Leadership and Inspiration from the Global Leadership Summit

We recently attended the annual Global Leadership Summit, a very special event, packed with leadership wisdom and inspiration from world-class speakers. The two days were rich with ideas and memorable stories to illustrate leadership successes as well as failures. This was our forth summit and we already registered for next year, August 6 and 7, 2020.

The mission of the summit is to improve leadership in our businesses, churches, and communities. The presenters were leaders in large and small companies, renown consultants, pastors and successful entrepreneurs. This year’s summit was streamed live to 600 locations across the U.S. and hundreds around the world.

If you can, we encourage you to attend the Global Leadership Summit as a leadership team. It clearly would help everyone be united about mission, communication, and relationships with their people, as well as many other important principles. If you cannot go as a team, then just go yourself. It is worthwhile!

As there is so much rich information from the summit, this is the first of several short articles we will write.

There were so many takeaways. We will just outline some in this article.

• Leaders make things better, help people, and improve their companies. This is a theme throughout the summit – leaders make things better and serve others
• Leaders commit to finding a way, encouraging and developing ideas, their people’s ideas as well as their own, are always seeking new ways to be better than before
• In a healthy organizational culture, everyone feels included, is focused on the same goals. Ideas are encouraged and people are truly heard, and everyone contributes in meetings. Leaders look to give credit to their people at all levels of the company.
  People allow themselves to be vulnerable. Everyone has empathy.
• Developing a healthy culture is the work of everyone in the company. It is not simply top down
• The quantity and quality of ideas matter. Yes, quantity counts, we want everyone continually thinking of new and better ways. Ideas are encouraged, accepted, and considered. In fact, the best ideas are bottom-up ideas. The people actually doing the work of a company know how to make improvements, generally more so than senior executives.
• Leaders need to give their teams challenges and clarity, and let them know that they have stability, are safe to be creative to do things better, to improve their company and results
• Trust is the currency of creative teams. Leaders must earn trust, which is often by doing the little things – and must realize that failure with the little things can erode trust quickly. The analogy was a water balloon. A minor nick causes the water (trust) to leak rapidly from the balloon
• Leaders see the potential in others, and they assure that their other leaders down to and including mid-level managers do, as well

Listing these principles and practices does not do them justice. We could discuss them in depth, for hours, unpack each to fully appreciate its power. Please reflect on each, which will help us improve our leadership.

In addition to the wealth of insight, there was every bit as much inspiration. These presenters, though renown and celebrated, each have humility and faith in their Lord. They realize that we are here to serve others, all of us. In fact, one presenter, Patrick Lencione, said he dislikes the term servant leadership, as all leaders must be focused on serving others. If they are not, they are not leaders.

The Global Leadership Summit again this year emphasized that when leadership improves, everyone wins, and striving for continuous improvement is a lifelong journey. Our leadership is a gift and we must use it to serve others.