Leadership demands the guts to initiate change.  Much like a young parent, leaders are often shocked by what is required to lead the necessary changes for your organization.  Tension, hard conversations, telling someone "no" and being on an island around your idea can cause a leader to wish they had signed up for some other profession.  Here's the good news, you can be ready for it!  Here are 5 qualities you need to lead change.

No leader wants a negative situation on their hands that is a direct result of their own poor planning.  Taking time to form a solid plan, exercising patience to work your plan and the discipline it takes to trust the process are all a part of leadership.  They help you get things right the first time.  Good planning pays off.  Poor planning makes you pay.  Here are a handful of ways you can be confident that you will get your next project right and avoid having an embarrassment on your hands!

Often we confuse creativity with a feeling or artistic expression that only hipsters can comprehend while they drink lattes and compare man scarves.  That is only part of what it means to create.  Art, music and writing are all creative forms, but so is problem solving, technological innovation, engaged parenting, marketing campaigns, home construction, and so much more.  Some of you are facing issues in life or leadership that seem insurmountable.  You need creative solutions to those issues.  Creativity solves problems.  I want to give you some action steps that will ignite creativity in your life.  Take some time to consider these four ways to be more creative.   

I want to challenge you to rethink leadership excellence regarding things large and small.  Do you have something you would dismiss as "not important" or "too nit-picky” that seems to be a detail Disney World would care about?  If so you may need to adjust your mindset towards excellence.  I want to share three specific, and sometimes passed over, traits of excellence.

Identifying emerging leaders is a learned practice.  While anyone can lead in some capacity, I believe there are qualities some individuals have that set them apart from the pack.  Part of my job is to identify potential leaders.  You are probably in a position like myself or you find yourself in a place where you want to be discovered.  Either way, you need to know what sets potential leaders apart from the status quo.  Personally, I think you can establish a handful of qualities that serve as lenses for you to peer through when searching for emerging leaders.  Here are the baseline qualities I look for in a potential leader.

Memorial Day is not just a day to eat BBQ or kick off summer or hang out at the pool.  It is a day to remember that someone died providing us the freedom to be able to do those things.  Liberty is expensive.  Memorial Day protects us from forgetting that.  I believe this holiday can teach us lessons in leadership as well.  We stand on the shoulders of those we lost on battlefields to make our nation and ourselves better.  My hope is that we hear the voices of the brave who went before us echo in our hearts today reminding us that we can be better. In that spirit I want to give you a couple of wise truths we can take away from Memorial Day.

We preachers put a lot of stock in Sundays.  We prepare, study, plan services and pray people will show up!  How many times have you walked away from a Sunday and said to yourself, "Wonder why no one came back after last week?  Why did today feel off?  This was a great sermon, why did it not seem to fit this Sunday?"  Perhaps all of our planning, studying and praying misses an element:  A system.  While most of the content here revolves around general leadership, today I want to focus specifically on a system that will grow your church.  We have to employ the right processes that tie together the elements of a weekend service.  If we want to make the most of our services and grow our churches, we need to approach Sunday different.  Sundays need a system.  Here are a few ways to rethink your outlook on weekend services and a hidden gem of a system to help grow your church.

John Maxwell says, "The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle."  The reality of leadership is that at some point we will all find ourselves playing "second fiddle."  While we may aspire to be a point leader, and some of us may attain that, we all do well to learn to lead from the second chair.  I have been on staff at my church for 10 years.  I have been second chair for 10 years.  Fortunately I have seen some success in my time here, I have also learned several things.  Specifically I have learned there are a handful of things second chair leaders should guard their hearts against.  These attitudes can make or break your potential.  Here are 3 areas where you should guard your heart in leadership.

Your days can be overwhelming.  There are endless things to be done, emails to be returned, issues to be dealt with and crises to be averted.  The task of leadership is vast and sometimes we feel the weight of it.  On top of that, you are an agent of change.  You want to leave your organization better than you found it.  Perhaps, like me, you have wondered, “Where do I begin?”  I believe you can find clarity.  Instead of telling you dozens of tweaks to make to your day, I want to coach you to ask some simple questions.  As you begin your day lay these questions over your organization, church, family or your own personal leadership.  These four questions should generate four lists.  These lists are what you should focus your energies on.  They are your gallery of action items to begin chipping away at, one at a time.  

Not long ago I took our staff through a process of defining right behaviors.  We spent weeks doing this.  We described what we love about working on our team, narrowed them down and formed them into values.  Our values are not theory, they are behavioral.  This is how you act.  While it is not a quick process and can sometimes be awkward, you need to determine your team's values.  How do you want your staff to behave?  By clearly stating this is how I want you to behave you free your team up to self-regulate and thrive.  You also paint a picture of the type person you need to hire, because if someone lives your values before they are on your team, they will naturally live them on it as well.  Here are the expectations on our team.  Each is followed by the staff value we created in summary.  I hope this inspires you to take the same journey in your organization.