Christian Santiago is passionate about helping Christian business leaders find success that aligns with their faith. He counts Christian CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders among his clients and promises that he can help them tap into clarity that can strengthen their professional edge.
He’s become very well known for his professional leadership mentorship and high-performance coaching in Greenville, South Carolina, where he resides. He founded The Greatness Institute to reach an even wider audience eager to learn how to become world-class leaders people want to follow that combine both spiritual and business success at the same time.
Another way the founder has reached an international audience of Christian business leaders is by publishing three popular books on the subject. They include Born To Rule: Reclaiming Your God-Given Birthright To Rule On Earth, Lost In Translation: Returning Back to the Original Message of Jesus, and Detour: When You Feel Like You’ve Missed Something: (Struggling With the Will of God).
For those looking for more content from Santiago, he has produced a handful of blockbuster e-courses; among the most popular is 8 Biblical Pillars of Rapid Transformation, a course that applies biblical learning to Christian entrepreneurship. It also touches on how to bring faith to the marketplace.
Here is some of his top advice on becoming an inspirational leader people want to follow and developing a world-class company using lessons from the Bible.
Table of Contents
Offer a Vision So Big People Feel Like They Have to Join You
One of the main reasons Jesus was able to attract the people who could carry His mission farther than Him was because His gave them a communal and personal vision so big, they felt compelled to leave everything they were working on to partner with what He was working on.
The communal vision He gave them was all about bringing the Kingdom of God to earth. The personal vision He gave them was becoming fishers of men.
If you truly want to build a big company that attracts A-Players or Level 10 Talent, you must have a large company vision that helps enlarge their personal vision so much that they need to partner with you. Why is that important? Because A-Players are attracted to big opportunities, not small ones.
This means you will have to do what Jesus did with His disciples after His resurrection – let those A-Players develop into “center stage” people where they are getting major credit and having a determining voice in the company. Elon Musk’s 17% ownership stake of Tesla is bigger than owning 100% of a small business. Model that example.
Focus on Your Constraints, Not Your Potential
After painting the vision so big that Level-10 Leaders feel like they have to join you, what must happen next in order for growth to occur is for your focus to be on your constraints, not your potential. What do I mean by that?
The Theory of Constraints states that your company or organization will not grow to the level of its potential, it will grow to the level of its bottlenecks (or constraints). It’s the same with our personal lives — we could have the potential of having 12% body fat, but won’t become that until we overcome the bottleneck of loving a bowl of ice cream before bed.
This is echoed in the Bible where God says that his people perish for lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6). In other words, the reason we don’t grow or succeed is because of what we don’t know, rather than what we do know.
If you don’t know how to improve lead generation or develop world-class leaders, then that lack of knowledge will cause your company to perish after some time because those constraints will come back to affect you. When you’re focusing on your constraints to grow, then every bottleneck that presents itself in every stage of growth will receive the adequate attention necessary to remove it so your company continually increases.
Be Obsessed with Being the Best in the World
If you’re going to do anything in this world, you might as well be the best in the world at it. Now this might spark a question: Would God want me to be the best in the world?
To get to the answer of that question, we have to embrace Colossians 3:23 where Paul says, “Whatever you do, do it as unto the Lord, not to men.”
Now let me ask you, if you were to become the right hand of the CEO of Apple or Amazon, how much better would you have to become?
Most likely you’ll have to be much better than you are right now in order to operate at that high level.
Now let me ask you this: If you have to become much better if you were working personally for the CEO of Apple or Amazon, how much greater should you be if you’re working for the Creator of the Universe.
With that question, the bar is raised so much higher that you can’t settle for being anything less than world-class in all you do. God does not celebrate mediocrity, so we shouldn’t either, especially since we’re working for Him.
Set Standards That Scare You
All throughout the Bible, the leaders who were chosen by God to lead multitudes of people to do something that’s never been done before all had personal standards that far surpassed those around them. With Joshua waking up earlier than everyone when they were conquering the Promised Land and Paul speaking in tongues more than all the churches he planted, every major leader didn’t mind allowing their personal standards to far exceed the people they were leading.
Why? Because they knew they could never properly influence people to the degree they were not influencing themselves. People never challenged Joshua’s leadership because they knew he was congruent with not demanding something from them that he did not demand from himself.
That’s one of the major influence keys: You cannot deeply influence someone in a way you have not deeply yourself. The key to achieving this is to raise your standards in these major areas of your life to a level that scares you: 1) Health 2) Career/Business 3) Relationships 4) Mental 5) Spiritual 6) Fun 7) Finances.
When you do this, it won’t be long before you become an inspirational high performer people want to follow.
About Christian Santiago
Christian Santiago, Founder of The Greatness Institute LLC and 3-time author, is Greenville, SC’s #1 high-performance Christian entrepreneur coach, serving as a coaching and culture specialist for high-end executives and 9-figure companies. Santiago is a ghostwriter for executives of $600M+ firms, producer of 4 blockbuster e-courses, and currently coaches clients whose net worths amass over $369.4M in asset management. Santiago believes that no one is ever stuck or powerless to change their situation; to become the best leader you can be, please visit https://www.christianpsantiago.com/