'The' Leadership Book You Have Been Looking For
For the formational crisis in leadership
Our task, as human beings, as human leaders, is far more humble and close to home. It is to grow up. It is to learn, through the experiences we are given, who we are—what it means to be courageous, what it is to serve, what it is to be loved and to love, what it is to be real, what it is to be fully human. True leadership is leadership of ourselves and others into this kind of life: embracing our full humanity, discovering what it is to be fully human, to participate fully in the world. Once we understand this, we begin to understand that leadership is not restricted to the narrow range of activities it is often supposed to be.—Simon Walker, The Undefended Leader Trilogy Book 1
We are living through a collapse of leadership trust. Moral failures, abuses of power, burnout, narcissistic patterns, anxious systems, and communities left wounded or disillusioned have forced a painful reckoning. Our crisis is not primarily strategic. It’s not about competence - as if there is some new leadership practice we need to develop to solve things. It’s not even about culture.
And we are also living through a collapse of people wanting to lead and being able to survive in leadership. Everywhere I turn — in churches, charities, and mentoring conversations — I keep hearing a similar confession from leaders:
“I’m not sure I can do this much longer.”
It’s not just pressure or tiredness, although those are bone-crushingly present. It’s something much deeper.
There is a profound sense of disorientation — as if the familiar maps for leadership no longer match the landscape we’re actually walking through. And our landscape has changed so rapidly that, like the tide going out, it has revealed the nature of our leadership crisis.
It is a formational crisis — a crisis of the leader’s interior world.
Working harder, smarter, and with greater competencies is not enough to navigate the world we now lead. Something else, much more fundamental and intrinsic to the nature of leadership, needs our attention.
This is why I keep returning to Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader. Long before we were talking widely about trauma, attachment, differentiation, or systems theory, Walker was naming something fundamental:
Leaders fail not because they lack skill but because they lack interior freedom. They become defended.
The Defended Leader
Defendedness is not a kind of villainy or wickedness. It is a survival strategy.
Walker explains how a defended leader protects their core, their self: guarding wounds, managing fear, holding on to identity, projecting strength, over-functioning, withdrawing, charming, controlling, over-working, numbing, protecting. What sits backstage inevitably leaks onto their front stage. And when the front stage outstrips the maturity of the back stage, and when the off-stage (that hidden life in Christ) is thin or neglected, power becomes distorted.
The result?
Anxious leadership
Reactive leadership
Ego-driven leadership
Leadership that cannot be questioned or held, learn, and admit to being wrong.
Leadership that fails to metabolise pain and grief
This is the story behind so many leadership collapses in the church today. In a world marked by volatility, cultural fragmentation, and relentless political tension, formation is no longer optional. The world is already shaping—and often misshaping—our inner lives. Which is why who we are as leaders now matters more than ever.
Integrating Psychology, Theology, and Reality
What makes Walker’s work so compelling is its integration:
• psychology (ego structures, defences, attachment)
• theology (kenosis, humility, cruciformity, hiddenness)
• leadership theory (power, trust, presence, formation)
And what makes Walker’s integration so valuable for Christians is that it brings together three domains we too often keep apart—our inner psychology, our lived theology, and the real dynamics of leadership and power. Most Christian formation falters precisely at the points where these worlds collide. And the world we now inhabit is forcing those collisions with seismic intensity.
We preach kenosis but have no language for the ego; we teach humility but ignore the attachment wounds that sabotage it; we call leaders to cruciformity without attending to the psychological structures that make self-giving unsafe or impossible.
Together, these three create a coherent account of leadership.
This is what makes Walker’s work so compelling: it refuses to let Christians live split lives. Healing (psychology), holiness (theology), and vocation (leadership) belong together. Integrated, they offer a pathway into the freedom Jesus promises—freedom from the defended, anxious self; freedom for the self poured out in love; freedom to lead in ways that are courageous, compassionate, and deeply Christ-shaped.
This is not an optional extra for Christians. It is the very texture of Christian leadership.
And Walker insists that this kind of leadership is not, at its core, a technique. It is a way of being. A leader’s authority flows from their interior world, their relationships, and their spiritual grounding. It is a matter of formation — and this is precisely the arena in which God meets us, shapes us, and equips us.
If we give ourselves to formation as leaders, we discover that God is already there. The journey toward becoming an undefended leader is not something we undertake alone; it is the very place where God chooses to take part with us.
An undefended leader then is one who:
• doesn’t need to protect their own status
• can hold power without dominating
• can release control without losing identity
• can admit to being wrong
• can face conflict without collapsing
• creates safety rather than threat
• lives from being, not performance
This is the kind of Christian leadership that can navigate any context.
This is the kind of leadership the church desperately needs.
Why Walker’s Approach Matters
One of the reasons Walker’s Undefended Leader model speaks so powerfully today is because it’s based on what researchers call a constructivist understanding of how people learn, grow, and make sense of life.
That sounds technical, but the idea is actually very simple — and deeply biblical and Christian.
1. What “constructivist” means (in plain English)
Constructivism says that:
We don’t just receive truth like data being downloaded.
We build meaning together, over time, through relationships, experience, and interpretation.
In other words, human beings co-create the world they live in — how they see themselves, how they understand others, how authority works, how trust grows, and how communities hold together.
2. In other words
Understanding is relational. We learn from how we interact, not by standing at a distance pretending to be “objective.”
Meaning comes from experience. People form beliefs and behaviours through their lived story — not because they were told the “right answer.”
Reality is co-created. In any church, team, or ministry, things like identity, belonging, power, and trust are created by how people relate and behave, not by rulebooks alone.
3. Why this matters for Christian leaders
If reality in our communities is something we help build, then leadership is not first about techniques or fixing people.
Leadership is about:
Creating the conditions where truth can be heard.
Making space for people to discover what God is doing.
Helping communities shape healthy patterns of trust, identity, and power.
Owning how we contribute to the culture we live in — good or bad.
This is precisely what The Undefended Leader is trying to do:
To show leaders how their inner life, presence, trustworthiness, and self-awareness help build the very reality their people inhabit.
Undefended Leaders in one sentence:
We become undefended leaders when we realise that leadership is not about enforcing a reality, but participating with God and others in constructing a truthful one.
The Undefended Series
In a time when the church is rightly asking hard questions about power, narcissism, emotional maturity, trauma, institutional fragility, and the formation of leaders, we need a model that:
Takes the emotional life seriously
Understands power relationally
Honours the complexity of the human person
Is deeply aligned with the way of Christ and a cruciform
Emphasises interior truthfulness and freedom
Refuses to reduce leadership to techniques and practices
This is what The Undefended Leader offers: a way of understanding and practising leadership that is psychologically mature, spiritually grounded, relationally wise, and attuned to how leadership is actually constructed in real communities.
Walker’s Undefended Leader is a trilogy that has shaped me for years. I’ve recommended it widely — including to my Doctor of Leadership students — yet I’ve never taken the deeper personal dive it deserves. I’ve long felt its impact, but I’ve not paused to excavate its core lessons and press them firmly against the contours of my own life and leadership as I have wanted to. And the condition of our world has made me reach for it more and more.
So I am going to do that now and post my reflections on the trilogy here. I hope you will join me.
Over the coming posts, I’m going to unpack from Walker:
Identity — The defended vs. undefended leader
Authority — How authority is actually formed, granted, sustained
Power — The moral weight and spiritual responsibility of power
Presence — Leading through grounded, un-anxious presence
Formation — The inner journey that makes leadership possible
Responsibility — The moral horizon of true leadership
We need undefended leaders.
And the hopeful truth is: they can be formed.
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