The Fruit Of Great Leadership

When we talk about great leadership, we usually talk about qualities like confidence, vision, communication, discipline, courage, influence, and the ability to make decisions. Those qualities matter. I teach many of them myself and are what pushes the organization along. But lately I have been thinking about leadership from a different perspective.

What if some of the greatest leadership qualities were already laid out for us thousands of years ago?

Galatians 5:22–23 gives us the Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Read them again, but this time don't read it only from the perspective of our spiritual lives. Read it from the perspective of leadership.

Imagine an organization being led by someone who consistently demonstrated those nine qualities. Imagine following a leader who loved people, carried joy into difficult environments, remained peaceful under pressure, had patience when people made mistakes, treated people with kindness, pursued goodness, remained faithful to their commitments, responded with gentleness, and had enough self-control to manage their emotions when everything around them was going wrong.

These qualities are what separate the great leaders from just good ones.

Love Changes How We See People

Leadership involves people, and how we view those people eventually determines how we lead them.

Love reminds us that the people working around us are more than employees, numbers, positions, or tools for accomplishing an objective. They are people with families, struggles, goals, fears, strengths, and weaknesses.

That doesn't mean we eliminate accountability or lower standards. Sometimes loving someone requires having a difficult conversation with them. Sometimes it requires correcting behavior. Sometimes it means telling someone something they don't necessarily want to hear.

The difference is the heart behind it.

When we genuinely care about the people we lead, development becomes more important than control. We begin asking how we can help people grow instead of simply asking what they can produce for us.

Joy Shapes the Environment Around Us

Every leader brings something into the room.

Our attitude travels farther than we realize. I talk about this in Intentional Leadership as the ripple effect. Our intention affects our behavior, our behavior affects the energy around us, that energy influences culture, and eventually culture influences impact.

Joy doesn't mean pretending everything is great when it isn't. Leadership will bring difficult seasons, disappointing results, conflict, financial pressure, personnel problems, and plenty of uncertainty.

Joy means those circumstances don't get complete control over what we bring into the room.

People are constantly reading their leaders. When the pressure increases, they watch us even more closely. Our response can create stability or add more anxiety to an already difficult situation.

Peace Creates Stability Under Pressure

I believe peace is one of the most underrated leadership qualities.

A peaceful leader doesn't have to be a passive leader. You can make difficult decisions, move quickly, hold high standards, and still operate from a place of peace.

Without peace, leaders become reactive. Every problem becomes an emergency. Every disagreement feels personal. Every unexpected change creates another emotional response.

I've talked for years about the difference between intentional and reactive leadership. Leading with intention means making deliberate choices rather than allowing pressure to decide for us.

Peace gives us the space to do that.

There is tremendous value in becoming the person who can walk into chaos without becoming part of the chaos.

Patience Gives People Room to Grow

People are going to disappoint us. They will misunderstand instructions. They will make mistakes. They will learn slower than we hoped. Sometimes we will explain something three times and still have to explain it a fourth.

That's leadership.

Patience allows us to develop people instead of constantly becoming frustrated because they aren't where we think they should be yet.

Think about your own development. You probably didn't become the person or leader you are today because somebody explained everything perfectly once. Someone gave you opportunities. Someone corrected you and allowed you some space to fail. Someone probably had patience with you when you hadn't earned it (that’s grace).

Great leaders remember that development takes time.

Kindness Doesn't Make a Leader Weak

Somewhere along the way, leadership became associated with hardness, but kindness and strength can exist in the same person. You can hold someone accountable and still treat them with dignity. You can disagree without disrespecting them. You can correct poor performance without humiliating the person performing poorly.

People remember how leaders treated them, especially during difficult moments.

Kindness costs very little, but over time it can build tremendous relational trust (which creates stronger teams).

Goodness Determines What We Do With Influence

Leadership gives us influence, and influence gives us the ability to affect other people's lives.

That makes character incredibly important because people follow people.

Goodness asks us to use our position and influence for what is right, not simply what benefits us personally. It affects how we make decisions when nobody is watching and how we treat people who have nothing to offer us.

This is where integrity becomes incredibly important.

In my Intentional Leadership framework, I define integrity around the alignment of our values, words, and actions. Identity defines who we are, but integrity proves it through how we actually live.

Good leadership cannot be separated from good character for very long (all truth comes to light). Eventually, who we are shows up in how we lead.

Faithfulness Builds Trust

Leadership requires consistency.

People need to know whether our words mean something. If we make a commitment, do we follow through? If we establish a standard, do we live by it ourselves? If we tell people something matters, does our behavior demonstrate that it actually matters?

Faithfulness is demonstrated over time. Trust usually isn't built through one incredible leadership moment. It is built through hundreds of ordinary moments where our actions consistently match what we said.

That is why the small things matter so much. Consistency builds credibility, and credibility gives our leadership influence.

Gentleness Gives Strength the Right Direction

Gentleness is often misunderstood as weakness.

I see it differently. Gentleness is strength that doesn't need to prove itself by overpowering someone else.

A secure leader doesn't have to win every conversation. They don't have to embarrass someone to establish authority. They don't need to remind everyone in the room who is in charge.

There is tremendous strength in being able to correct someone without crushing them.

The more authority we have, the more important gentleness becomes because our words carry more weight than we sometimes realize.

Self-Control Might Be One of the Most Important Leadership Skills

Of all nine qualities, self-control may be one of the easiest to connect directly to leadership.

Leadership constantly gives us opportunities to react emotionally. Someone challenges us. A project fails. An employee makes a costly mistake. Someone sends an email that immediately raises our blood pressure. A customer complains. A plan falls apart.

There is always going to be another trigger.

Self-control creates space between what happens to us and what we choose to do next. That space matters. If we can't lead ourselves in those moments, our title won't make us a better leader.

This is why I continue to believe that before we can become great leaders of others, we first have to become great leaders of ourselves.

Maybe Leadership Growth Should Look Different

There is nothing wrong with wanting to become a better communicator, strategist, executive, manager, or decision maker. We should continue developing those skills.

But maybe our measurement of leadership growth needs to go deeper than just performance outcomes.

Am I becoming more loving?

Do I carry more joy?

Am I more peaceful under pressure?

Am I becoming more patient with people?

Do people experience kindness from me?

Am I pursuing what is good even when it costs me something?

Can people depend on my faithfulness?

Have I become gentler as my influence has grown?

Do I have greater control over my emotions, habits, words, and reactions?

Those questions get much closer to the heart of leadership because leadership isn't only about what we accomplish. Our leadership is also shaping the environment that other people have to live and work inside every day.

Our words, tone, habits, decisions, reactions, and character create a ripple in every part of an organization.

Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control.

Maybe becoming a greater leader has less to do with becoming more impressive and more to do with allowing these qualities to become increasingly visible and apparent in the way we live, work, lead, and treat the people God has placed around us.