You’re probably familiar with the old expression never meet your heroes because they are sure to disappoint you. But what happens when that disappointment stems from the alleged actions of a leader whose teachings helped to shape the foundation of your personal and professional life?
Dan Goddard, the lead pastor at Victory Church in Moose Jaw, Sask., can relate to the former all too well. For Goddard, disappointment came from the American church figure and author Bill Hybels, who was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018.
Bill was one of the premier leadership teachers in Dan’s world. He published over 20 books and Dan devoured them all. He attended multiple conferences hosted by Bill, and brought along friends, family, colleagues and staff members. He used Bill’s materials to train other people. Bill’s teachings were woven into the fabric of Dan’s being.
Dan was faced with a challenge.
“The thought that just kept running through my mind was, I don’t want to lose all the good things that have come into my life through this leader’s influence,” Dan says. “And how do I preserve that? Even if he’s done some things that are tremendously disappointing.”
He decided to write a paper about it.
Check out the podcast below to discover how Dan’s research helps us understand how we can keep the good in the teachings from a disgraced leader.
Dan Goddard:
Humility. It creates a learning posture. It opens our hearts and minds to learn. And really when we have humility, we’re not so concerned with comparing ourselves with somebody else. So, we don’t put them above us or below us. We’re simply saying I can learn from you, from everyone.
Mathieu Yuill:
Hey, it’s Matthew Yuill from the Leading With Nice podcast. And I’m here today with Dan Goddard. Welcome to the podcast.
Dan Goddard:
Thank you. It’s fantastic to be here. Thank you for having me.
Mathieu Yuill:
No, my pleasure. So, we’re actually in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan today. Dan is the lead pastor at Victory Church. He’s been here for 10 years. And Dan, how did you end up here in Moose Jaw? Because you’re not from Moose Jaw.
Dan Goddard:
No. So, I was born and raised in Calgary, and I had the opportunity to pastor there for 13 years and received a call one day asking if we would consider moving here. We felt it was the right thing to do. That was 10 years ago, and it’s been, been a wonderful ride since then.
Mathieu Yuill:
Very awesome. So, we met at Briercrest Seminary, which is a college and seminary just down the street in a place called Caronport, where we’re both working on a masters of Leadership and Management. Now, part of that masters to finish the course is doing a special research project, and I was really fascinated in the winter or fall winter of 2018, when you said you were looking at preserving the legacy of teaching from leaders who have had moral failures. So, tell me, how did you come to that? And am I saying it right? Is that what your research project is on?
Dan Goddard:
That’s fantastic. Yeah, so that is exactly what the research project is about. How do we keep the legacy, keep the teaching, keep the positive, from a leader who has failed us in some way or other, has disappointed us? And, of course, every leader at some level does that, but the way this came about in my world was there was a leader, in particular, a guy named Bill Hybels, who has had a powerful influence on my life and on many other leader’s lives and in particular pastor’s lives, that’s my profession. Learning all this from Hybels, and then really recently Hybels was accused, this leader was accused of some moral failures. They were quite serious and that made big news, and there was discussions all around me and amongst my peers about what to do with this, and how we should respond and so on. And the thought that just kept running through my mind was, “I don’t want to lose all the good things that have come into my life through this leader’s influence. And how do I preserve that?” Even if he’s done some things that are tremendously disappointing.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, Bill is accused of being inappropriate, both with his language, with his actions, sometimes sexual in nature with women at the church, and then also being verbally abusive with some men at his church. So, this is not, just to be clear, this is not something that only at the church world might find inappropriate, but this is something that would be found inappropriate in most workplaces?
Dan Goddard:
That’s correct. I mean, it made big news. Chicago Tribune put out articles and then article on top of article on top of article after that and what complicates it even more is that the accusations were disputed. So, he didn’t just readily admit fault. He claimed innocence and then on it goes from there.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, we were talking before we started recording that this is a tough subject. I kind of liken it to anybody that has to write about hurt and pain. It’s tough. Did you find it tough to approach this topic?
Dan Goddard:
Yeah. I, in fact, when I sat down to begin my research, just even putting my thoughts to paper was tough. I had a few moments where I was just like, I don’t want to do this. I don’t even want to think about this and moments where I, on one side, felt angry in five different ways. And then actually part of the research was to ask other people who knew Bill Hybels and this very situation and ask them how they were processing and responding. And even though I knew my own reactions were quite visceral or quite emotional, I was surprised by how much other people were, I don’t know if the word right word is compromised, or were confused, were struggling with the complexities of the emotions that are tied to subjects like this.
