FollowtheLeader.indd

FOLLOW THE LEADER

permitted, I could give the names of scores of these national leaders
who are already having national and international impact as world-class
Christian leaders. It has been my privilege to work with many of them
personally around the world.

I have just shared this representative list of some popular American
Christian leaders to demonstrate the point that a faithful and focused leader
increasingly becomes one with his or her purpose. That’s why FOCUS
is so crucial in the life of a leader. Let me quickly share a few quotations
about the importance of focus in leadership:

• The focused life is the powerful life. The saints I have read seem
  to have a unified priority system. They are chiefly single-agenda
  individuals with a purity of purpose...When we focus and screw
  down the nozzle, we increase the force of the water...Once you
  decide what you want to do and the strategy that will accomplish it,
  then decision-making becomes simple. You do the things that advance
  the strategy and avoid the things that hinder it.^34


• The ability to block out the unnecessary is the willingness to
  concentrate your resources for more impact, just as one can deliver a
  more forceful blow with the fist than with an open palm...the essence
  of focus is sacrifice. Leaders who cannot bring themselves to give up
  the unnecessary for the sake of the necessary do not possess the critical
  leadership characteristic of focus.^35


• Effective leaders who reach their potential spend more time focusing
  on what they do well than on what they do wrong.^36

A leader must stay focused if he or she is going to be effective. To stay
focused, a leader must live a life of planned neglect. He will have to
purposefully neglect some things in order to give his attention to other things. To
do that, a leader must constantly be prioritizing his life. In other words,
he must constantly fight to keep “first things FIRST!” This is one of
the greatest battles of every leader. The secondary and tertiary things
constantly crowd out the things that should be in first place. This is
certainly one of the lifelong struggles of my own life and leadership. I
am constantly plagued by the “tyranny of the urgent!” It is so easy to spend
my days “hurrying BIG for little reasons!” If we are not very careful, we
can...