Albert Mohler recently published a partially revised and updated edition of his 2012 book The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters. Click here to read my review of the book. Here are 30 more good quotes from the book:
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- The most essential element in determining whether others will follow you is your credibility to lead them and to guide the organization to the right future.
- Every single day, the faithful leader must be aware that credibility is the essence of leadership, and that it can be both earned and lost.
- Leadership doesn’t happen until communication happens.
- The best leaders know that the road to great effectiveness is paved with intentional communications, and the very best leaders are always learning how to be even more effective as communicators.
- If you don’t have a message, don’t try to lead. If you do have a message, your task is to communicate it effectively.
- Leadership is a risk, and those who are afraid to take that risk need to stay far away from the responsibilities of leadership.
- There is no substitute for effective reading when it comes to developing and maintaining the intelligence necessary to lead.
- Christian leaders learn to read with discernment drawn from our deepest convictions.
- The Christian leader will serve by leading and lead by serving, knowing that the power of office and leadership is there to be used, but to be used toward the right ends and in the right manner.
- A leader without accountability is an accident waiting to happen.
- The stewardship of power is one of the greatest moral challenges any leader will ever face.
- If you are truly unable or unwilling to stand up in front of people and speak with conviction, you are not called to the role of leadership.
- Christian leaders are invested with a stewardship of influence, authority, and trust that we are called to fulfill.
- Leaders—no matter their title—are servants, plain and simple.
- Leadership is a trust, and we will answer to God for that trust.
- Leadership requires the possession and cultivation of certain moral virtues that allow leadership to happen. If the leader does not demonstrate these essential virtues, disaster is certain.
- If your followers find out that you are not trustworthy, your leadership is undermined, usually fatally.
- Leaders have unique abilities, but they received those talents and the ability to develop them as gifts from God, given for the good and welfare of others.
- Leaders write because words matter and because the written word matters longer and reaches farther than the words we speak.
- If you are satisfied to lead from the past, stay out of the digital world. If you want to influence the future, brace yourself and get in the fast lane. But stay within the boundaries you set for yourself, and make every post pass your test of character and conviction.
- If you are a leader, you are responsible for seeing that your organization’s Internet presence is useful, attractive, inviting, and well designed.
- The Christian leader understands his calling in terms of God’s eternal purposes and plan.
- The effective leader learns how to be available at the right times—the times that will make the most difference.
- Leadership by conviction affirms the reality that leadership is an intellectual enterprise. It is more than intellectual, of course, but never less.
- Faithful leaders know that time has to be protected or it will be lost. Once lost, it can never be regained.
- The leaders who make the biggest difference are those with long tenure.
- Leadership is an endurance test that will demand the best of anyone.
- A legacy is what is left in the wake of a great leader. The leader is gone from the scene, but his influence remains essential to the direction and culture of the work he led.
- The American ideal of retirement does not meet the Christian standard of faithfulness. For Christians the issue should be redeployment rather than retirement.
- Your legacy is all that remains when you are gone. Do you have any idea what that legacy will be? Answering that question honestly is part of what it means to have the conviction to lead.
