for the days of my youthful ignorance, but I digress. The point is, early on we men are systematically excluded from this “circle of women.” We have to content ourselves with the meager provisions left for us outside the circle, which consist mostly of overwhelming systemic cultural, political and financial bias toward the male gender.

But I recently found myself smack-dab on the circumference of the circle of women in, of all places, an ice cream parlor. Suddenly, I was the minority. I would not be directing the conversation; I would not be the center of attention; I would not have occasion to share stories of all my accomplishments or talk about weighty matters of sport and golf. No, we talked of girly things—things that you spray on yourself, for example.

Don’t get me wrong. I have great respect for the women I was gnoshing with. Perhaps what surprised me most of all about the afternoon was how comfortable I felt in the circle. I mean, let’s face it: guys’ conversations can be somewhat stilted. The “circle of men,” if there is such a thing, might often be confused with a “cone of silence.”

I have a friend over for chess every once in a while, and we could easily play one game of chess for an hour and a half without any dialogue beyond the occasional chess smackdown. My wife is dumbstruck when she comes home and asks me, “How he’s doing?” and I tell her, “OK,” and she asks me, “Did he tell you about the big changes in his job or that his wife is pregnant or that he’s thinking about joining the Peace Corps?” and I tell her, “No.”

She’s dumbstruck, I think, because she’s used to life in the circle of women, where people seem to be taught to set aside their agendas and enter into communion with one another. I, on the other hand, am not put off by silence because I so often inhabit the cone of silence myself. It’s easier there—if no one knows what you’re thinking, they’re less likely to disagree with you and more likely just to shut up and move their bishop.

Perhaps I’m idealizing the circle of women. Perhaps I’m even oversimplifying the circle of men. I do, after all, have very healthy, soul-building relationships with men, and I know of some women who do not feel safe with one another. But I do find my fourth grade memory a little easier to take when I imagine the girls assembly as a half hour of chit-chat over ice cream rather than a half hour of talking about what I think they were talking about. Some things are none of my business.

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Enter the circle of superheroes here.

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The Unscented Leader

By David A. Zimmerman

Leaders are like deodorant. I’m serious. I drew this conclusion in a moment of epiphany as I was anointing my armpits with what my family has affectionately called “stink-juice.” My deodorant had a sticker on it that read “Unscented leader!” Nobody smells less than these folks, apparently, and in the world of deodorant, unscentedness is next to godliness.

I liked the phrase so much that I peeled it from my deodorant stick and stuck it to the back of my PDA, a gentle reminder to myself that if I am to lead, I am to do it in away that doesn’t raise a stink.

After all, unscented leaders are uncommon. We live in a celebrity culture that stretches to big business, to the point where corporate big shots such as Les Moonves (CBS) or Michael Eisner (Disney) or Steve Jobs (Apple) or Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) are household names.

Such high-profile leaders render their employees anonymous—probably not on purpose, for I’m sure that they recognize the contributions their staff make to their companies’ success. But if you work under a celebrity CEO, you’ll probably find that you punch in each morning and clock out each night, and even your family members, on mention of your company, are more apt to think of your boss than you. Don’t take this personal, all you high-profile CEOs out there, but you smell a little.

But a celebrity culture generates celebrities as a matter of course, as much because we demand to have them as because people strive to be them. The high-profile leader broadcasts the scent a group wants to be known for, and as consumers, we want to know ahead of time whether, for example, we’re going to smell like waterfalls or fire or any such other manly scent. There is, however, an internal odor to leadership that’s more onerous to me: the stink that power can bring to an otherwise collaborative relationship.

There is absolutely a place for leadership in most ventures, I’ll gladly grant. Without coordination a complex task is doomed to failure, and to borrow from the Scriptures, without vision a people perish. But just as deodorant is meant for the armpits and not, say, for the eyeballs, leadership has a specific and limited function in any collaborative effort. The leader who rolls over her subjects without cause impedes the agenda of the group and potentially causes pain and a nasty rash.

Pastor John Ortberg has spoken of church leaders as “leading servants” to convey the idea that they serve the cause of something bigger than them just as their workers do. Similary, Jim Collins in his book Good to Great exhorts leaders to aspire to “level five,” where they see themselves as part of a team earnestly working together toward the same goals rather than seeing themselves as shepherds looking after a bunch of dumb sheep. Their concepts appeal to me as someone who is more often sheep than shepherd: If I’m trying to do my part in a collaborative effort, an unscented leader will do for me what I can’t do for myself but let me do what I can do best, for the good of all of us.

But mostly I like to think of leaders as deodorant because it helps me take them off the pedestal that I or we or they have put them on. Leaders serve a purpose, and I benefit from them when they are adequately serving their purposes. With the right leader applying the right leadership to the right place at the right time, we all come through the toughest problems smelling like a rose.