42 actas del xii congreso católicos y vida pública and certainly these are the most accurate words to describe leadership: priest, prophet and king. Therefore, in some way we must be true to our baptism´s calling to show leadership. This is the most important theme that I would want everyone to remember from this conference, the understanding that life and Christian life is giving me a leadership opportunity and responsibility now, whatever is my state of life. In a time of VUCA we need to show leadership in all environments, certainly in the Christian frame. I want to talk about a few of these themes and, in a way, what we might call spirituality of VUCA. A way of understanding leadership in a very spiritual way. The first idea: we are each called to embrace a leadership, an opportunity and a responsibility I’ve already introduced and discussed. The next big idea will be that we all need to keep improving our leadership skills all the time by being loving, being a servant when we interact. I want to tell you a story that helps me to re-enforce this point about the skills we all need to acquire and keep improving, and the story is about Pope Francis. As you heard in the introduction, I wrote a short book about Pope Francis’ leadership style and I told stories that Jesuits, who knew him in Argentina as Father Bergoglio, had shared with me. One of them told me that when Bergoglio took over the rectorship of the Colegio Mejor on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, it was in a terrible financial situation. He told the seminarians that they could no longer afford to pay people to come and wash the dishes and clean the hallways, they had to do the work themselves, and Bergoglio said “I will do the laundry, this will be my job”. These Jesuits told me that in those days if you got up in the morning very early and went into the basement you would see Bergoglio throwing people’s dirty underwear and gym clothes into a washing machine, but what does this have to do with leadership? They didn’t explain, but I felt that what they were saying was channeling the idea of a leadership definition that the US Air Force used “Leadership is the art of influencing and directing people in such a way that it will win their obedience, confidence, respect and cooperation in achieving common objectives”. Well, I think that when Bergoglio stood up in front of the seminarians and basically said, well I’m sorry we are in a difficult situation, we all need to sacrifice and I will go first, I will show the way. This really won the respect and confidence of these people. I’m not asking you, if you’re the rector of the university, to do everybody’s laundry, but what I am saying is in our communities,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzUzNTA=