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Early-20^th-century philosopher and poet, George Santayana, said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” With that in mind, here’s a quick look back at seven world-changing events from 2016 and leadership lessons we can learn from them.

Lesson #1: Don’t Lose Touch with the Needs of Those You’re Leading (Brexit)
On June 23, 2016, surprising the pundits and ruling class, British citizens voted on a referendum to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Lessons:

1. Leaders can lose the pulse of the people. A commitment to truly serve those we lead presses us to stay close in touch with them, but it’s important to be intentional about this.
2. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. There’s always a group that yells the loudest, but we must not believe that volume equals majority. We must look past the noise to hear what people are really saying, experiencing, and feeling.

This month’s entry is a guest post written by Rick Newton. He co-founded the Center for Serving Leadership with John Stahl-Wert in 2015 because of their shared vision and passion of equipping leaders to awaken, align, and achieve Great Purpose.

Here in the United States, we have just come through a historic election – unlike one that anyone has ever seen. Don’t worry – I am not going to get into political opinion, but I do want to get into politics – and talk about how Serving Leaders are needed in every facet of society, especially Government.

There are many problems with our society, and I trace all of them back to leadership – or to be more precise, a lack of serving leadership. Too often, leaders in government are self-centered, egotistic, and more concerned about staying in power than serving the people they represent.

When self-centered leadership is in place, we see the results: name-calling, blame-shifting, miscommunication, no communication, undermining, dysfunction, and an inability and unwillingness to rise above differences to serve the common good.

As leaders, we each bring value to the world in our own distinct way. The uniqueness of the start of our leadership journey is extraordinary as we are born into the world and then move out to engage it, seeking to have impact, hoping to make friends, longing to achieve results, and aspiring to make a difference.

However, we can find profound similarities among us all in our calling to serve. Several fundamental challenges are consistent across our individual leadership journeys. One of these common leadership challenges is learning how to translate vision into reality. Or, as we more usually say it: How can we bridge our strategy-execution gap?