matter how small, then you are in the position of a leader, and there are certain qualifications you must meet to lead effectively. However, the scope of your sphere of influence and the demands it makes on your potential determine the magnitude of your leadership.
Ten Essentials in the Development of a Leader Based on what we have discussed so far, let us explore ten essential aspects of leadership development. If you are going to be an effective leader, you must prepare yourself. You have no other option. All of the following elements are inherent in the process of true leadership. Aside from discovering your true self and capturing your vision, the aspects of leadership development on this list are not necessarily listed in sequential order. Some of them may be developed simultaneously. Yet each is indispensable in the process. We will look at an overview of these essentials and then look more closely at each area in subsequent chapters.
1. Discover Yourself
All leaders uncover a sense of meaning and purpose for their lives that produces an awareness of their true identities.
This identity provides the basis for personal value and worth, as well as a positive self-concept from which a spirit of confidence emerges. This spirit of confidence is energized by a belief in their potential and capacity to fulfill their discovered purposes. Confidence, combined with a conviction of their ability to achieve their purposes, establishes a sense of
destiny. The integration of all these elements cultivates the dormant gifts and talents deposited by the Creator within the leaders for their generational assignments. When all these parts become one, leadership emerges. This is leadership without limitations, in the sense that the leaders believe they can do anything necessary to fulfill their purposes. Once that process occurs, a leader becomes unstoppable.
To become a leader, you need to discover your true self by uncovering a meaning and purpose for your life that gives you an understanding of your unique identity as a person. This understanding of your true self will give birth to your vision.
2. Capture Your Vision Leadership is conceived when a person’s mental
photograph of a future that incorporates his purpose becomes more vivid and important to him than the experience of the present. This mental picture is called vision. When an individual captures his vision, his leadership function begins to stir. Leadership is impossible without a vision because leadership exists to fulfill a vision. Without a vision, leadership is invalid and unnecessary. Vision validates leadership; it explains the existence of leadership.
We have seen that without a vision, people perish, or have no meaning for their lives or hope of accomplishing their purposes. Yet when vision is lost, a leader “dies.” Leadership, therefore, depends on capturing, refining, planning, simplifying, documenting, communicating, living, and
maintaining a noble vision.
To become a leader, you must catch hold of a vision of a future that reflects the fulfillment of your life’s purpose.
3. Share Your Inspiration
One meaning of inspire is “to inflate.” This concept is derived from an idea the Greeks captured in the expression
“god-breathed.” It is also evident throughout the biblical text, which reveals that men and women throughout the ages have been inspired by God’s Spirit, who lifted them from the mundane existence of their life conditions to see an alternative worth risking everything for. For example, when Moses, the great Hebrew deliverer, lived in a remote desert as a shepherd, he was divinely inspired to embrace a vision of a land filled with freedom and prosperity. He was inspired from the desert!
He was lifted up higher than his environment.
To become a leader, you must be inspired so that you can inspire others. It is the power of inspiration that becomes contagious and moves others to reorder their priorities; it motivates the human spirit to submit personal vision to a corporate dream. The greatest component of leadership is inspiration because if a leader cannot inspire people, he may be tempted to manipulate them. And where there is manipulation, there is dictatorship and control but not genuine leadership.
True leaders never manipulate; they inspire.
4. Commit to Your Principles and Values
A leader commits to spiritual and moral truths that form his character and enable him to carry out his vision. Vision has inherent principles and values that need to be adhered to for the vision to be fulfilled. True leadership, therefore, always includes a personal code of ethics, moral standards, and values that safeguard the character necessary for the leader to pursue and fulfill his purpose and vision. For example, vision cannot be carried out without self-sacrifice. Leadership requires the willingness to sacrifice pleasure for the protection of purpose.
Leadership necessitates a dedication to principles more than to profit and popularity; it places convictions above
convenience; it is more concerned about excellence than about expediency. True leadership is always sensitive to spiritual accountability and aware of its obligation to divine authority.
Leadership is ultimately measured by what it values. True leadership values human life, human dignity, human equality, human rights, and human security.
To become a leader, you must commit to principles and values for the development of your character and the fulfillment of your vision.
5. Express Your Passion
True leadership is impossible without passion. Passion is a result of inspiration and thus provides the catalyst for leadership. One definition of catalyst is “an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action.”7 Passion is a desire that is stronger than death and greater than opposition.
Passion is the root of self-motivation and the energy that fuels persistence, consistency, and resilience. Passion is the secret source of a leader’s drive. It is the force that directs the management of the leader’s time, energy, resources, and priorities. Passion is also the leader’s life vest for times of failure. When true leaders fail, they always rebound because their passion leads them back.
It was passion for God that brought Moses back to face Pharaoh, time after time, to tell him to let the Israelites go. It was passion that drove David to face and defeat the giant Goliath. It was passion that preserved Daniel the prophet after he was thrown into the lions’ den. And it was passion that led Jesus Christ from Gethsemane to the cross, to the tomb, and on to resurrection.
It is passion that makes leadership effective. To become a leader, you need to have a passion for your purpose—a passion you express in the way you live your life.
6. Empower Others
Leadership never exists for itself. It exists for the purpose of guiding others to a better future, enabling them to develop in greater ways, helping them to improve themselves, and inspiring them to believe that anything is possible. Leadership sets standards for people and influences them positively, giving them hope and deep conviction about their own abilities to achieve greatness. Leadership empowers.
True leadership is, therefore, a commitment to people. It
recognizes the value of people, and this recognition cultivates the leader’s attitude toward them. Leadership invests time, resources, energy, and experience in the empowerment of others. True leaders act with integrity toward others, modeling what they expect of them and demonstrating what they demand. In essence, leaders lead through character.
