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Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast where our calling is to help you become a leader that people love to follow. As we're wrapping up 2025, we're looking ahead to 2026. We've got an amazing year planned for you. We will celebrate 10 years at the beginning of January 2026. And before we dive into new content today, let me tell you just thank you for being a faithful part of our leadership community. I'm going to work really, really hard to bring you valuable and concise content that will help you grow in your leadership and get better. Because we know that everyone wins when the leader gets better. If you're new with us, we drop a new episode on the first Thursday of each month. I want you to do a few things for me. First of all, hit subscribe wherever you consume the content. If you have not commented or rated it, please do that. I'm working hard to give this to you. I've got no side benefit. This is my gift to you. That would be a gift to me. Also, if the content's helpful, share on social media tag me and our team may repost you to help invite others into our community. And let me tell you, you do want to get the Leader Guide. We've got a guide that will both help you and it will help you cover the content with people. Give it away, use it, teach it, whatever you want. Go to cglp.com and you can get the Leader Guide with the release of each episod. So let's dive into the content to close out this year at the time of this release. We're releasing it in the 1st of December at the end of the year 2025. And so if you're wise in your leadership, now is the time to look back at the previous year to start planning for the year ahead. Now, to be clear, you do not have to wait until January to make important changes. January 1st is like it's just another day, right? There's nothing magical about that day. And personally, I prefer to make changes early. This is a really important part just of my mindset. For example, I'll dial in my diet before Christmas. And the reason is I want to start early. Why am I gonna wait to get better when I can begin now? And so what it does is it just frames your mindset of I'm not going to gorge myself now or I'm not gonna be lazy now and start to be disciplined later on. I like to start early and it frames a mind that helps Me move forward with consistent discipline. So the best leaders don't wait for a date on the calendar. They start early and they start strong. So before you plan next year, what I want you to do is, together, we're going to look back now. At this moment is the time to evaluate the previous year. You want to look at your wins, your losses, your successes, your failures, the surprising victories, the missed opportunities. And I wish I didn't have to say this, but I feel like I have to because leaders tend to lie to themselves a lot. But what I want you to do when you look back is tell the truth about what happened. It's so easy to make excuses and say, well, it wasn't. Or there was this. Or there was this external factor. Tell the truth. Because growth doesn't start with excuses. Growth starts with honesty. Be honest as you look back. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at six things every leader should evaluate. Six things. I'm going to give them to you, then we're going to go through them one by one. You're going to want to evaluate, number one, the successes. Number two, the misses. Number three, the patterns. Number four, you're going to evaluate the people around you. Number five, the priorities. Evaluate your priorities. Number six, evaluate yourself. Successes, misses, patterns, people, priorities, and yourself. Let's talk about them one by one. We're looking back to plan the best year as we move forward. Number one, evaluate the successes. Why do you do this? If you don't know why something is working when it is, you won't know how to fix it when it's not. That's an Andy Stanley quote. Very, very important. Evaluate. Why did this work? If you don't know the reason for the win, the reason for the success, then one day, when it's not working, you're not going to know how to fix it. Here's what tends to happen. When something's going well, it's tempting just to take it for granted, or you might even celebrate it and then you move on. Smart leaders never take wins for granted. And they don't just celebrate, they stop to ask and analyze and study. Why exactly is this working? You wanna ask yourself some questions. If you've got some wins, an apartment's winning, you've got a part of the team, you got a product, whatever. You're gonna ask yourself, like, what specific made this ministry grow when the other ones were struggling? Or why did this one product take off when others are in decline? Or you might ask something like, what created the shift that Sparked new momentum. If the culture got better, what were the contributing factors that made the culture get better? Because again, if you don't know the reason behind your success, you're actually going to struggle to reproduce it. So you don't just do autopsies on the failures, but you do. You really try to understand what's going into. What are the contributing factors that making these things work? Now, I'll give you an example. Our church meets in 45 different locations. And some of them grow faster than others. Some are explosive in growth, 25% growth. Some might be 4% growth. And what's really interesting is if you look at our model, all the churches have basically the same contributing factors, right? Every staff member we have comes through the same hiring process. They all come through the same training system. We have the same systems at the locations. We have the same values in our whole organization. They even. They'll have similar worship songs. They have the same messages. And so why would one be explosive and one struggle? Some. Well, the