True Leadership

This year's Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit created these nuggets of wisdom from Bill Hybels:

• All leadership is intensely spiritual: not necessarily shown in the positive but in the negative whereby poor leadership demoralizes the organization and sucks the energy, enthusiasm and engagement (their souls) right out of people. Poor transactional leadership drops employee engagement--"I didn't hire your brains, only your hands. Don't think. Just do what I tell you (as in the job description)."
• Everybody wins when leaders get better at leading.
• Great leadership is relentlessly developmental. His advice: assign emerging leaders to short-term, pass/fail projects to test their resourcefulness and resilience.
• Find emerging leaders with a legacy mindset, not a hireling who's only trying to get the next promotion.
• Develop endurance in yourself and your organization: the grander the vision, the greater the cost. Past endurance strategies may need to be adapted for the next project phases or organizational life cycle stages.
• Commit to ruthless progress and resolution of healthy conflict, no matter how it feels.
• Raise the level of candor. Provide feedback through Start, Stop, Continue. (I would suggest Continue, Stop, Start as daily/hourly and annual performance appraisal format.) Start--behaviors, actions, new goals you need the person to initiate; Stop--behaviors, actions, projects you need the person to drop; Continue--behavioral and relational strengths, good-to-exceptional performance results, etc.
• Educate everyone who manages. "People join organizations; people leave managers."
• Exec team needs to own and advance any turnaround, especially one related to the corporate culture. Your culture will only be as healthy as you want it to be.
• 3M Meeting goals and agenda: Move something ahead; Modify; Motivate. If it's not doing all 3, or any, of these things, you shouldn't be meeting.