A while ago I heard Andy Stanley talk about questions that leaders should be asking. The one that stood out was simply, “In this situation, what would a great leader do?” The value of the question is that it can help us to take a step back from the immediacy of the current situation and think about it from a different perspective.
Most of us would not identify ourselves as ‘great’ leaders, but we all can think of people that we would consider great. And if we take a second to pause and think, most of the time we can picture what they would probably do in our situation.
Now, once we can see what the ‘great’ ones would do, we’re faced with a choice: will we choose to do what a great leader would do in this situation, or will we choose not to? This doesn’t mean we’re committing to do everything they would do in every situation. But in this one particular situation, we have the power to choose to imitate what someone great would do.
This same kind of question can be adapted to all areas of life. For instance, in a given a situation, we can ask ourselves, What would a great parent do? What would a great spouse do? What would a great employee, or teacher, or neighbor do? Because although we wouldn’t call ourselves great at all these things, we can still probably imagine what someone who was great would do. And once we can see what they would do, we have the power to choose to do the same.
Taking a moment to step back and see the situation from a broader perspective gives us a better shot at making wise decisions in whatever situations we find ourselves in—decisions that are driven by a bigger picture, and not just by what we see and feel in the heat of the moment. And that’s something all of can choose to do, regardless of how ‘great’ we think we are.