Leadership Wisdom

Several weeks ago, we attended the Global Leadership Summit. It was the twenty-third annual, and is sponsored by Willow Creek Church, a true “mega church” as thousands attend their services each week and many thousands more listen virtually to their services and homilies. The intent of the summit is to help improve leadership in business, in our churches and our communities.

The speakers were wonderful. Each one of them had great insight to share.

My notes are extensive, literally pages of ideas I very much appreciate. I am listing just a few of these ideas/bits of wisdom below.

While listing them as kind of sound bites, they each can be ideas for reflection.

• Everyone wins when a leader gets better
• Humility and continuous learning and improvement are key
• Take a few minutes for conversation, change a person’s life
• Be inclusive and respectful to everyone
• Address problems promptly
• We cannot be an effective leader from a distance
• Grow people as fast as we can
• Be the wind in the sails of our team members
• Ask everyone how we can bust bureaucracy
• Complaining does not help
• Stay open-minded, and we can learn from everyone
• A leader focuses on her people
• A leadership journal can help help us stay intentional

These are simply a handful of insightful ideas that were offered at the summit. We will discuss some in more detail in future articles.

We had the good fortune of attending the summit with a group of four other leaders who work together. They thought it was amazingly helpful as they are totally on the same page on how they should go forward to help their people and their organization thrive. Again, one of the bits of wisdom was that “leadership unites” and, as stated above, when leadership improves, everyone wins.

I urge that you try to save the dates for the next Global Leadership Summit, August 9 and 10 2018. There will be about 250 host sites around the U.S. If you attend, you will gain a whole lot of wisdom and inspiration.  And ideally, try to attend with your leadership group. It will be a marvelous investment of two days as your own leadership and the leadership of your team is almost guaranteed to improve significantly.

More information about the Global Leadership Summit can be found at their website.