Speaker 1: Hey, what's up, y'all? My name's Chris Abbott, but all my friends just call me Abbo, and in this video, we're going to be talking about leadership principles from the Navy SEALs, and we're going to specifically answer the question, how to develop leadership skills in a church. Coming up. Now, like, Gus has to offer, I guess, like- Hey, what's up, y'all? Welcome back to the channel. Now, what we're going to be doing in this video is just specifically breaking down three tips and three leadership principles from the Navy SEALs, that not only Navy SEALs, but some of the best leaders and organizations in the world use. So let's dive in. Okay, so principle number one, extreme ownership. Now, this means that every single leader must accept who he is and that he is ultimately responsible for everything. So this idea of extreme ownership means that if somebody screws up underneath you, it doesn't matter if it's your fault or not, but as the leader, you take extreme ownership and you take responsibility for that. Now, I actually had this happen a couple of years ago. So we had a church growth conference. We had invited a bunch of churches from all over the country to come in, and I just taught social media and church growth principles for two days straight, right? So at the end of the two days, we were going to invite these churches into kind of a coaching network where we were going to coach them on some of these principles that we'd been pioneering. So everybody's excited. I had literally four churches that walked up to the stage and literally threw their credit cards at me at the end of the conference and said, sign me up. I'll pay whatever I need. This is incredible. I need to just quit my church and come be an intern for you, right? Which was kind of funny and kind of flattering at the same time, right? The only problem was we now had credit cards and no way to run them, right? We hadn't actually thought through how we were going to sign people up. And so I'm standing there with credit cards that people are throwing at me, looking around going, what should we do, right? And so afterwards we were debriefing and we were talking about it and I took full responsibility because at the end of the day, I should have thought of that, right? Like it's not on me to take payments, right? Like we have a business office that does that. I actually don't even know how to take credit card payments, but as the leader, I should have thought of that. I should have thought ahead and say, okay, we've decided what we are inviting people into. We've spent two days getting them here, teaching them. Now we're inviting them to take the next step to become part of this coaching network. And we know exactly what we're going to offer them and how we're going to help them grow their churches. But I didn't think about how we were going to allow them to sign up. That was on me as the leader, right? Extreme ownership. And so the most important thing is to understand that it doesn't matter if it's your fault or not. You're the leader, it's your fault. So you have to take extreme ownership. All right, principle number two, there's no such thing as bad teams, only bad leaders. When I was a kid, I used to go to the same summer camp every single year, right? And so every year for six years, I would go back to this. And finally, when I was 15 years old, I became chief of the Shawnee tribe, right? I was pumped. I've been waiting for this for years. It was now my turn to run my tribe. And the way that it was set up is that you had four different tribes who would compete for points in different competitions all week long. And whichever tribe had the most points at the end of the week won the golden feather. I know, sounds pretty prestigious, pretty crazy, right? But it was a big deal back then, right? And not only did you win the golden feather, but you also got bragging rights for an entire year, right? And we would talk trash to all the other tribes. And so I just knew, I was like, okay, when I'm coming in now, it's my turn to take over as the chief of the Shawnee tribe. So one of the things that I realized even at 15 was that I wasn't competing against the other tribes. I was competing against the other chiefs, right? This is something that I don't even think a lot of the chiefs understood is that all I had to do was I had to be a good leader in my tribe. And so one of the interesting things was at the end of the week, when we switched and I got sent over to the Delaware tribe, right? They were normally one of the quietest tribes and probably in last place, right? And everybody knew it. And so on that day, the Shawnee tribe ended up being the second largest tribe, but the loudest tribe of the day was the Delaware tribe, right? Now, why did that matter? What changed, right? Well, it was simply the leader. My goal was to make our tribe have as much fun as possible and be the loudest tribe out there. And so I shared that vision and that leadership philosophy with my team and my team responded, right? The tribe, the Shawnee tribe was the loudest all week long. So when I went over to the Delaware, I took that same leadership philosophy, that same vision, and I just said, guys, we're going to have a ton of fun today. We're going to have a blast. And no matter what happens with all the competitions, we're going to be the loudest tribe out here. We're especially going to beat my tribe, the Shawnee. You guys in, right? And they were pumped. And that's exactly what happened. And I remember at the end of the day, when we switched and we went back to our tribes, the chief of the Delaware tribe came to me and just said, dude, Abbo, I don't know how they were so loud for you. They're never that loud for me. That's so weird, man. Right? Now, I didn't want to tell the chief. I knew exactly what the difference was, right? There was no such thing as bad teams. There's no such thing as bad tribes, right? There's only bad leaders. And that leader just simply didn't understand that fact and didn't understand that the way that you win the Golden Feather is by simply having the most fun and being the loudest tribe. And that's exactly what happened. I don't want to brag, but at 15 years old, the Shawnee tribe took home the Golden Feather, right? So this principle of no bad teams, only bad leaders extends to every single organization, not just summer camp, right? That's the same way in your church. That means that if you don't have the right leaders in your church, the reason is because you haven't led them there yet. There's no such thing as bad teams, only bad leaders, right? So you need to take full responsibility for the underperformers, right? If there are people on your church staff or maybe on the worship team or people that are some of the underperformers, it's on you as the leader to come alongside them and to coach them up and to be able to get them up to par. And if it turns out they're just not the right person for the job, it's on you as the leader to remove them or hopefully move them into another position where they can absolutely thrive. But there's no such thing as bad teams, only bad leaders. Okay, so before I get to my last point, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notifications bell. That way you get a notification every single time we drop a new video. All right, and principle number three, believe. I believe this is one of the most important principles in leadership, right? You have to be completely aligned with the mission or the vision. And if you're not, then you have to aggressively work to align yourself with the mission or the vision, right? This is the only way that you're going to be able to accomplish the mission or be able to lead people to where you need to go. You have to have a vision for it, you have to believe in it, and they're not always going to be sold on the vision themselves. They just have to believe that you believe it, right? So if you're trying to get a team to go with you, right? Maybe you want to double the church, or maybe you want to change the entire city, or maybe you want to get a thousand people saved. If that's your goal, they may not believe that's possible, but that's okay. You actually don't have to make them believe it. You just have to make them believe that you believe it, right? So belief is one of the most important things that as leaders that we can possess. Now, ex-Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, who actually wrote the book Extreme Ownership, where I got these principles from, talks about the importance of belief and says that as a leader, our default setting needs to be aggressive. We need to be proactive and aggressive. So we don't wait for things to happen to us and be reactive. We are proactive, and we take action before those things happen, right? So maybe there's some things in your church, maybe there's some difficult conversations that you know that you need to have, but you've been waiting, right? You shouldn't wait until things blow up, or until they come to a head, and now you're forced to have that conversation, right? That's reactive. You actually need to be proactive, and you need to sit down and have those tough conversations with some of the people in your church. You have to aggressively and proactively believe in the mission, go after the mission, and continue to cast vision to everyone in your church in order for them to buy into the mission. Because again, they may not buy into the belief, they just have to buy into the fact that you believe. All right, so I have a free gift for you. If you want to learn a little bit more about leadership, and specifically how you can use social media and church growth in order to attract new visitors to your church every single Sunday, head on over to churchgrowthagency.com, or simply click on the link in the description below. We have a free training video, and if you want, we'll actually hop on a free strategy call to talk about how you can set this up at your church. We'll see you soon.