Mathieu Yuill:
And actually Paul Magnus is going to be on another episode of this. You went to him, not once, not twice, but thrice to discuss another topic perhaps, but what happened?
Dan Goddard:
Yeah. So, I just kept thinking, “I want to write about this. I want to think about this more.” But then when I sat down to write about it, I just thought, “Ah, it’s too weighty of a topic and difficult of a topic and maybe controversial, and I’ll try to come up with something else.” And then I go to him and suggest that, and to his credit, he kept encouraging me to go to those places that were maybe uncomfortable for me to address and press into. And I’m now very thankful that he did.
Mathieu Yuill:
When you describe yourself as a fan of Bill Hybel’s work, I’m looking at your bookshelf right now, there’s all of his books are here, I assume you’ve listened to other audio of his work? Tell me how often do you engage, have you engaged with Bill Hybel’s work and for how long?
Dan Goddard:
Yeah, so I would see myself as a learner, as a leadership learner. I love learning, and I love engaging in learning. And this guy, Bill Hybels, was one of the premier leadership teachers in my world. So, he’s written over 20 books. He hosted one of the world’s largest leadership conferences, over a 100,000 people would attend in 70 plus nations that it gets satellited to. And I devoured it all. I read every single one of those 20 something books. Some of them multiple times. I went to all those conferences, brought friends and family and colleagues and staff members. I used his materials and teachings in training other people. So, I was a deep into learning from this mentor leadership teacher.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, the pain for you was real?
Dan Goddard:
It was and still is. And I still haven’t sorted through all of the realities. In fact, one of my conclusions in all of this research is that we will likely never know, most of us, how guilty, or even whether or not he’s guilty. And that becomes a complicated thing in our hearts and in our lives, as we wrestle through some of these issues. We live in a world that our lives are becoming increasingly public, media and social media. People love to talk about other people. And yet many of these people we don’t know personally. So, we’re just depending on what we’re hearing from others and that complicates the whole journey.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, tell me, how did you approach figuring out how we keep the learning? What was your process like? What did you do?
Dan Goddard:
Yeah, so I kept bringing myself back to that. I want to keep the learning. I want to preserve legacy, even if someone has done wrong. So, part of what I tried to do was remove the specific individual from the equation. It’s not just Bill Hybels, this is any leader who’s had a failure or a perceived failure. Anyone who’s disappointed us. And I just began to research. So, part of it was to interview significant leaders, influential leaders. The leaders that I interviewed, I interviewed particularly leaders who had also been influenced by Bill Hybels, and asked them about their own experiences, their processing, and what they’ve done to preserve that legacy or what they might suggest to help us do that. I also read several books and engaged in several other resources. And so, yeah, this was quite a journey of learning.
Mathieu Yuill:
What did you find out, or what did you discover from the other leaders who’ve been influenced by Bill Hybels?
Dan Goddard:
Yeah, so one of the things I found out was that learning from someone who is, I guess, alive, if I can use that term, when we learn from people who’ve passed away, it seems emotionally easier to let the failures of those people go and preserve the good traits. It seems like if they’re still alive we have a harder time doing that. And so, again, just this acknowledging the reality of the complexity was one of my main learnings from those who I interviewed and surveyed. Another learning, actually probably the primary learning from every resource that I approached, was that humility is the key to continuing learning, to having an open heart and an open mind, to being a learning individual
Mathieu Yuill:
Molly Fletcher, who is an author and a consultant, she was at one time a sport’s agent says, “Trade defensiveness for curiosity, humility is the essence of a hungry leader.”
Dan Goddard:
Yes, I wish I had that quote a couple of weeks ago when I was presenting this paper. That is exactly the findings that I discovered, and humility it creates a learning posture. It opens our hearts and minds to learn. And really when we have humility, we’re not so concerned with comparing ourselves with somebody else. So, we don’t put them above us or below us. We’re simply saying, “I can learn from you, from everyone.”
Mathieu Yuill:
That’s powerful. Just thinking about what that means to not put somebody on a pedestal, or also not think you’re better than them, that really opens up a lot of opportunities to learn.