Leadership considers success a corporate issue and is therefore lavish in its appreciation of everyone. It never takes credit; it always distributes it. It knows what people need—
empathy, respect, love, recognition, appreciation,
encouragement, integrity, trust, and faith—and is dedicated to meeting these needs. Leadership builds people to build a vision to build a future.
To become a leader, you must be committed to empowering others.
7. Discipline Yourself for Your Purpose True leadership possesses a deep dedication to personal discipline. Personal discipline incorporates self-imposed standards for the sake of achieving noble goals and aspirations that are more important than personal pleasure. Leadership focuses on self-sacrifice for the sake of service rather than on personal comfort and indulgence. It defers present gratification for future goals. Leadership shuns mediocrity for the pursuit of excellence. It imposes restrictions on itself in order to achieve a greater alternative.
Leadership involves molding oneself in order to obtain what
is best. Leaders make decisions cognizant of the consequences and their impact on desired goals. In essence, leadership disciplines its decisions based on its dedication to a determined destiny. Leaders control their decisions. That’s high discipline. Why did Corrie ten Boom, after reaching the age of fifty, decide to risk her life to protect persecuted Jews in her native Holland during World War II when she could have lived a quiet life? It was self-discipline based on her integrity not to compromise the value of life.
Again, leadership never compromises vision for the sake of gaining popularity. Those who practice leadership are willing to walk alone until the crowd catches up. To become a leader, you must learn to discipline your life according to the goals and objectives of your purpose.
8. Coordinate Your Resources
In his administrative and coordinative duties, a leader must always closely monitor the “big three”: personnel, finances, and planning.
True leadership builds effective managerial teams and organizes people’s diverse gifts and talents to maximize their contribution to the whole. Leaders know the strengths and weaknesses of others and use wisdom when assigning them to particular teams.
Effective leaders are also good stewards of the physical and financial resources for which they are responsible. They know how to use them in the best interests of the vision and can
make them productive so that they yield good returns.
Over both the above areas is the necessity of planning your resources, both short-term and long-term. What is needed now for furthering the vision? What will be needed next year and in years to come?
To become a leader, you must be able to know what resources you have, what resources you still need, and how to use them most effectively.
9. Manage Your Priorities
As I stated earlier, leadership is controlled by vision and disciplined by a sense of destiny. Purpose and vision dictate priorities and determine the plan for fulfilling purpose. It is imperative for leadership not just to identify and establish the vision, but also to design and disseminate the plan required to take the organization to that destination.
In effect, planning is the sequential establishment of priorities. Priorities are stated goals that are necessary for progressing toward purpose. In order to protect priorities, leadership must always distinguish between what seems to be urgently calling for attention and what is truly important to purpose. Leadership must also distinguish between what is good, which may be a variety of things, and what is right—
good things that are specifically suited to purpose. Leadership always has a narrow agenda and a concentrated to-do list.
Leadership must never get bogged down in details but
should always allow the priorities of the vision to set the agenda. The greatest Leader of all time, Jesus Christ, spoke about the importance of priorities, saying, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14). If you want to experience maximum living, it is important to narrow your life’s priorities to a few.
To become a leader, you must develop a plan for fulfilling your vision by setting priorities and using them to guide your pursuits.
10. Mentor Your Successors
Leadership is committed to the priority of preparing those who will fill the designated position of leader in the future and carry on the work of leadership. True leaders know that their success is measured, to a large degree, by their successors.
They mentor future leaders by sharing their knowledge, experience, skills, expertise, and resources with them.
Leadership is never given to just one generation. It is transgenerational. Leadership that serves only its present generation is destined to fail. Leaders know that if their visions die with them, they have failed. The ultimate goal is not to maintain followers but to produce leaders. Therefore, true leaders make themselves increasingly unnecessary. Secure and mature leaders are not threatened by the successful
development of those whom they are leading. They rejoice
when their followers develop into leaders and become greater and more effective than they were.
The greatest expression of this leadership principle of succession is found in Jesus’ statement to the leaders that He developed: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples [students] of all nations” (Matthew 28:18–19). With these words, He defined the purpose of authority, which is to transfer and release the authority of others. Mentoring is a nonnegotiable function of successful leadership. Again, a true leader knows that his most significant contribution to the future is his successor.
Unfortunately, few people seem to realize, and few organizations seem to practice, this crucial element of leadership.
To become a leader, you must understand the importance of mentoring your successors and actively preparing others to become leaders who will carry on the vision.
Express Yourself
Speaking of the leadership development process, Warren Bennis asserted, “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It’s that simple and that difficult.…Leaders are people who are able to express themselves fully.”8 He also stated, “We are our own raw material.”9 Everyone has the capacity, potential, and “raw material” to become a leader by the design of the Creator. However, it is a tragedy that most of the people on this planet will bury the leader trapped within
them in the grave of a follower. In fact, many people die without ever knowing who they really were.
God created you with the capacity to lead. Though you were born to lead, you must become a leader, just as one may be born a male but must become a man. To become the leader you were born to be, you must discover who you are, know your purpose in life, and understand God’s design for your existence. It is difficult and perhaps impossible to become something you do not know or cannot define.
Leaders “express themselves fully.” As Bennis wrote, “No leader sets out to be a leader….The point is to become yourself, to use yourself completely—all your skills, gifts, and energies—in order to make your vision manifest.”10 This full expression brings glory to God. It is in this light that everyone can become a leader, and it is important that you strive to know who you are and to discover God’s purpose for your life. We have a personal responsibility to cultivate and become ourselves. Therefore, in the chapters that follow, we are going to look at what a leader is, how you can continue your journey to becoming an effective leader, and how to refine and enhance your leadership capacity.
God created you as someone special and original. Discover yourself and become a leader.
Part 2