most obvious reason is what? It's leadership. It's always leadership. Great leadership tends to get better results. We know that. But here's what's interesting. The longer we do this and the more kind of test cases we have, there are X factors. We discover other contributing factors. For one thing, for us, this is spiritual. So there's just the God factor and there's that. And you never can quite explain it. But also practically standpoint, practically, we want to see why do some do better than others? And it is always a part of the leader. But it's not just the leader. For example, we've discovered that who the leader is paired with matters just as much as the leader. For example, if we've got a really charismatic leader that's really good with people but has no organizational skills, you have to pair that leader with the right partner in order for it to work, or vice versa. You've got a very systematic leader that follows the rules and good with deadlines and processes, but really isn't warm. You have to pair that leader with the right person. So for us, we've learned that it's not just the right point person, but it's the right team. We've also learned a lot of other things. The age of the campus can make a difference. Like a newer one tends to grow faster. One that's been in the Same community for 15 years, people are used to it and it doesn't grow as fast. Sometimes the community demographics impact growth. Is the community growing? Is it aging? Things like parking matters if you can't turn cars, you can't grow services. And so we've discovered multiple documented factors to fast growing campuses. It's not just leadership. There are multiple different reasons of why one might be doing better. You want to do the same thing in your organization. Wherever you're seeing wins, don't just go with it. Well, it's good leadership or it's just a good season, or it's just a good product. Whatever it is, you want to look deeper into it. Who created the product? Who created the systems? Why do the systems work? And so you don't just celebrate the desired outcomes. You study the ingredients, the contributing factors that brought about the desired outcomes. So what decisions and disciplines or people created the wins? And here's what's really interesting. Success leaves clues if you're wise enough to look for them. So I'll say it again. If you don't pause to evaluate, you might accidentally drift from what made something work in the first place. Or we're going to evaluate the wins. The second thing we're going to do is obvious, but we've got to do it. And it's important. We're going to evaluate the misses. Why? Because a mistake you don't learn from is a mistake you'll likely repeat. Let me say it again. A mistake that you don't learn from is a mistake that you'll likely repeat. And the reality is, we all miss every leader misses occasionally. Some of us more often than others. Right. We make the wrong hire, we launched the wrong project or at the wrong time. Or you trust your gut and your gut's usually right, and this time it backfires. The danger isn't in failing. You do want to fail sometime. If you're not failing every now and then, you're playing it too safe. The danger isn't in failing. The danger is not learning from what didn't work. When something doesn't work, we have to stop and ask, why? Where did we get it wrong? Why did the project fail? Or why do we have a goal and not hold anyone accountable to not making the goal? And so you're gonna ask questions like these, and these are in the leader guide. You're gonna ask, what did we overlook? I like this question a lot. You're gonna ask, where did we lead with ego and lack humility? Super important. Where do we lead with ego? We thought we knew it all. We were overly confident. We had hubris. And where do we lack humility? We weren't listening. Someone might have warned us. We weren't thorough. In our study. And then we're gonna ask, what will we do differently next time? Super important. What'd we learn from? What's our takeaway? I'll give you an example, one I'm not proud of, but it was super helpful. Like I said, we do church in multiple locations in, I think, 12 different states. The first time that we went out of my local state into a new state, we tried to start two different locations in Phoenix. Well, they didn't work well. So we combined two into one, and eventually the one didn't make it. We went back and did an autopsy on it, and I can't remember the exact number. It was 32 or 34. But anyway, we listed over 30 mistakes that we made. A better way to say it is we learned 30 lessons from that failure. And so what we do today, if you ever look at it and say, you guys do a pretty good job at that, what we do today is a result of what we did poorly before because we learned from it. You have to learn from it. A failure is. Is only bad if you don't learn from it. And so if you have something that doesn't work, the fact that it didn't work isn't the problem. You have to learn from it. I always tell our team, don't waste a failure that we already paid for is already expensive. So learn from it. So we're going to evaluate the wins, we're going to evaluate the misses. The third thing we're going to do, and this is really important, and a lot of leaders miss this, is we're going to evaluate patterns. Evaluate patterns. What happens occasionally is a circumstance, but what happens repeatedly is your culture. And so you wanna look at something. If something good or bad happens once, that might be good luck or bad luck, but if it happens over and over again, it's a reflection of what you've created or allowed. For example, if you have one missed deadline, that's understandable, right? If you got five missed deadlines in a row, that reveals a lack of accountability somewhere in your organization. I'll give you an example of a pattern that we noticed that was not healthy and we had to change.