Leaders are masters of strategic steps

Leaders have aims and work hard to maintain these aims. To achieve their goals, leaders have to employ a number of strategic steps.

What is a strategy? A strategy is a series of manoeuvres and steps that are undertaken to achieve a specific goal.

Lessons on Strategic Steps
• A leader needs to know that every great or important destination requires a number of steps to get to it.

A good leader must accept the reality that no great achievement involves just one step. It will involve a series of steps, a series of manoeuvres or a series of stratagems.

Empowering Women through Skill Development
The series of steps, manoeuvres or stratagems are also known as strategy. Bear in mind that that strategy involves more than one step.

• The worst leaders will take zero steps to achieve anything.

The mentality of such leaders is that someone owes them something and someone has to do something for them.

This is often the mentality of people who are not used to doing things by themselves. It is also the mentality of people who have been used to having others think for them. Their understanding is that something has to be given to them or handed over to them.

That is the leader who is always describing his woes and what he lacks, hoping that it will touch the heart of a philanthropist somewhere.

Even after many years they do not perceive that their woeful plight and pathetic situation does not touch the hearts of the men of this selfish world.

It takes years for zero-step leaders to realise that no one will freely pour out his hard-earned wealth into their laps. A leader must take many steps with the aim to achieve the goals set.

• Bad leaders are interested in taking only one step towards a goal.

Bad leaders are a little better than the worst leaders because they take at least one step towards their goals. But most things are not achieved by taking just one step.

For instance, many people will take just one step – the step of prayer. A lot of Africans will take one step of fasting and praying every year.

Many church members will take one step of sowing a seed in order to be prosperous. But one step does not go very far! One step is not enough. You need a number of steps to do well.

As you sit in your seat reading this article, if you were to take just one step how far would you get? But that is all people want to do. They just want to take one step towards their goals.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

There are few things, if any, that can be reached with one step. The Bible says that

“All things work together for good.” Many things work together to make one thing beautiful or successful.

Many things are combined in a particular way and with particular timing to make a nice stew or soup. It is not just having one thing (good meat) that will make you have a nice stew. It is many things that will work together!

Because one step gets you almost nowhere, the one step that is taken is often seen as having not worked. For this reason, people who have taken the one step of praying or one step of fasting or one step of sowing a seed have often complained that the one step does not work.

• The greater the goal the more the manoeuvres and steps you need to take.

The greater and more impossible the goal is to you, the more steps you will have to take to get there. To achieve great goals, you will need to take many steps.

• Each step in a strategy requires faith and patience.

The first few steps require the most patience and the most faith in the wisdom of your strategy. If one of the steps you are taking is to have your quiet time, you need a lot of faith and patience to consistently have your quiet time, believing that it will have an effect on the outcome of your life.

That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises. Hebrews 6:12

• Many strategies to get somewhere or to achieve anything can be broken down into four steps. With four steps you can get to any destination or person in this world.

• Become a man who takes as many strategic steps as need be. Graduate from being a zero-step person or a one-step person.

Indeed, there is a call for the leaders in our nation to become masters of strategic steps!

The writer is the founder of the Lighthouse Group of churches.
E-mail: theaol@ymail.com