Leadership 101 #2 Responsibility

Principle #2 Leaders Take Responsibility

What are some things I am responsible for?  Myself, My family, church leaders. If you put a leader in place then you take responsibility for everything that person does:  The good, the bad, the stupid things they say, the brilliant idea, everything.  If you are the leader, then everything that happens in the organization sooner or later comes back to you.  This is why it is so important to hire people slowly, and remove people quickly.  This is why a culture of taking responsibility is so critical.  You have to train leaders to do the same thing.  Blaming someone for something that happened under your watch makes you look rather ridiculous and creates a toxic culture.  Everyone starts to look over their shoulder and trust will elude the team.

Everything comes back to me.  Either I hired the wrong person, didn’t coach and help them enough, or gave them too much responsibility too soon.  When a character issue arises, it is always up to the leader to help the person deal with it in an effective way.

So you want to be a leader?  Take responsibility.

Leadership 101 #1 Humility

Over the last few days I have been pondering what I am looking for in leaders.  In essence, this made me do a heart check of what I am as a leader.  So over the next 10 days I will share 10 principles that I am learning.

Principle #1 Leaders must lead from a place of humility –

I am tired of people who have all the answers.  Vision is highly overrated.  What blesses a ministry, a work place, a home, is humility and integrity.  I’ll gladly take a person who is humble and who has integrity over big vision any day.  Show me unconditional loyalty with no entitlement and I will naturally want to walk alongside you.  A lot of people have vision based on ego.  This is corrupt and evil.  If we depend on Jesus we get his vision and develop our trust in him.  This has to be done with humility.  Before I release and call someone a leader, I want to see if they can serve someone else’s vision.  I must follow, then maybe I can lead.

Do you get hung up on this just as much as I do?