Leadership Summit 2015: Bill Hybels

If you missed the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit this year, no worries I’ve got you covered. I’ll be posting my notes and thoughts from each presenter over the next couple of days.

If you’re unfamiliar with Leadership Summit, more than a quarter million leaders participated in this world-class experience designed to help leaders lead better and embrace a grander vision – the reason God called you to lead. The event was broadcast live in HD from Willow’s campus near Chicago to more than 375 sites in North America and later around the world.

Willow Creek Community Church Founder and Senior Pastor Bill Hybels opened the Summit addressing The 5 Intangibles of Leadership.  The following are leadership quotes and lessons from this incredible session.

• Leadership is about moving people or an organization from here to there. From where it is to where it needs to go.
• Leadership is not about protecting a position.
• The highest value at the Leadership Summit is humility…
• Armed with enough humility, leaders can learn from anyone

8 Basic functions of leadership

1. Casting Vision
2. Building Teams
3. Motivating & Inspiring
4. Solving Problems
5. Change Management
6. Establishing Core Values
7. Allocating Resources
8. Developing Emerging Leaders

5 Intangibles of Leadership

#1 Grit: Passion & Perseverance over the long haul…unrelenting long-term tenacity. Gritty people play hurt, expect progress to be difficult, but progress to be made. This is the key that unlocks the ability for less talented people to win. Those with more grit undoubtedly accomplish more in life than those who do not, regardless of talent.

• Can grit be developed? Yes. But the archenemy of grit is ease. Grit development demands difficulty.
• Overcoming physical challenges is one way to grow grit, and any area you develop grit in spills over to other areas of their lives.
• Young leaders grow when volunteering for extra work assignments and then delivering and over delivering above expectations.
• When Sr. Leaders push themselves hard teammates and followers notice and they begin to push themselves to the next level.
• The whole organization gets grittier, and gritty organizations are unstoppable.

#2 Self Awareness: Who are you trying to impress? Without understanding the decisions and how they’re tethered to your past you destroy your future.

• Under-performance is connected to leaders not being self aware.
• Blind spots: stuff that leaders think they’re good at but everyone else knows that’s not true…they’re making a laughing stock of themselves.
• Something someone believes they do well but everyone else on the team is aware of.
• On average every leader has 3.4 blinds spots.
• The danger is you really have no idea that they exist.
• Everyone will win when you grow in self awareness.

#3 Resourcefulness: (learning agility), quick learners, tinkerers,

• People with a high learning agility are promoted more than 20% more than others.
• Resourceful people may not know the right answer but they stay at it until they figure it out.
• Resourcefulness can be developed, but only by putting yourself in difficult situations and experimenting and trying to figure things out until you do.

#4 Self-Sacrificing Love: serve them, invest in them, pray for them by name, pull down the professional veil.

• Vision & strategy are not at the core of leadership. It’s self-sacrificing love.
• Love never fails.
• Love is what melts teams into families instead of just work-groups.
• We live in a day with narcissistic blood flowing through the veins of most leaders, trust in organizations is low, and at the root of it is a lack of love that must begin in the heart of the Sr. Leader.
• Gallup measures what separates healthy organizations from toxic ones with one simple question: “Do workers feel personal concern coming from their managers?”
• The quality of your “loving” sets the tone of the culture in your organization.

#5 Sense of Meaning:

• Start with Why / Simon Sinek / What How Why
• People want a “why” to come to work…a compelling reason to do what you do at your organization…what’s worth giving your life to?
• What is your “white hot why?”