And when all Israel saw that the king did not listen to them, the people answered the king, “What portion have we in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. Each of you to your tents, O Israel! Look now to your own house, David.” So all Israel went to their tents. But Rehoboam reigned over the people of Israel who lived in the cities of Judah. Then King Rehoboam sent Hadoram, who was taskmaster over the forced labor, and the people of Israel stoned him to death with stones. And King Rehoboam quickly mounted his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. So Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day.
Leadership decisions are fraught with the possibility of certain peril. They don’t have to be but they can be. In the above paragraph we have one of those decisions by leadership that didn’t unfold the way the leader had hoped. The story is about the events immediately following King Solomon’s death and the rise of his son, Rehoboam. We don’t know much about this young, new ruler. This event is the first recorded event of his rookie leadership position. Once Solomon died, a man named Jeroboam (who was living in exile due to his relationship with Solomon) came back to town. Jeroboam gathered the workers around him and lead them to ask Rehoboam for better working conditions and, probably, more pay. His exact demands are recorded here:
2 Chronicles 10:3-4 (ESV)
And they sent and called him. And Jeroboam and all Israel came and said to Rehoboam, “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke on us, and we will serve you.”
Rehoboam consults with the old men his father had previously consulted and with the young men he grew up with. Not surprisingly the old men counseled mercy and the young men counseled power. Rehoboam went with power. It was a non-negotiable decision that did not consider any aspects of the people’s (and Jeroboam’s) desires. The results are what we read in the above passage. It is when the people realized that Rehoboam would not listen to them that the rebellion took place. One of the key principles of leadership is to not let how you handle a problem to become the problem. Because Rehoboam’s decision did not take into consideration any of the people’s demands and/or desires, he was left with a contentious constituency. His stakeholders turned on him. A leader will always have a percentage of people disagree with their decision. But how you make the decision is as equal to the finality of the decision. The decision making process is as important as the decision when you are trying to build a culture, an organization and/or a country. Exclude people from your decisions and ensure potential conflict. We can’t always give people what they want, however. There are times when doing God’s will requires decisiveness and not democracy. But even then there should be a posture of education, collaboration and cooperation in the process (read the events of Acts 15). Rehoboam will never recover from the above. The kingdom will split under his leadership and Jeroboam. This was all designed by God, however. But how did God make it happen? He caused division by allowing a leader to make a poor decision based upon poor process.
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