Have you ever thought about what separates the leaders who achieve victory from those who suffer defeat? What does it take to be a winner? Winning is an inside job. The leader that achieves is the one that first wins the internal battles. Re-read 2 Chronicles 34 and 35.

Josiah remained faithful to his covenant with God throughout his entire life. Some elements of leadership we can learn from Josiah:

Our society tends to give one leader credit for what the team has accomplished. Leaders who read their own press clippings can easily fall into that same trap. Read 2 Samuel, chapters 8 and 10.

In The Maxwell Leadership Bible, John Maxwell talks about effective teamwork:

Most of our leadership days contain victories and challenges. We praise God for the victories but on most days these are not victories that cause us to celebrate in an extraordinary way. It is the same with our challenges. We pray continually and consistently that God will give us wisdom to handle the challenges and that the challenges will not consume us or the people on our team but these are not the challenges that put a knot in our stomach or that put us on our face before the Lord totally dependent on His power to change the situation. But, every once in a while, the Lord favors every leader with the opportunity for the great victory or the overwhelming challenge that will require complete faith in God and use of everything we have learned as a leader, and revelation from God that we have not learned. Read 1 Samuel 17:1-58.

Most leaders do not have the problem of attracting too many volunteers! Read Judges 7:1-25.

To make sure He would get the glory from the victory over the Midianites, God led Gideon in an exercise to eliminate all but 300 warriors of the army that had assembled from several tribes. Some lessons that leaders can learn from this reduction of troops:

Several leadership books talk about establishing momentum. Jim Collins’ book Good to Great helps us picture business momentum as a very heavy flywheel that is very difficult to move at all for the first few turns but as one success stacks on top of another the weight of the flywheel begins to assist the forward motion and the movement of the flywheel is almost self sustaining. In fact in the physical world, it now takes work to stop a flywheel that is in motion. Read Joshua 10:16-43.

As God gives Joshua one military success after another, the Israelite army begins to experience a momentum they could not have described just months before. In the notes in The Maxwell Leadership Bible, John Maxwell calls this The Law of the Big MO. Maxwell states: