Sometimes a book comes across my desk that catches my attention with a unique angle on leadership. My friend, Tom Harper, just wrote one. It’s called Through Colored Glasses–how great leaders reveal reality. It’s written as a leadership fable and quite insightful. I highly recommend it. I asked Tom if I could ask him some questions about the book and here are his answers.

What prompted you to write Through Colored Glasses?

Anyone who’s been a leader has observed how people misunderstand each other, withhold information, and manipulate others to get ahead. There’s a widespread lack of honesty in workplaces (including churches).

I wrote this book to give leaders a tool to fight this trend. The story’s main lessons center on how to wield the power of truth in the office – not just by being honest and transparent, but by utilizing concepts and techniques found in the Bible to pull truth out of people.

I believe if you understand and apply the biblical principles this story teaches, you’ll reveal reality all around you, every day. As a result, you’ll be a much more effective leader.

Explain the essence of the book reflected in the title.

You’ve probably heard the saying “he wears rose-colored glasses,” describing a person that’s always optimistic, even to the point of naiveté. It’s as if they ignore reality.

Through Colored Glasses describes how most of us see the world – through lenses that are anything but rosy. We’ve got a cloud of emotions, moods and thoughts coloring our views.

When we look at each other through those off-color lenses, what do we see? We tend to interpret each other’s words and actions according to our own biases, rather than trying to understand the other person from their point of view.

Why did you choose to use a fable as the core of the book?

For me, story has always been an effective teacher, whether it’s through leadership fables by Patrick Lencioni and Ken Blanchard, biographies, true-life dramas or even novels. Plus, I’m always intrigued when a conference speaker tells his or her personal story, sharing the hard lessons they’ve learned.

As I strategized this book project, I realized the most poignant and memorable way for me to teach what I’ve learned would be through a story that brings the concepts to life.

Many nonfiction books today could be half as lengthy, without losing any meat. With this in mind, I kept this book to 100 or so pages. You can read it on a plane trip. I tried to make it fast-moving all the way to the climax, where the main lessons come into focus.

You mention filters and facades we deal with. How does a leader discover unfiltered reality in the heart of another, and in himself or herself?

One way to improve our ability to understand what someone’s thinking is to get to know the person. As leaders, though, we can’t intimately know everyone under our care.

To remedy this, we can tap the Bible’s great wisdom for understanding the motivations behind people’s words and actions. It gives us cues to watch for. I’ll give you two examples.

First, Proverbs 15:13 says, “A happy heart makes the face cheerful, but heartache crushes the spirit.” Simply assessing someone’s countenance can alert us there’s something significant going on behind the scenes, urging us to move forward with sensitivity.

Another example is listening for verbal signals. Two of my favorite verses on this are also from Proverbs:

• “The wise in heart accept commands, but a chattering fool comes to ruin” (Prov. 10:8).
• “The prudent keep their knowledge to themselves, but a fool’s heart blurts out folly” (Prov. 12:23).

In other words, you can gauge a person’s overall wisdom by how much they respect authority and use word economy. If someone constantly announces what they think, their overall judgment is questionable. Giving them greater responsibility probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

We can apply these verses to ourselves, of course. Listen to yourself in your next few conversations. At any point are you defensive, impatient or unusually verbose? At that moment, assess what’s going on in your heart.

When I listen to myself speak, I often hear internal struggles coming through. It reminds me to entrust my worries to God – he wants us to lean on him at all times, even as words are coming out of our mouths.

What is the biggest takeaway in your book for leaders?

After more than two decades of reading leadership books and holding them up to the Bible, I’m convinced that biblical principles undergird just about all the leadership best practices you’ll come across.

So, my #1 takeaway would simply be to read the Bible for yourself, and do what it says!

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I recommend you add this book to your reading list. You can purchase it here on Amazon.

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