The Long-Term Leadership Mindset
Picture this: It’s Sunday morning, and I’m carefully sipping coffee from one of those little paper cups with the kind of chintzy plastic lids that really make you nervous—like it might have a bad seal or just pop off and you wind up with hot coffee on your shirt.
The 9 a.m. service had just wrapped up, and I was standing around with a couple of guys from men’s Bible study when I saw the pastor walking toward me, clearly on a mission.
Uh oh. What’s he want? Am I in trouble for something?
Funny. I was baptized in that church. It was where I met my wife and got married, where we served food to the less fortunate on Thanksgiving, where I gave the eulogy at my dad’s funeral. And yet, something about the pastor walking toward me had me feeling like I was seven again, getting caught swiping cookies from the kitchen in the church basement.
“Do you have a second to talk?” he said with a reassuring smile.
The pastor’s name was Josiah, and we knew each other well. He cut to the chase.
“Kevan, we’re putting together a committee to support the new capital campaign that we’re launching around our facilities expansion.” He paused. “Well, you clearly have a passion for this strategic planning stuff, and I was hoping you’d lead it.”
Hmm.
I’d been looking for a new volunteer opportunity, and this seemed like a good fit.
“What’s it pay?” I asked with my best poker face.
He looked down for a second. I let him off the hook with a wink and said, “I’m joking. Yes, I’ll do it. But can I ask you a few questions while I have you so that I can start thinking about this ahead of time?”
“Absolutely,” Josiah said enthusiastically. “Shoot.”
“Well, for starters, why are we doing this?”
“Oh, yeah. Right,” he said as if he had expected the question. “We just see it as the
most effective path forward in growing the church.”
“Sure,” I shot back quickly. “But why?”
He looked at me blankly. “I’m not sure I’m following you.
“Listen. If we’re going to devise a strategy for asking people to donate millions of dollars to expand our facilities, we need to know the answers to a few basic but really important questions. For example, why does this church even exist and, in the end, how do we see the world being different because it does?”
“To begin with the end in mind means… to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.”
—Stephen Covey
Long-term clarity is one of the greatest gifts any leader can give his or her organization. It is the discipline of defining the things that are most important, and it is deeply connected to your ability to scale and grow.
Food for Thought:
The things that seem most urgent are not always the most important. Too many leaders spend too much time fixing things when they go wrong instead of helping things go right.
Here are five keys to creating clarity and maintaining a long-term leadership mindset:
1 Develop a long-term focus. Spend time looking out on the horizon. Look three to five years into the future, or even 10 years. Where do you want your business to be?
2 Relentlessly pursue clarity and results. Don’t tolerate ambiguity in areas like Mission, Vision, Values, Roles, and Accountability.
3 Spend time on internal and external anal- ysis. Use tools like SWOT, then formulate actionable plans as a response to what you learn.
4 Be fanatical about your resources. Make sure that every possible minute and dollar is aimed at your target market and leverages your unique place in it.
5 Be dogmatic about continuous improve- ment, almost religious. Be devoted to it. Create an ethos around it. And make sure that your team is fully engaged in it.
“The purpose of leadership is not to make the present bearable. The purpose of leadership is to make the future possible.”
—Joan D. Chittister
October 2026