Business owners rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. The greater challenge is identifying which idea deserves attention and then turning it into meaningful action.
That was what stayed with me after this year's Global Leadership Summit. The speakers were excellent, but the real value of an event like GLS26 is not measured by how many notes we take. It is measured by what happens when those ideas meet the actual problems we are facing in our businesses.
As I listened, I kept connecting the speakers' insights with conversations I have with business owners and CEOs today. Four questions stood out.
Problem or Pattern?
Look beyond the symptom to what keeps repeating.
Why Would They Stay?
Consider whether your best people see a future.
What Conversation?
Approach the hard conversation with curiosity.
What Governs You?
Let conviction guide decisions when they cost you.
01. Are You Solving the Problem or the Pattern?
Craig Groeschel opened GLS26 by talking about patterns. His framework was straightforward: See it. Break it. Build it. Protect it.
Leaders can spend a tremendous amount of time repeatedly solving the same problem without recognizing the pattern producing it. Perhaps good employees keep leaving. Leadership meetings generate plenty of discussion but very little execution. Decisions continue finding their way back to the owner even though they should have been delegated long ago. The same customer or operational problem keeps resurfacing despite repeated efforts to correct it.
Craig encouraged leaders to examine what keeps repeating, what is consistently missing, and what tension continues to return.
Those questions move us beyond treating the immediate symptom. They can also make us uncomfortable because we may discover that our own habits, expectations, communication, or unwillingness to address something are contributing to the result.
In my years of leading organizations, I learned how difficult it can be to see a pattern clearly when you are standing in the middle of it. I see that same challenge among leaders today. The closer we are to the situation, the easier it becomes to accept something as normal simply because it is familiar.
02. Why Would Your Best People Stay?
Ryan Leak addressed another challenge I regularly hear about from business leaders: retaining great people.
He described building a “stay culture,” where employees remain because staying feels like progress. Compensation and benefits matter, but they are not the entire answer.
Do your best people see a future for themselves in your company?
Are they growing? Are they receiving meaningful opportunities, or will they eventually need to leave your organization to find them?
Ryan also challenged leaders to think carefully about the voices around their table. The person we consider difficult may be the person willing to question an idea that everyone else has quietly accepted. An agreeable leadership team can make meetings more comfortable, but comfort does not necessarily make the organization stronger.
One of Ryan's most practical questions was this: Who on your team is one opportunity away from reaching their potential?
Leaders can become so accustomed to seeing people in their current roles that they overlook who those people could become. Retaining good employees is not only about keeping them satisfied. It requires helping them see how they can continue growing, contributing, and building a meaningful future within the organization.
03. How Are You Approaching the Conversation You Know You Need to Have?
Kwame Christian addressed something every leader eventually faces: a difficult conversation.
A senior employee is not performing. Two valuable people cannot work together. A partnership has become strained. A longtime employee may no longer be right for the role. A customer relationship has become unhealthy, or someone is affecting the culture in ways that can no longer be ignored.
Being right is not the same as being persuasive.
A leader can have the facts, the authority, and the correct answer and still handle the conversation poorly. Kwame’s Compassionate Curiosity framework begins by acknowledging what the other person is experiencing, becoming genuinely curious about that person’s perspective, and then working together on the problem instead of treating each other as the problem.
That approach does not require leaders to avoid truth, lower expectations, or ignore accountability. It recognizes that difficult conversations involve more than facts. They also involve people, history, emotions, relationships, and consequences.
Before entering one of these conversations, leaders should ask whether they are genuinely trying to understand or simply preparing an argument. There may be information they do not possess. Fear, frustration, loyalty, fatigue, or pride may also be affecting their own judgment.
Sometimes the best preparation for a difficult conversation is having an honest conversation with a trusted person first.
04. What Is Inside Your Parentheses?
Priscilla Shirer brought a spiritual dimension to leadership that is especially important for those of us who follow Christ.
Using the account of Obadiah in 1 Kings 18, she contrasted a leader’s visible position with the convictions quietly governing that leader. Obadiah held significant responsibility in King Ahab’s household. He managed important affairs, people, resources, and decisions.
That was what others could see. Scripture also tells us that Obadiah feared the Lord. Priscilla described that defining conviction as what sits inside our “parentheses.”
Our titles may identify us as an owner, CEO, president, founder, or managing partner. Those titles explain what we do, but they do not necessarily reveal what governs how we do it.
What remains most important when financial pressure, growth, success, or fear begins competing for our attention?
For Christian business leaders, there is no clean separation between business decisions and stewardship decisions. The ways we handle people, money, growth, customers, culture, and opportunity reveal something about what we truly believe.
Turning Insight into Action
GLS26 provided valuable leadership ideas, but those ideas only become useful when we take them back into our businesses.
We must decide whether a recurring problem is evidence of a pattern. We must understand whether our best people see a future with us. We must enter the conversation we have been avoiding. We must also examine whether our decisions genuinely align with the convictions we say guide our lives.
There will be times when the right course is clear. There will also be situations where the answer is far less obvious. That is when the relationships leaders have intentionally built around themselves become especially important.
Who can you speak with when you need to think honestly? Who understands leadership and business well enough to challenge your assumptions? Who knows you well enough to recognize when fear, frustration, fatigue, or pride may be affecting your judgment? Who can disagree with you without having a personal interest in the outcome?
Some of those relationships in my own life have developed through C12, and I am grateful for them. The larger point, however, is that leaders need trusted people and a reliable process to help them see clearly and follow through.
One Final Question
What is happening in your business right now that you need to see differently, and who do you have around you to help you see it clearly?
Leadership Is Not Meant To Be Carried Alone
There will be times when the right course is clear and times when the answer is far less obvious. That is when the relationships leaders have intentionally built around themselves become especially important. C12 gives Christian business leaders a trusted process and table to think honestly, challenge assumptions, and follow through.
