Evaluating Leadership

By Doug Franklin November 30, 2011

How do you determine if you are a good leader? Most of us measure ourselves against the leaders in our lives. Maybe we look at the senior pastor of our church and measure ourselves against his/her leadership or we look to a business leader we know and ask ourselves the same question. Is this a good way to determine your leadership competency? Not really, because who knows what kind of leader those people are. A better way is to look over your shoulder and see who is following you. What do the people look like who are your disciples? Are they humble, kind, generous? Do they live the vision you are calling them to? Are they responsible and willing to sacrifice to accomplish the mission? Are they energized or are they defeated? Here are few action steps of solid leaders:

1. Care about followers
People only follow people who care about them. Have you connected one on one with all your people in the last seven days? If you have not make it a priority to have a personal word of encouragement with all of them soon. 

2. Clear vision
Make sure all your people know what success looks like for this year and this week. When we cast a clear vision people will be energized to follow it. 

3. Personally live the mission
Before we can ask others to live the mission we must live it ourselves. Have we made sure that our followers see us doing the things we are challenging them to do?

4. People before tasks
Do our followers know that we value them over the mission or as much as the mission? This is a bit of a repeat but people must know you care about them before you can lead them.

5. Giving away leadership
Our number one goal as leaders is to look for people to take our place. Are you giving away leadership or are you taking credit? Giving away leadership will make you more successful and lead to greater impact.