A leader is a master of strategic steps
Strategy is defined as a series of manoeuvres that are undertaken to achieve a specific goal. A leader goes through a series of steps to achieve his aims.
A good leader has goals and takes steps to maintain and achieve his goals. This is what makes leaders candidates for strategies!
When leaders accept the responsibility to lead, they make efforts that involve more than one step.
What a leader must know about strategy
• Every great or important destination requires a number of steps to get to it.
A good leader must accept the reality that no great achievement involves just one step. It will involve a series of steps and a series of manoeuvres. A leader carefully plans and goes through these steps.
•The worst leaders will take zero steps to achieve anything. Such leaders live in constant expectation of something being done for them.
Their mentality is that someone owes them something and that someone has to do something for them or to them.
This is often the mentality of people who are used to others thinking for them, taking the initiative and getting things accomplished for them.
Their understanding is that something has to be given to them or handed over to them.
As a leader, many people depend on you and you have to be creative and take steps to achieve your goals and aims.
• Those interested in taking only one step towards a goal are often not the best leaders.
Bad leaders are a little better than the worst leaders because they take at least one step towards their goals. But most things are not achieved by taking one step.
Many people will take one step of fasting and praying every year. Many church members will take one step of sowing a seed in order to be prosperous. But one step does not go very far. As you sit in your seat reading this book, if you were to take just one step how far would you get?
There are a few things, if any, that can be reached with one step. The Bible says that “… all things work together for good.” Many things work together to make one thing beautiful or successful. For example, many things are combined in a particular way and with particular timing to make a nice stew or soup.
Cooking a nice meal involves a number of meaningful steps. It is not just having one thing, like good meat, that will make you have a nice stew.
In the same way, many things have to work together to be a good Christian. There is more than one step to becoming a good and strong Christian.
Because one step gets you almost nowhere, the one step is often seen as having not worked. Because of this, people who have taken the one step of praying or one step of fasting or one step of sowing a seed have often complained that the one step does not work.
You will need to surrender your life to Christ, have your quiet time, read the Bible, pray and witness to others to be a good Christian.
• The greater the goal, the more the manoeuvres and steps you need to take.
The greater and more impossible the goal is to you, the more steps you will have to take to get there. To achieve great goals you will need to take many steps.
• Each step in a strategy requires faith and patience.
The first few steps require the most patience and the most faith in the wisdom of your strategy.
If one of the steps you are taking is to have your quiet time, you need a lot of faith and patience to consistently have your quiet time, believing that it will have an effect on the outcome of your life.
That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises Hebrews 6:12
Dear leader, follow God’s example and become a man who takes as many strategic steps. God took many strategic steps to redeem us and make us His own. When man sinned, God took amazing steps to redeem man, due to His love for man.
God sent Jesus to come from heaven to earth and die on the cross in order to draw man to himself.
May you graduate from being a zero-step person or a one-step person to one of many strategic steps.
The writer is the founder of the Lighthouse Group of churches.