Dan Goddard:
It does. And again, approaching our learning from that posture of saying, “I can learn from anyone. There’s something everyone can teach me.” And there’s powerful things that everyone can teach me. And rather than sort of closing ourselves off from people, we open ourselves up and that’s the learning posture.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, that’s hard though. What does that look like practically? What does it look like in real life to be humble in your learning? What do you think?
Dan Goddard:
Well, you remind yourself of how much we don’t know, right? We remind ourselves of our own failures. There’s a human tendency, psychology teach this, but there’s a human tendency to minimize our own faults and minimize our own failures and sort of maximize the faults and failures of others, sort of a self-serving bias that we all have mentally. So, acknowledging that bias and even working to reverse it, to be very real and honest about our own failures and capacity for failure, and then being able to offer others the grace to say, “I acknowledge that you will fail, too, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from you and can’t get good things from your life.”
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah. It must be tough, especially, when people in positions of trust, and they can maybe be doctor, you’re a professor, a pastor, when they go through a failure, it must be even tougher than if it was a speaker at a conference or the CEO of a tech company. Would you agree with that?
Dan Goddard:
For sure. So, positions of trust, there’s certain types of authority that we put more trust in than others, and those ones are the ones that seem to be the hardest. And, yet, maybe the most important that we preserve the good things. We don’t have to keep everything from everyone. And I think the best illustration of this is actually our parents. Everyone has a parent who has failed them. Everyone has a parent who has done them wrong, because your parents weren’t perfect. And the intimacy that we have with our parents means that we know their failures. We know their wrongs, we know them intimately. And yet most of us, I would venture to say 90 some percent of us, could also find good things that our parents could leave, good things out of their legacy.
Dan Goddard:
And I think there’s tremendous value in acknowledging the wrongs and finding healing from the wrongs, but I don’t know that we’ve done enough in our culture and in our society on the reverse of that learning to say, “Not only do I need healing from the wrongs that my parents have done, but I also need to preserve the good things, to preserve the legacy that my parents have left me.” And maybe our counselors and our psychologists and our coaches and mentors could help us on that side as well. I think there is a lot of treasure available to us on that side.
Mathieu Yuill:
Is this something that came to you as you’re doing this research project, or is this a learning you’ve had throughout the rest of your life?
Dan Goddard:
I think it crystallized for me as I was doing this research, but there’s various moments in my life where this has been a reality to me. When my wife’s father passed away, was actually a moment where our kids were very small. And one of our big thoughts was that they wouldn’t be raised to know him personally. And of course that’s a big deal in all of our lives. We think a lot about our parents and grandparents being there when our children are raised. And one of the decisions my wife and I made when her dad passed away was that we would preserve the good things in his legacy. There was a lot of things we remember that are negative, and a lot of things we remember that are positive about him. And it’s not that we wouldn’t acknowledge the negative things to our kids and accept those and talk about those, but that we wanted them also to know some of the wonderful and positive things. That was probably one of the first times where I used this principle and that certainly came back to me as I was doing this research.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, we were discussing that out of this research actually came a set of principles.
Dan Goddard:
Yes.
Mathieu Yuill:
And we’ve talked about one, humility. What were some other, what’s another principle that you-
Dan Goddard:
-Let me just fire off some of the thoughts-
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, perfect. For sure.
Dan Goddard:
That came to us, so humility is a big deal. And learning with a posture of humility helps us preserve legacy from those who have failed us, or we perceive have failed us. Another one would be what I call biographical learning. Just learning the skill of, and this is probably my favorite one or one of my favorite ideas, is that when we learn from other people, we don’t just learn information. People’s lives influence us. Sometimes we say, “Leadership is more caught than taught.” Well, that’s something that’s through all of life, it’s not just leadership. Every lesson of life is caught not just taught in that. That means a person’s life is influencing us. We seem to be pretty good at biographical learning. Again, like I mentioned earlier with people who have passed away, but struggle with biographical learning in the present tense.
