16 leadership lessons I learned the hard way

Normal teenagers don’t read leadership books. They play baseball, chase girls, and wait on their budding mustache to bloom into all its glory. But as my wife continually reminds me, other than my sweet mustache, I wasn’t normal.

In my defense, I came by it naturally. Our home was filled with leadership books. They were left on bedside tables, stuffed in briefcases, and alphabetized near the theology section of our home library. As a young businessman and civic leader, Dad devoured anything that helped him wrap his mind around his growing responsibilities. As his only son and namesake, I followed suit. By the time I graduated high school, I could quote John Maxwell and Peter Drucker like a seasoned executive.

But it was all theory. As I soon found out, leadership in the real world is complicated, contextual, and hard. To grow beyond my theories, I had to immerse them into real organizations with real people and real problems.

Here are several leadership lessons I’ve learned the hard way.

Five essential elements of transformational small groups

Transformational discipleship involves moving people from sitting in rows, where they are simply in proximity to one another, to sitting in circles. From there, they move into community with one another.