So my former personal assistant, Marybeth, the best personal assistant ever, used to do some of the copy editing on the early versions of the EntreLeadership workbook for me. And there was one sentence that she kept getting hung up on.

Finally she got frustrated and came to me to let me know that the sentence, “The Bible says the anointing drops from the beard” doesn’t have a verb. I pointed out that drops was the verb, and it hit her. She was thinking that these were anointing drops, not the action thereof. We had one of our best laughs together that day! As you can see, I still get a kick out of it.

The verse comes from the days when they used to anoint a new king. When a prophet found a would-be king, he would “anoint” him by breaking a carafe of oil over his head. The oil would then run through the king’s hair, down through his beard and drop onto his body. In other words, the anointing flowed from the head to the body, representing God as the head and us as the body.

This also illustrates the idea that as the head is, so will the body be. If the king was a great warrior, so would his people be. If he was merciful, so would his people be. If he was a tyrant, etc. This makes it one of the best leadership lessons. If you have a team, or a “body,” then you have to realize you are the head. As you are, so will they be. If you’re a total jerk, your people will be jerks to each other, and more importantly, to your customers. If you’re all about taking care of people, your team will love taking care of your customers.

Either way, your focus needs to be on you. What are you doing to make sure you are being the best “head” for your team? What areas have you noticed that need some serious work, and which areas could just use a few tweaks? Are you, as hard as it is to do so, giving your team the opportunity to tell you what’s wrong with you? Or do you lead your team by fear, in which case they wouldn’t say anything if you paid them? Spend some time thinking through what it should look like to represent your company, then figure out what it takes to get there.