Developing Diamonds in the Rough

Nancy Ortberg is an alumnus of Willow Creek Community Church and is a founding partner of TeamWorx2, a business and leadership consulting firm to businesses, schools, nonprofits, and churches. She has made a important observation concerning leadership development in her book, Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands. Often in our search for new leaders we go looking for the finished product. She refers to Andy Stanley's comment that leaders always think that they can do a better job than you are doing. So that's a good place to start (unless we are taking ourselves too seriously). A leader's responsibility is to develop these diamonds in the rough. Ortberg writes:

We need to keep our eyes open for leadership qualities: energy, dissatisfaction, new ideas, mistakes, and perhaps even a bit of cynicism. These are the raw materials in the making of a leader, not the finished product. Leadership development doe not necessarily start with strong leadership qualities like discipleship, maturity and wisdom. Those are the end products. We need to be looking for the drive without the experience, the vision before the patience, the energy minus the discipline. These are the building blocks, the clues that ell us there is a leader here, but so much still needs to be done.