Leadership Principle: Take Heart!
Take Heart! Before becoming a leader of a major corporation and leading people to unlimited successes, you must first learn about forgiveness. Casting vision is expected and required, but preparing a clean slate for each person is an entirely different matter. It is a matter of the heart.
Forgiveness replenishes the soul, refreshing its soil to receive new seeds to be planted. A leader can’t produce a harvest without first preparing the soil, so that the seeds can actually take root. I believe that when a new seed takes root, it embeds itself into the soil to create a relationship that is united under one purpose; to grow up together to produce fruit. Do you ever stop for a moment and ask yourself the questions, what’s embedded in me? What’s embedded in the people or units that I will guide? How do we manage to grow together through a shared vision?
Growth, it’s the underline for change shared in the same space (soil) intertwined together, revealing each persons gifts, talents and weaknesses. Are you ready for the growing pains because change does not ask your permission to take effect, it simply commences. A leader’s goal should be to aspire to grow up together with their team and produce fruit. Whiling walking through the good, bad and the ugly and having the patience to see the caterpillar before the butterfly. The cocoon process is about going through the darkness to get to the light and in order to prepare a sustainable future there has got to be good ground.
Take heart and ask your people to forgive their past leaders, co-workers and their own personal short-comings. Forgiveness cleansing their heart of any impurities, so that a new vision can take root and everyone can then move forward with tilling the ground for many harvests to come. It will then becomes everyone’s responsibility to manage growth, invest in their future and create a culture for new leaders to be planted in their soil. This is the kind of buy-in that every leader needs from their team, a commitment to pave the way for innovation to spout. In preparing the ground, it is necessary to put the right seeds in the right soil. Review your human resources, determine if there is a need to re-assign, re-empower and redeploy. Share a heart of forgiveness to call forth a new future.
Finally, take heart and ask them to forgive you as their leader now, because you will make mistakes. Yet in those mistakes, taking heart on the center platform is just as important as all the workers taking heart in the audience or behind closed doors. Team building isn’t always pretty, but a diamond can’t shine, if it isn’t tested first.
The journey ahead is filled with many unknowns and out of those remarkable things will happen. One thing is for certain, taking heart will only make room for more gifts to come and cause more opportunities to be created. Strategy isn’t at its full effect until a plan is created first, so take heart.
Take heart and prepare to sow your seeds into good ground.
- The Leadership Columnist
