Lead Strong: Leadership Lessons From The Bible - Part 3Sample

Leaders Have Hard Conversations Awhile back, I was having lunch with a friend. We were having a good time catching up when suddenly, the conversation slipped into something that felt really uncomfortable to me. Other people's names came up and the conversation started feeling ugly. I was getting information I didn’t know about and definitely didn’t NEED to know about. I do love the chat and juicy tidbits of random stories. But in this situation, it went beyond that. It actually went into a bit of character assassination. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. The conversation ate at me for the rest of the day and into the next day. The Holy Spirit was urging me to confront my friend about our lunchtime gossip session. So I called. I apologized for my part in listening and allowing extra information to be shared. Then, I asked this person not to share things with me that would change my view or thoughts of others anymore. This person, fortunately, extended a lot of grace and also apologized for the words that were shared from their end. It could have gone south. I could have lost a friend over this hard conversation. When it comes to relationships, we’d all rather have good ones than bad ones. We all want friends. We all want to be liked and loved. But when we look at the lives of the prophets Samuel and Nathan, it is obvious they chose holiness and obedience to God over being liked by people. The life of a prophet must have been SO isolating. No one ever likes what you have to say because most of the time you are rebuking and correcting because humankind is busy making a mess of things. None of us want to hear about our dumb mistakes. But Samuel and Nathan were called to have these hard conversations. As leaders, so are we! When we choose to have these honest and hard conversations in humility, grace, love and kindness, hearts can be changed. We need to be willing to have hard conversations instead of hiding from them for the sake of having people “like” us. What about you? Was there a recent conversation that should have been a hard conversation, but you chose to let it slide instead? Spend some time today asking God for courage in those situations. By Jenni Clayville