The Power of Agreement in Leadership
Hank and Brenda Kunneman argue that meaningful growth rests on a shared operating discipline: pursue excellence, manage well, practice generosity before success arrives, stay the course, and learn from people who have already built wisely.
From a conversation with Hank & Brenda Kunneman
A publisher once gave Brenda Kunneman an unusually candid answer to a question every ambitious leader asks. What makes one book a bestseller while another disappears? If publishers knew the formula, he told her, they would use it for every book. The answer stayed with her because it exposes the limit of formulas. Leaders can do careful work, make sound decisions, and still lack certainty about the outcome. Excellence matters. Management matters. Strategy matters. None of them turns growth into a controllable event. For Hank and Brenda Kunneman, that uncertainty does not excuse weak execution. It clarifies what leaders can control. Their Ignite conversation develops a shared operating philosophy that joins spiritual conviction to practical discipline. Brenda names four parts of it: excellence, sound management, connection to the kingdom, and the patience to stay with an assignment. Hank adds a fifth: mentorship that turns another leader's experience into applied wisdom. Their agreement appears in the principles they reinforce from different angles. Growth has a purpose. Generosity begins before abundance. Hard seasons test practices already in place. Endurance is active, not passive. Proximity can accelerate wisdom, but only when a leader applies what is learned. Together, those convictions form a demanding alternative to both hustle and wishful thinking. The goal is not simply to become larger. It is to become capable of carrying more without losing the reason the work exists.
Before growth arrives, decide what it will amplify
A publisher once gave Brenda Kunneman an unusually candid answer to a question every ambitious leader asks.
What makes one book a bestseller while another disappears? If publishers knew the formula, he told her, they would use it for every book.
The answer stayed with her because it exposes the limit of formulas. Leaders can make smart plans, build polished products, and manage carefully without gaining certainty about the outcome. Excellence matters, but it does not make growth controllable.
For Hank and Brenda Kunneman, that uncertainty is not an excuse for weak execution. It clarifies the work leaders can control. Their Ignite conversation brings spiritual conviction into practical decisions about quality, money, persistence, and learning.
Brenda begins with excellence. A business should present its work well, she says, while recognizing that young organizations must build from the tools they have. The goal is not to imitate the appearance of a mature company. It is to keep raising the standard from today's real starting point.
She quickly pairs excellence with management. Vision can open a business, but preparation, punctuality, and dependable systems help it survive. Leaders who want greater influence must first become trustworthy at their present scale.
Then the conversation turns to a more searching question: What is growth for?
Hank describes financial capacity as a way to strengthen work beyond the business itself. Resources can support churches, ministries, and people carrying meaningful assignments. Yet he also warns that wealth alone does not produce generosity. Someone can possess a great deal and remain reluctant to release it, while a person with little can build a life organized around giving.
Brenda makes the principle concrete. She says she and Hank practiced giving before their income grew, not after. The amounts changed, but the decision came first.
That sequence matters for every founder or leadership pair. The habits established in lean years do not disappear when opportunity arrives. They scale. So do avoidance, disorder, and competing definitions of success.
Here, agreement is visible as a shared operating philosophy. It is a common answer to the questions pressure eventually asks: What will we protect? What will we fund? What will we continue when results come slowly? How will we know whether persistence is faithful or merely stubborn?
Their full framework adds three disciplines that determine whether early conviction can survive later complexity, including a crucial limit on staying the course and a test that separates useful mentorship from proximity without change.
Those disciplines reveal the larger point. Growth is never only an increase in revenue, reach, or opportunity. It is an increase in weight. The best time to decide how that weight will be carried is before it arrives.
Agreement becomes an operating advantage when leaders practice the same convictions about excellence, stewardship, generosity, endurance, and learning before pressure tests them.
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The practices that make shared conviction operational
Continue with the five-part discipline Hank and Brenda Kunneman describe, including why generosity must begin before abundance, when persistence becomes wisdom, and how mentorship turns proximity into applied knowledge.
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