Effective leaders help their team develop as leaders and at times this will mean correcting unacceptable behavior. Read Proverbs 3:11-12.

God’s Word gives leaders a model to follow. Think through the powerful implications of verse 12. Few things are more difficult for a leader than to give a firm rebuke to a team member yet a leader who truly loves their team will be found as quick to exhort and discipline their team as reward them. From my own experience it is tough enough to exhort and correct teammates when they make a careless or inadvertent mistake but when someone on the team purposefully imposes their own will to violate the established criterion for behavior or protocol the job is just that much more difficult. Read more »

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts,” Winston Churchill. David’s moral failures in seducing another man’s wife and then finding a way to cause that man’s death could have derailed his leadership of Israel but his failure was not final. Read 2 Samuel 12:13-31.

David demonstrated several actions and attitudes that can help any leader survive a major failure: Read more »

The degree to which a Christian leader tolerates known sin in their own life or the operation of their team is the degree to which they separate themselves and their team from God’s grace and favor. Read Joshua 7:1-26.

I grew up with six siblings. My parents knew that what one of us did that they “viewed as good” would soon show up in the behavior of the others and what one of us got away with would soon affect the behavior of all seven. My mom seemed to have a “proverbial type” saying to fit every situation. One of those sayings was “One rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel.” In today’s world we don’t typically keep barrels of apples around the house so the saying could possibly be changed to “one apple, rotting in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator will cause all the other apples stored in that drawer to get soft spots and begin rotting.” (I do like my mom’s version better.) Read more »

Effective leaders must develop self-discipline. The first person a leader needs to lead in this area is themselves. Read Numbers 33:1-49.

Numbers 33 provides a review of the entire exodus journey from Egypt to Jordon. Why didn’t the Israelites get to the Promised Land more quickly? Not because it was such a long trip in distance, they could have made the trip across this distance in less than a year under the worst of circumstances even with small children. The real reason was that God needed to prepare the Hebrew people, teaching them how to move from a slave mentality to a free mentality where they chose to be obedient to Him from a free disciplined spirit. Read more »

A leader must have faith in their team and be prepared to lead with equal effectiveness regardless of current circumstances. Read Numbers 11-14.

Moses faced open rebellion from the people concerning the kinds of food God was providing. He had his senior leadership lose confidence in him after a marriage to a non-Hebrew. He had 10 of 12 tribal leaders refuse to follow the established course and timeline after they saw the potential problems in the land God had promised them. He faced a total collapse of confidence by all the people when the 10 tribal leaders brought their report out of the leadership team and took it public. Yet when God was ready to strike down the people, Moses begged God to give the people another chance. Read more »