By: Eva Keller
Terry Bradshaw won the Super Bowl. Then he walked into the locker room and felt nothing.
Dr. Dave Jones tells that story in Plan to Win as an illustration of what Pride does to a leader whose identity has become fused with performance. The trophy was real. The achievement was real. The emptiness afterward was also real, because the foundation the achievement was built on was not.
For Christian CEOs, Dave argues, this is not a cautionary tale about professional athletes.
It is an accurate description of what happens when an organization’s season of success quietly shifts the question “who am I?” from a God-given answer to a performance-dependent one.
The Confusion Dave Identifies
In Plan to Win, Dave names identity fusion with performance as one of the most common and most damaging expressions of Pride in Christian leadership. It is damaging precisely because it looks like the opposite of pride.
A leader who is pouring themselves into the organization’s results, whose sense of self rises and falls with the metrics, who takes failure personally and success personally in equal measure, that leader reads as deeply invested, not dangerously proud.
Dave’s counter is that Pride is not revealed by failure. It is revealed by resistance to dependence, feedback, and vulnerability.
The leader whose identity is built on performance is not resistant to working hard. They are resistant to the question of who they are when the work is not going well. That resistance is diagnostic.
Leaders whose identity is fused with performance are, according to the data Dave cites in the book, more than three times more likely to face an identity crisis when circumstances shift.
The shift does not cause the crisis.
The shift just exposes what was never stable to begin with.
Why Christian Organizations Are Not Immune
The particular vulnerability of faith-based organizations is that the work is genuinely meaningful.
When a Christian CEO builds a ministry, launches a product serving a clear Kingdom purpose, or scales an organization that is measurably changing lives, the stakes feel different than they do in secular business.
They are different.
But that difference does not make the leader immune to identity fusion; it often accelerates it.
When the work is God’s work, the leader can mistake investment in the mission for investment in God rather than in their own performance metrics. The two can look identical from the outside and feel identical on the inside, until the season changes.
When revenue drops, when a key partnership dissolves, when a product fails publicly, the leader whose identity was built on the mission’s success cannot cleanly separate their worth from the outcome. The collapse of the metric feels like a collapse of the calling.
Dave is careful about this. He is not arguing that Christian leaders should care less about results.
He is arguing that the source of identity, the foundation that holds when results deteriorate, has to be something other than the results.
The Antidote Is Not Self-Deprecation
Humility, the antidote Dave prescribes for Pride in Plan to Win, is frequently misapplied. It is not the performance of modesty. It is not the reflexive deflection of credit or the public minimizing of accomplishment. Those can be their own form of pride, managing the perception of the leader rather than changing the foundation underneath them.
Dave defines Humility as obeying God and serving others without keeping score. The without keeping score clause is where the work is.
A leader who serves generously but retains an internal ledger, noting who noticed, who reciprocated, who gave credit, is not operating from humility. They are operating from a quieter version of the same performance orientation.
What Humility actually produces, in Dave’s framework, is the capacity to receive feedback without experiencing it as a verdict.
A leader who is not building their identity on performance can hear that a strategy failed without hearing that they failed.
They can sit with a difficult quarter without the quarter sitting in judgment of them. That capacity, to hold results without being held by them, is the organizational benefit of an identity rooted in what Dave describes as God’s economy rather than market performance.
The Practical Question
The distinction Plan to Win draws is precise: who you are is not what you do. The confusion of those two things is not a minor leadership inefficiency. It is the specific mechanism by which Pride enters Christian organizations and begins doing its damage, quietly, in the seasons when things are going well, long before the season shifts and the damage becomes visible.
Dave’s free leadership assessment includes a read on where Pride is currently operating in a leader’s decision-making.
The question worth sitting with before taking it is the one Dave says most Christian CEOs have not answered cleanly: if the organization’s best metric disappeared tomorrow, what would remain?
The answer to that question is the foundation. Everything else is performance.
Plan to Win by Dr. Dave Jones is available for purchase on Amazon.
