What You Can Look Forward to on the Other Side of Being Overwhelmed
The cliché: “Don’t bite off more than you can chew” is unhelpful because it is good for a leader’s development to occasionally do so. The same is true with lifting weights. If you want your muscles to grow, you must lift heavier weight, and put your muscles under stress and pressure. If you lift the […]
When Workload on Your Team Increases, You Must Do This
Every single week the Office of President receives 65,000 paper letters, 500,000 emails, 5,000 faxes, and 15,000 phone calls (as told by Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind). You can’t wing that type of workload. A system that sorts and prioritizes and ensures the right people are given responsibility and authority is essential. While that […]
3 Reasons a Humble Leader Is an Effective Leader
According to research, the most effective leaders are the most humble leaders. Research led by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman discovered that leaders who underrate themselves are more effective than those who rate themselves high on self-assessments. These results are no surprise to Christians. One of the greatest leaders in our collective story is Moses, […]
3 Items That Should Be on Your “Stop Doing” List
The second law of thermodynamics revolves around entropy, the principle that things move to disorder and chaos over time. Left alone, things do not become more orderly or more effective. Your once well-ordered garage digresses to clutter. No matter how much you attempt to wish it into existence, your garage will not get more clean […]
2 Qualities in All Great Leaders
Great leaders are both intentional and intense. Great leaders bring focus and fury, precision and passion, wisdom and work ethic. With wisdom and discipline, they identify what matters most. And with passion, they continually pursue what matters most. Intentionality coupled with intensity makes a leader very credible and very effective. We see both intentionality and […]
6 Mistakes Leaders Make in Their First 90 Days
While there is nothing magical about the number, many have used the “first 90 days” to describe the important first days in a leader’s new role. In his helpful book The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins encourages leaders to adjust their leadership to the context and life cycle of the organization: start-up, realignment, sustaining success, […]
6 Ways the Team Reflects the Leader
One of the most challenging and convicting insights Brad Waggoner has shared with me is that “a leader can complain about the culture of the team for only a few years because after that, the culture reflects the leader.” In a church or an organization, there are multiple teams or groups. Obviously there should be […]
3 Bad Excuses for Avoiding Leadership Development
Great leaders intuitively know they are responsible for future leadership, and all leaders have heard these catch phrases: “There is no success without succession” and “Work yourself out of a job and you will always have a job.” Yet few leaders plan and prioritize developing others. There is always something else to do, always an […]
4 Ways to Spot an Interested Leader (Not One Focused on Being Interesting)
In his famous work, Good to Great, Jim Collins coined the phrase “level five leader.” The leaders Collins wrote about were ones who were fiercely and boldly committed to the mission of those they led but simultaneously humble. Humility and boldness can and must coexist in a leader’s life. Collins described the level five leaders […]
5 Common Ways Leaders Undermine Themselves
The dictionary first defines undermine as “eroding the base or foundation” and second as “damaging or weakening someone or something.” A river can undermine its banks and cause them to erode over time, and someone can undermine a leader and erode the leader’s credibility over time. Poor leaders undermine themselves far more frequently than others […]