leadership summit highlights

I got to take a team from our church to the Leadership Summit last week and wanted to share some of my key takeaways. I’m a learner and love hearing new ways of thinking about leadership. I take my calling seriously to encourage others, help them see their own gifts and make sure they have what they need to grow. I used to attend these summits for me. But now, a big reason I go is to take people with me. I find more joy in sitting back and watching them have lightbulb moments about their leadership and purpose in life. So much fun.

Bill Hybels: Who do you owe the most for calling leadership out of you in your younger years? Who gave you responsibilities past what you were capable of? They kept saying, “you can handle this.” They saw potential in us before anyone else did.

People are looking to the leader for clarity around how we respect each other. In this day and age, we think we shouldn’t have to remind people of the basics of respect and civility, but we do. We need leaders to do this work.

Sheryl Sandberg, from Facebook, talked about post traumatic growth. We know about post traumatic stress after difficult seasons. But we also get post traumatic growth. We often grow so much after painful circumstances.

Fredrik Haren: We are never closer to God than when we have a good idea. This is how we co-create with God.

Bryan Stevensen: The bigger the dream, the more opportunity God has to show up.

Andy Stanley: The next generation product and idea almost never comes from the previous generation.

When is the last time you weren’t sure about an initiative but gave the go ahead anyway?

Replace with How? with Wow! As soon as we say, “How?” the creativity dies. Wow keeps us talking and dreaming.  WOW ideas to life, don’t HOW them to death. We fuel innovation or we shut it down by our response to new, untried, expensive, unorthodox ideas.

Laszlo Bock: Give your people more freedom than you’re comfortable with.

Juliet Funt: We all need time with no assignment. The pause we must take in our work and home lives has formidable power. It’s where we slow down long enough so great ideas can grace us with their presence. The pause has been squeezed out of our schedules by the tyranny of the urgent. We are too busy to become less busy.

White space is a strategic pause taken between activities. Don’t rush the cooking of a good idea.

Become aware of the productivity thieves. We think they’re helpful and then they actually steal our productivity.

• Drive — can become overdrive
• Excellence — can become perfection
• Information — can become information overload
• Activity — can become a frenzy

My time, in the presence of these thieves, will be filled.

Defeat them with question

• Is there anything I can let go of? (drive) 
• Where is “good enough” good enough? (excellence)
• What do I truly need to know? (information)
• What deserves my attention? (activity)

Email was designed to be pressure free – respond when you can. We’ve turned email into a competitive sport. Email is destroying our deeper work. She shared a system for determining actual urgency of messages.

Marcus Buckingham: Many of us set annual goals for ourselves and the people we support. But this goals can change so quickly as the organization moves forward. We really need to check in with our individual team members and ask, “what are your priorities for this week and how can I help?”

Sam Adeyemi: We get to give people new beliefs about themselves, about what they have and what they can do.

Whatever people see and hear consistently over time will enter their hearts and put their lives on autopilot.

“The big crowd is not here because I am special. They are here because they are special, that’s why I am here.”

I must model the transformation I’m talking about. They must see me transformed.

I hope no one hangs around you for more than a year without seeing transformation.

Gary Haugen: All the best leadership training in the world can be rendered useless by fear.

Every day fear goes to work trying to destroy the dream.

We don’t usually know what scares us most deeply. It’s often not the obvious and respectable risks. He was actually more scared of looking like a failure to others. Once he exposed the real fear, then he could deal with it. I don’t want that fear to kill my dream. The dream won.

Relentlessly inventory your own fears — what am I really afraid of? Leaders become driven by their unexamined fears — the whole team are led by the leader’s insecurities & fears. Is God in a panic about how this dream is going to get worked out?