Are You Steering Your Ship True North?

A ship that turns its direction by one degree will alter its course by hundreds of miles. In the same way, your decision to trust in God will have a significant impact on the direction in which you’re headed. The more you trust, the more freedom you’ll gain from the shackles of the urgent, bottom-line pressures that enslave you. The more freedom you have, the more significant a leader you’ll become.

ISSUE: We are led by bottom-line pressures.

For a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

—2 Peter 2:19

I was asked to conduct a leadership program for a group of San Francisco sales executives. As part of my preparation, the leader asked me to weave in a module on stress management. During the program, I discovered that the group was on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown. They were under relentless pressure to produce results and felt as if they were strapped to a treadmill whose speed kept increasing.

I wanted to help them find the root cause of their situation. The sales executives, however, only wanted me to equip them with skills so that I could help them run their treadmill faster and better. In essence, they wanted me to teach them how to go down the wrong path more efficiently.

The bottom line had become their god. It was insatiable. No matter how hard they worked, it was never enough, nor would it ever be enough. These executives were talented, intelligent, capable people who, somewhere along the way, lost focus on what is truly meaningful and important. They had become slaves to bottom-line pressure and, as a result, became professionally ineffective and personally burnt out.

SOLUTION: Let God lead.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall make your paths straight.

—Proverbs 3:5–6

In my work as a leadership coach, I find people in all positions, from CEOs to line employees, wrestling with challenging dilemmas and trying to make sense out of situations that have no simple solutions. These are talented people who want to make a difference, but who are stuck in a quagmire of urgent deadlines, unrealistic expectations, and politics.

There are times when critical business decisions have no correct answer and can only be made with a leap of faith by the leader alone. The solution is to trust God’s principles, which will help us be effective and significant leaders in the midst of a pressured and demanding world.

Excerpted from God is My CEO by Larry Julian