Updated from July 12, 2012 post One of the most important leadership lessons I learned in recent years is to always walk around with a leadership tuning fork. I learned this in conversation with a teammate who didn’t seem to understand the direction our organization was heading. Sensing his confusion I sat him down one…
Why Leaders Must Look Back in Order to Push Ahead
When you’re clear on your leadership call, you can persevere through almost anything. I was reminded of that truth this week as I was rummaging through some previous blog posts. I came across a personal favorite, entitled “What To Do When Your Leadership Has Been Rattled” In that post I related that one of the…
4 Signs Leaders Should Go For a Base Hit, Not a Grand Slam
Updated from August 26, 2013 post Baseball season is back, and each spring when the first sound of ‘Play Ball!’ is heard, my mind goes back to a leadership lesson I learned years ago. A wise, older colleague named Jack would watch as several of us young bucks would expend enormous energy to come up…
3 Declarations That Have Guided My Leadership for 30 Years
Where there’s clarity, there’s forward movement. This theme recently emerged in a conversation with a younger leader. He asked me, “What decisions did you make as a younger leader that had the greatest impact in your life?” My mind went back immediately to a time in my 20’s, when I was first told by an…
Leadership Getting Hard? Resist These 3 Shortcuts
This week we held the semi-annual meeting of the Willow Creek Association board of directors, and once again I found myself taken aback by the level of leadership excellence in the room. As the members of the board tackled issues of considerable complexity, at one point I wrote on my notepad, “These leaders are real.…
