This week, I’ve had the privilege of attending the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit. This is my favorite leadership conference to attend. In this post, I will be sharing my key takeaways from each session from day 1. I hope they will add value to your life!
Today, I will be live tweeting my key takeaways during the conference. You can follow along by following me on twitter here.
Session 1: Bill Hybels
- If you care at all about anything, then you better care about leadership.
- Armed with enough humility, you can learn from anyone.
- Leaders with the highest level of vision and passion have the lowest level of awareness of the spirit of the team assembled.
- What God treasures most in this world is people.
- Don’t make people pay for your addiction to progress, vision, and success.
- Your culture will only be as healthy as the senior leader wants it to be
- People join organizations, they leave managers
- The kindest form of management is the truth
- Leaders won’t give their best unless they are challenged to
- The best way to develop next generation leaders is:
- Put them in high challenge roles
- Assign them to a short term task force
- Success of failure most be possible
- They have to have full authority
- They have to work with a diverse group of people
- There has to be pressure and deadlines
- In the end, they have to be evaluated by senior leaders
- Give them Real time feedback
- Provide coaching and mentoring
- Make sure there is pressure and deadlines
- Classroom Classes/Seminars
- One of the best qualities of a leader is resourcefulness! We need to be put in positions where we have to figure it out!
- Forgiven much, worship much
Session 2: Carly Fiorina
- Everyone has more potential that most of us realize
- Potential can be crushed
- Leadership unlocks potential
- The highest calling of leadership is to unlock the potential of others
- There are a lot of people in corner offices who have never led a day in their lives!
- People are not poor because they lack potential, they are poor because they haven’t had a chance to use their potential
- Everyone has the capacity to lead!
Session 3: Jeffrey Immelt
- Never fear accountability
- Your peers will ultimately determine how far you go in an organization.
- Be around a crises early in your career. You can’t tell anything about anyone until they have been through a crisis.
- Excuses turn everybody off
- Overtime, you may question my decisions, but you will never question my intentions
- You can’t guarantee outcomes, but you can guarantee process
Session 4: Susan Cain
- Make sure everyone has a chance to speak in meetings, introverts need time!
- Network based on service – find ways to serve people
- Introverts and extroverts experience church in different ways, we need to remember that
Session 5: Bryan Loritts
- God sees us as is, accepts us as is, saves us as is, but by grace, never leaves us as is!
- You can’t have God’s heart and not have a heart for the least of these.
- How much is enough? Enough pay? Enough profit? Enough house? Enough stuff? Give the rest away!
Session 6: Patrick Lencioni
- It’s dangerous to become a leader for the wrong reasons – notoriety, fame, power, money, etc.
- Good leaders sacrifice themselves for the good of others even if they don’t get a return on their investment.
- If you’re doing it for you, you will leave a trail of tears behind
- The only real payoff of leadership is eternal
- It’s dangerous to fail to embrace vulnerability
- You can’t be too vulnerable as a leader
- More often than not, it’s worth taking the risk to confront your leader. Most want to know the truth and will reward you for it.
- When you don’t confront, you either brown nose or become an activist, neither are good
- It’s dangerous to make leadership too important – Don’t make it an idol.
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