What Do Leader's Need?

In today’s global business culture, organizations suffer from a common yet deadly malady. Hidden behind the hype of creative advertising campaigns and masked by a steady flow of financial reporting and a seemingly endless barrage of meetings, a serious shortage of competent leaders threatens every organization’s future success.

Leaders need to be Equipped to Lead for service. Leadership expert Dr. John W. Gardner had it right: despite what seem like a great many depressing aspects of management, leadership development is not one of them. The skills necessary for effective leadership are learned. In short, leaders are made, not born.

At the heart of the matter rests a universal truth that every stakeholder should embrace: long-term success is impossible unless leaders have a proven method for ensuring order and balance in organizational management. This truth disturbs us because most organizations these days reflect chaos and instability more than order and balance – a telltale sign of floundering leadership.

Different languages, lifestyles, and cultural influences are major obstacles to management. Leaders of organizations bog down in digesting such complexity, and they routinely opt to embrace the universal simplicity of numbers. Sadly, stakeholders fail to grasp this simple reality: it is people with knowledge who drive the bottom line, and therefore leaders must commit to people-first practices if they desire sustainable superior performance.

Nowhere is the tide of secular influence more dangerous than in the heart and head of an organization’s leader. When leaders fail to live by God’s natural laws and principles, organizational order and balance remains impossible. Leaders choosing to pursue this path will find an endless supply of chaos, restlessness, and instability.

Modern management requires leaders to resist the pull of societal culture and its growing willingness to exclude God and His natural laws and principles from organizations. Leaders must recognize the moral compass that is built into the soul f human beings and strive to instill the practice of ethical behavior.

Simply put, order will emerge when leaders subscribe to godly values. Without values and adherence to natural laws and principles, order cannot serve as an organization’s foundation. Similarly, without adequate focus on four universal components that are common to all organizations, balance cannot take shape.

Leaders must restore and maintain order and balance in their organizations by educating stakeholders on the importance of people, processes, and partners. Only then will organizations realize revolutionary performance, soaring beyond expectations to a place of realized potential. Businessman Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, says, “When you do something truly revolutionary, most competitors will never copy it; they won’t even understand it.”


In his groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Built to Serve, United Supermarkets CEO Dan Sanders showed how putting profits before people encourages organizational chaos, saps motivation, stifles innovation, and undercuts competitiveness. He also unveiled a revolutionary people-centered business model championed by United and challenged other business leaders to put the human factor first. For more book summaries, please visit http://www.bizsum.com.