Dan Goddard:
And being a pastor, this idea of biographical learning has really come to life for me with scripture, because the Bible records the stories of life after life after life, that we can learn from. There’s hundreds of what we call Bible characters. And yet these characters in the Bible are not perfect. They fail regularly. They make all kinds of mistakes. In fact, the Bible sometimes really graphically records their failures and mistakes, as well as their successes and their good traits. And it invites us to learn from them both ways, not one or the other. We have a tendency of going all one way and saying, “This person was horrible. I can learn nothing from them”, or, “This person was amazing and I should emulate them entirely.” And yet most of the time it’s a both and equation, not an either or equation, which actually, and I’ll just leave you with this one, but would take me to another principle, which is just choosing what I call the learner path rather than the judger path.
Dan Goddard:
So, when we take the judger path, we’re taking a path where it’s an either or tendency. Can I learn from this person? Yes or no? Right. It’s black or it’s white. What a university president, president of University of Southern California, he wrote this great book called the Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. He calls this thinking gray, and he says, “Not everything is either or, it’s not a full-on dichotomy. There’s a both and relationship.” And I think just building that skill of thinking gray, of choosing the learner path, rather than the judger path, that’s another one that will help us preserve people’s positive legacy.
Mathieu Yuill:
I guess there’s learning on the other side, if you are that leader that is putting out great teaching, there’s a lesson for you here as well, too, that you’re not impenetrable. And you’d be wise to be on top of your deeds and actions.
Dan Goddard:
Yeah, there absolutely is. There’s an encouragement here to be watchful over our own lives. And actually when we can work at preserving someone’s positive legacy, it helps us acknowledge their faults in a way that is not just they’re terrible, and I don’t want anything to do with them, but in a way that says, “Oh, and I have faults, too.” And I better watch out for those and build up my own character and my own life and protect myself, even put some boundaries around my life so that I will not fall into some of those same traps. So, learning from a person’s life comes both ways. We learn from their successes and their failures. And I would just take us back to this parenting illustration. We learn from our parents. We have things that we say, “I would like to do the same.” We have other things that we go, “Wow, I would like to not repeat some of those mistakes in my journey.” And great leaders would learn both.
Mathieu Yuill:
And I guess the key is to be building on that learning, right? This is, so, for Bill Hybels, this is not the end of what he has taught, because others will build on it.
Dan Goddard:
Yes. And again, if we look way back in history, we have a pretty good ability to say, “Oh yeah, people’s mistakes are redeemable. People can pull through their mistakes and they can continue on and do great things if they will have a change of heart and so on.” That is harder for us to do real time with others. And it’s hard for us to do with ourselves. Again, this idea of a judger path or a learner path, when you go down the judger path, what you do is you don’t give people the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and yourself to learn from your mistakes, to become greater at the next phase of life than you are in this phase of life. And all of us are going to have failures. All of us are going to have things that we’re disappointed in ourselves and in others. And yeah, that’s a fantastic learning.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, how many principals do you have? We’ve we’ve gone through humility and the learner’s path. How many principals are there?
Dan Goddard:
So, I have 83 principles for you. No, I’m just kidding.
Mathieu Yuill:
Dan, that is not a comedy podcast, Dan.
Dan Goddard:
I think there’s six or seven in the paper, but let’s talk about a couple more. So, one is what I call reframing. And this is actually a principle that is taught in lots of books, and one that we’ve learned at Briercrest through professor Magnus there and various others. But one of the things you can do when you’re heading down a path of feeling discouraged or feeling upset about something is to objectively pull yourself back from the situation a little bit and say, “Is there another way I can frame what I’m thinking about, what I’m looking at? The story I’m telling myself about what’s happening here?” And that is a fantastic skill to learn, to say, “Am I framing this in a way that’s helpful?” And stepping back and saying, “I’d like to just frame my thoughts around this circumstance, around this situation in a different way, that will actually be helpful for me and helpful for others.”
Mathieu Yuill:
And that isn’t just a mental exercise. You can physically reframe yourself. So, when you’re in that moment where you’re looking to reframe something, physically, maybe taking a few steps to the right or left, or taking a deep breath that just helps kind of reset you as a human being, to look at something in a different way.
Dan Goddard:
It does. And I mean, there’s all kinds of skills you can learn around the reframing thing. I think just taking a different physical posture, telling yourself you’re going to stop thinking about this right now, and that you’re going to come back to it tomorrow. One of my favorite things to do to reframe is to discuss my thoughts with a friend and just to say, “Here’s what I’m wrestling with right now.” And almost invite them to tell me I’m crazy, right? Invite them to give me some feedback on my thoughts or to give me some new ways of looking at my thoughts. This skill of reframing can be a very powerful tool. We live in a culture that gets stuck in its frames, that likes to make a quick judgment on things.
