Monday, September 2, 2013

Be Strong and Courageous

Recently I heard a talk where a church leader pointed out that Joshua, on the brink of taking over the leadership of several million people from Moses, was told to be courageous. Why is this the first thing a new leader is told...twice?

Bill Hybels says that leaders need to have courage. He describes several aspects regarding that courage:

Courage in vision: keep working towards the vision that you have, in spite of the circumstances and risk. Perhaps the economy is not cooperating but you're sure that the new service offering will be a market hit. Keep going. Especially through the midpoint when you're too far away from the origin and you can't see the end yet.

Similar to this is the courage in persistence: to finish strong

Courage to define the situation: to boldly face the situation and recognizes truths that probably the rest of your team already knows. These truths could be related to customer experiences, team dynamics and other human resource issues, knowledge or product gaps, and so on.

Courage to build a thriving culture: Hybels admits this was the hardest for his organization, well-respected in his industry and market. They saw some warning signs but he ignored them. Finally they did an assessment of the culture and the result put them in the 'toxic' category. After much courage, and hard work...and three years later...they built a culture that's flourishing. He realized that the staff culture will only be as healthy as he wanted it to be, and as healthy as he was. He relearned a business truism: people join organizations but they leave managers. After he realized the problems, he wanted a culture that went beyond healthy (a 'nice' culture) and one that got into the realm of powerful and magical in its corporate abilities and results.

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