Every year, my team and I attend the leadership summit. This year, there is a shadow hanging over the summit as I outlined here, but I’m still trusting that it will have some incredibly helpful content, just like in past years. To capture what I’m learning and to help you grow as a leader, I shared my notes from each session, which you can read here. I wanted to share some of the biggest personal takeaways I had. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you if you attended the summit to process your learnings with your team and use that as a way forward for your team.

1. Leaders need a heart to care. This is the difference between me centered leadership and you centered leadership. Leaders need to notice people and let them know they matter. To thank people for what they do. This is hard for me as I want to get things done and can easily run through tasks.
2. Leaders should ask what would I want to hear from others. It is so important to understand what people feel from you. This was a big theme in the first session. I love this question, what would I want people to say to me? Often, leaders struggle to know how to complement or celebrate people, but asking this question is a great place to start.
3. Think bigger. T.D. Jakes’s session on vision was my favorite session. The longer you are in a church or an organization, it is difficult to think big or have a big vision. It’s easy to get lost in the details of work. There are now more people counting on you, not just your family but also a staff whose livelihoods depend on you and your company. But vision is crucial. It is what gives you purpose and what excites those who follow you. I can’t wait to dive into Jakes’s new book Soar. 
4. Not all data is the same. Rasmus Ankersen talked about soccer in Europe and how all data and stats are not the same. For churches, this is huge. For churches, there are numbers and things that are happening that are more important than other things. There are also things that tell you more things than other things. He talked about one of the big problems for companies is outcome bias which is good results are always the result of superior decision making.
5. Fear. Erwin McManus’s talk was the talk of the summit. His idea that we are terrified that we will never become all that we could be spoke so powerfully to me. This is the battle for all of us, but especially leaders.