Dan Goddard:
So, a piece of news comes out, we want to know what the commentators think. The commentators come out and just go, “Well, this is the conclusion. That leader did this in this situation, and it was a fantastic move, or it was a terrible move.” And we’re almost forced into choosing a side quickly. And I think learning to be flexible in our frames, learning to reframe, learning to think about things from other angles and other sides, is an important skill.
Mathieu Yuill:
Hmm. What else?
Dan Goddard:
The last thing that I would encourage is, when we see faults, when we see mistakes, when we see failures, be bold about naming them, facing them, addressing them, and coming at them from a perspective of this is a changeable reality. Repentance is possible, forgiveness is possible. People do change. So, I think there’s a tendency sometimes when we address failure or disappointment, especially in others, and sometimes in ourselves, there’s a tendency to just sort of choose a blackout strategy. I’m not going to think about that anymore, or I’m going to pretend that’s not true, or I’m going to push that to the side. A boldness in naming it, a boldness in addressing it, sometimes we call this candor, having candor in our discussions with ourselves and with others about these issues. That actually, it’s a bit counter-intuitive, but it actually allows us to step past those things. And again, go back to the good or address the good again when we choose that bold attitude.
Mathieu Yuill:
Dan, so you are a pastor and you preach on Sundays, so for those that aren’t familiar with church or whatnot, have you ever spoken about this from the platform?
Dan Goddard:
You know what, I have. We talk a lot in our context. In fact, the tagline of our church, that we live in a reasonably small town, Moose Jaw, 35,000 people, so if you go around Moose Jaw, you will see this tagline everywhere. And the tagline is “No Perfect People.” So, it’s interesting. All of us, when it comes to morality, have this initial gut reaction of, “Oh, I’m a failure. I make mistakes. I blow it.” And to be reminded, hey, there’s no perfect people. And we serve a God, in our context, we serve a God who’s full of grace, full of love, full of second chances, and third and fourth and fifth chances, who redeems difficult and painful situations, turns them for good. And so that’s something that we talk about a lot in this church is that we believe things can turn around.
Dan Goddard:
We’re just starting this Sunday, in fact, we’re starting a new series called No Perfect Family. And we’re talking about the reality that all of us have brokenness and mistakes in our families and areas where things we’re not proud of, and we put on a pretty good show. Again, we live in a culture that knows how to put a good front on. We can post some nice things on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter make ourselves look pretty good, but you get behind the scenes. All of us have things that make us feel ashamed. And yet those are the very places, where if we’re willing to go there, we can see them turn for good.
Mathieu Yuill:
So, if you’re listening to this right now and you want to hear Dan’s message on that, that would be March 10th, 2019. Dan, where can somebody go to hear that or where can they go to hear more of, if they’ve said, “Hey, this Dan guy seems to know what’s up.” If they want to hear more, where do they go?
Dan Goddard:
So, two things you need to remember, one, is the word victory and the other is the town Moose Jaw. So, if you Google that, victory Moose Jaw, or you go on YouTube, we have a couple of YouTube channels with various things on them, and we have some live streaming as well. So, all of our services and messages and so on are put online through various mediums online, but YouTube and Facebook are both right there.
Mathieu Yuill:
Dan, thank you so much. The key takeaways, just to approach learning with humility, I think is such a powerful tool. And just to remember that we all fail at times, two great learnings and takeaways from our time together. Thank you so much for making time for me tonight, and I really look forward to sharing this with people.
Dan Goddard:
Very good. Well, thank you. It’s been fantastic to be a part of this, and I want to encourage just the listeners, you can learn from anyone, even the likes of me. I’m on here. And if you take that posture learning from anyone, I think you’ll be glad you did.
Mathieu Yuill:
I want to thank our listeners. To Learn more about this topic, visit leadingwithnice.com. And on our way out, I want to thank the people that help make this podcast come together, Jeff Anhorn, Andrew Park, Austin Pomeroy. They all are involved in the production of this, and I am so grateful for them. So, for Leading With Nice, my name is Matthew Yuill, and we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty, and get results. Talk to you next time.