By: Eva Keller
Many Christian leaders who know they have a problem can name one thing they are working on.
They are trying to manage their anxiety.
Or they are working on patience with their team.
Or they are trying to stay humble in a season of growth. What they rarely see is that all three are the same problem wearing different clothes.
Dr. Dave Jones spent 25 years building M is Good, a Christian advertising agency serving ministries and businesses worldwide, watching this pattern repeat in organization after organization. His conclusion, laid out in Plan to Win, is that the four toxic motivators he calls FLAP:
- Fear
- Lust
- Anger
- Pride
They do not operate independently. They form a closed loop.
And the loop is the problem.
The Sequence
Fear leads to Anger when threats materialize. A leader who is operating from scarcity, not enough clients, not enough revenue, not enough runway, will move quickly into anger when something goes wrong.
Anger is not irrational. It is the predictable downstream consequence of unaddressed fear.
The threat arrived.
The body responded.
Anger then fuels Pride as a defensive mechanism. A leader who has reacted angrily to a setback needs to be right about having done so.
The alternative is to acknowledge that the reaction was disproportionate, which requires a degree of vulnerability that pride specifically prevents. So the anger calcifies into a position, “I was justified,” and the position hardens into pride.
Pride then intensifies Lust for validation and control. A leader whose identity has become entangled with being right about a decision will need external confirmation of that rightness. They will seek environments where they are agreed with, surround themselves with people who do not challenge them, and chase the metrics, recognition, growth, and industry standing that confirm their position.
That craving for confirmation is lust in the organizational sense Dave is describing.
And lust deepens fear, because a leader who is attached to specific outcomes, a particular revenue number, a particular client relationship, a particular reputation, has more to lose.
The more attached, the more afraid of losing it.
The loop closes.
Why This Matters More Than the Individual Components
Dave describes FLAP as a fast-acting cancerous malignant tumor. That is a structural observation, not rhetorical escalation. Cancer is dangerous not because of what a single cell does but because of how it spreads systemically.
A leader who addresses only their anger, through coaching, through spiritual discipline, through conflict resolution training, without addressing the fear underneath it and the pride reinforcing it, will find the anger returns. Because the system that generates it has not changed.
This is the diagnostic gap in most Christian leadership development. The programs address individual symptoms. The 360-degree feedback surfaces the anger. The executive coach works on impatience.
The accountability partner calls out the pride. None of it disrupts the loop, because the loop is operating below the level at which the interventions are aimed.
The Entry Point
Dave does not prescribe a single entry point into the loop.
The free assessment at Plan to Win Today is built to identify which of the four toxic motivators is currently dominant, because different leaders are in different places in the cycle at different times.
A leader in a growth season will often be running on Pride and Lust. A leader in the middle of a crisis will more often show Fear and Anger as the primary drivers.
What changes is not the loop. The loop is always there.
What changes is where you enter it and therefore which antidote is most immediately relevant.
Fear is replaced by Faith.
Anger is replaced by Forgiveness and Patience.
Pride is replaced by humility.
Lust is replaced by Giving and Love.
Each antidote is specific. None of them is generic spiritual advice.
The Organizational Cost of Missing This
Dave documents the compound effect in Plan to Win. Fear-based leaders underestimate revenue potential by 30 to 50 percent.
Organizations dominated by FLAP show turnover rates 40 to 60 percent higher than industry averages. Research from Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimates that ineffective communication drains up to $1.2 trillion annually from US businesses.
For Christian CEOs, those numbers carry a second layer of cost that does not appear in the productivity data. It is the spiritual disconnection that comes from building something on a foundation other than the vision God gave you.
Dave’s argument is not that FLAP makes organizations less efficient, though it does.
He argues that it replaces the north star. And an organization that has lost its north star is not just less productive. It is building toward the wrong destination entirely.
Readers interested in exploring Dr. Dave Jones’ approach to building and leading a Christian organization can find Plan to Win on Amazon.
