The Global Leadership Summit is a two-day, world-class leadership event experienced by more than 170,000 leaders around the world, representing more than 14,000 churches. It’s telecast LIVE from Willow’s campus (near Chicago) every August. Throughout the fall, Summit events take place in an additional 300+ cities, 92 countries—and translated into 42 languages.

Willow Creek Community Church Founder and Senior Pastor Bill Hybels opened the Summit addressing the courage that leadership requires.  The following are leadership quotes and lessons from this incredible session.

• Everybody wins when a leader gets better.
• Vision is a picture of the future that creates passion in people.
• God made you a leader to create discontent with “here” and lead to “there.”
• Vision dies in the heart of a leader due to the fear of the cost being too high…the loss being too great.
• Don’t die a coward!
• Visions from God are holy commodities that need to be treated with the utmost respect.
• The leaders job is to define reality.
• All leaders are leading in 1 of 3 realities
  1. A down turn: admit the downturn, declare an emergency, and execute a plan to turn it around
  2. Status quo: create an emergency
  3. An up turn: pour fuel on it, give pep talks and raises, take risks with younger leaders, build cash reserves for when the run is done, and innovate
• If you lead long enough, you’re going to experience all 3 of these realities.
• Your team already knows where the organization is at, they’re just waiting for you to admit it and lead out of it.
• It takes courage to build a fantastic culture.
• People join organizations, they leave managers.
• The Sr. Leader drives the culture of the organization.
• Staff Cultures will only be as healthy as the Sr. Pastor or CEO wants them to be, delegating or abdicating this to anyone else is the kiss of death. People will only take this as serious as the Sr. Leader.
• There are only 2 kinds of employees: Culture Builders and Culture Busters. They both may have jobs but only culture builders are going to have jobs at Willow. We are no longer going to pay people to bruise and bust our culture.
• Do you know how healthy your staff culture is? If you’re not willing to measure it, can you at least admit that you don’t want to know because you’re cowardly about it?
• It takes courage to establish and enforce values.
• There comes a time when a leader needs to stop casting vision and start behaving differently.
• It takes courage to finish strong.
• It takes courage to start something & sustain something, but finishing is really tough.
• Some of the most rewarding experiences in a leaders marathon are reserved for quite late in the race.