Top Five Leadership Principles-Principle of Process

This week, I’m distilling my top five leadership principles. I’ve already covered the law of the lid and the need of the leader to first lead oneself. Today, I want to distill a third principle that I call the Principle of Process.

We live in a result-oriented culture. Further, we live in an immediate results culture. So, we expect to see results quickly. The problem with leadership is that it rarely produces lasting, healthy results quickly. In fact, if you have quick results, it could be that important things have been sacrificed or compromised in the “process.” Now, before I continue, I confess that even churches and pastors are susceptible to this. “Church growth” wasn’t a focus of pastoring until approximately half a century ago. Measuring church effectiveness wasn’t a thing until about that same time. Yet, I’ve been shaped by both, experienced both, and came to expect it and focus on it. So, no one is immune from the type of thinking focused on results or immediacy of results. However, great leadership focuses on the process, not production. Production and results are important, but they’re not to be the focus. The focus should be on the habits, core values, ethics necessary to produce the desired results. For example, with my current staff, we have a few staff core values or non-negotiable beliefs that guide our decisions, form our future, and create our culture. In my current setting, we’ve seen immediate results, but with a focus on these core values, we’re likely to see long-term, healthy, and sustained results. When this is done, the results take care of themselves.

Not only does great leadership focus on the process, but great leaders focus on the process of great leadership. Great leaders take a lifetime to produce, and that requires a process of continued, sustained growth, learning, and improvement. (Hopefully, by now, you’re realizing the genius of my sequencing in this series.) Whatever you might think about leaders, they’re not born. They’re made. They’re made daily, and not in a day.

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