David's lessons on leadership - Everyone Matters

In a series of posts, I am going to reflect upon what we can learn about leadership from David, King of Israel.  If this is the first post in the series you have read, please do a quick review of the January 2, 2009 post titled  “David’s lessons on leadership – Intro”; that post outlines why I am looking into David’s life.

The previous post dealt with a detail on how leaders should treat their team titled “Care for your crew”.  For this post I am going to stay on the topic of the team with a discussion on “Everyone Matters”

In a particularly difficult moment of David’s life, he provides a great lesson for how leaders should treat everyone that is part of accomplishing a goal or pursuing a mission.  However, before we get to this lesson, I need to set it up with a brief back-story.

David was running from Saul (his former boss and king of the Hebrews) and getting quite weary of it.  So he broke with his own people and started serving Achish, who is the Philistine king of Gath.  David brought with him a large band of well-trained men and was assigned a city to live in – Ziklag.  For a year and a half David raided other people on behalf of Achish and the Gath king became so convinced of David’s loyalty that he assigned David and his men to be bodyguards during Achish’s planned attack on Saul and the Hebrews.  At Achish’s request David and his men pack up their gear and prepare to go to battle alongside the Philistines.

In a twist of fate, the princes and nobles that surround Achish fear that David is a spy and make Achish choose between David and themselves.  Achish chooses his own and sends David back to his adopted city of Ziklag.

Here is where we pick up the story and arrive at David’s lesson for us that Everyone Matters. 

David and his men get back to Ziklag and find it a smoking ruin.  One of the tribes that David has been raiding, the Amalekites, have come into town while David was gone, crushed the city and stolen everything; wives, children, cattle and goods.  Their entire adopted city is destroyed; David and his men are at their lowest point, they wept aloud until they had no strength to weep (1 Sam 30:4).   It got so bad that some of David’s men even starting talking about executing David for convincing them to follow Achish.  David is now dealing with a potential mutiny along with the loss of his own family and household.

David, always a man of action, takes six hundred men and goes after the Amalekites.  When they get to the Besor Ravine, two hundred of the men become too weary to go on.  They are left at the ravine and the rest of the men carry on the raid on the enemy.  The raid is successful; they retrieve their families, all of their possessions and a large amount of the enemy’s wealth as well.  On the way back to Ziklag they arrive at the ravine where the weary men had encamped.  Some of David’s men start going over to the dark side (Star Wars reference) saying, "Because they did not go out with us, we will not share with them the plunder we recovered. However, each man may take his wife and children and go” (1 Sam 30:22).

David replies, "The share of the man who stayed with the supplies is to be the same as that of him who went down to the battle. All will share alike." (1 Sam 30:24).   David made this command, given at the end of a battle, into a statute and ordinance for Israel.

I have long believed that for extraordinary performance to occur in an organization, three things must be in the minds of each individual; 1) they know their role 2) they believe it matters and 3) they are able to be proud of their work.  David sets the tone for his leadership early saying, ‘each will have a role in my kingdom and no role is more important than any other’.  We need to take this lesson and extend it into our team and our organizations.  If you are like me, you probably always say ‘thank you’ to each who are serving, but may not mean it with the same level of intensity for every role that is being performed.  We have to constantly ask ourselves, in our hearts do we think some roles are more important than others?  Malcolm Forbes said, “People who matter are most aware that everyone else does, too”.  The guy who had a private 727 jet named ‘Capitalist Tool’ and published Forbes magazine; the ultimate capitalist realized the same thing David taught us 3,000 years ago – Everyone Matters.