AFR Men’s Summit Speaker Series — Speaker #6 of 8 Summit: The Power of Asking for Help — Creating the American Family Renaissance Date: September 14, 2026 · Online, join from anywhere Meet the full lineup: americanfamilyrenaissance.org/summit/speakers Reserve your seat for this No Cost Event: AmericanFamilyRenaissance.org/summit/#register
Somewhere along the way, men got handed a definition of leadership that has been quietly wrecking us.
It goes like this: the leader is the one with the answers.
So, you learn to always have one. In the meeting, at the dinner table, in the small group, in the car when your wife asks how you’re doing. You develop a reflex for producing certainty on demand, and it works well enough that nobody notices you’re doing it. You get promoted for it.
And then you’re fifty, and you can’t remember the last time you said “I don’t know” out loud to another human being. Your team stopped bringing you their best thinking years ago, because why would they? You always had the answer. Your kids stopped asking hard questions because you always had an answer for those, too. Your marriage runs on efficiency instead of intimacy.
You didn’t become a bad leader. You became a lonely one. And you did it by following the rules exactly as they were given to you.
Bob Tiede has spent decades proving those rules are wrong. On September 14, he’s bringing the correction.
Who Bob Tiede Is
Bob Tiede is one of the most quietly influential leadership voices in the country, and the word “quietly” is doing real work in that sentence.
- Fifty-five years on staff with Cru — the global ministry founded by Bill and Vonette Bright in 1951 — where he currently serves on the U.S. Leadership Development Team.
- Author of the widely acclaimed Great Leaders Ask Questions series, read in more than 190 countries.
- Co-author of the third edition of Leading with Questions, the book that started him on this path in the first place.
- Founder of LeadingWithQuestions.com, now in its fourteenth year, delivering insights to leaders around the globe twice a week, every week.
- A prolific resource-builder for leaders—his free ebooks, including 339 Questions Jesus Asked, Now That’s a Great Question, and a recent collection of more than 300 questions, have equipped leaders in ministry, business, and the military.
Let me highlight three things about that list that most people would overlook.
First: fifty-five years. Not five. Not fifteen. Fifty-five years of faithfulness in the same mission. In a culture where men rebrand every eighteen months and treat commitment as something that limits their options, Bob Tiede has been building in one direction for over half a century. There is a sermon in that fact alone.
Second: his current job. His role on Cru’s leadership team is recruiting outstanding leaders from outside Cru to coach Cru’s own leaders. Read that again. A man with fifty-five years of institutional knowledge spends his days going outside his organization to ask other people for help. He doesn’t just teach this message. His actual job description embodies this message.
Third: how it all started. In 2006, Bob was browsing a bookstore and picked up a book on leading with questions by Michael Marquardt. A few pages in, he knew it had changed how he saw leadership. Everything that followed—the blog, the books, the global platform, and the 190 countries—grew out of a man who was willing to receive something from somebody else.
The world’s leading voice on asking got his own start because he was teachable. That’s not irony. That’s the proof.
Learn more at leadingwithquestions.com.
What Bob Is Speaking On
Bob’s summit session is the theological and practical center of this entire event:
Why asking for help is the most powerful leadership move a man can make.
I’ll be straight with you about something. When I titled this summit The Power of Asking for Help, I was making an argument. I believed it from years in the coaching chair, but I knew that plenty of men would hear it as soft, a nice idea for guys who need permission to be vulnerable.
Bob Tiede is the man who takes that argument and makes it structural.
His core conviction is that leadership is far less about knowing the right answers than about asking the right questions. That sounds simple until you realize what it actually costs. Asking a real question means admitting you don’t already know. It means giving up control of where the conversation goes. It means the person in front of you might have something better than what you were going to say.
That’s not softness. That’s the hardest thing most men will ever do at work, at church, or at their kitchen table.
The Problem He’s Solving
Here’s what the answer-man reflex actually costs a man, and Bob has watched it play out across decades and continents:
It caps your team at your ceiling. If you’re the source of every answer, your organization can never be smarter than you are on your worst day.
It destroys truth-telling. People stop bringing you bad news because you’ve trained them that you already know. You end up leading on a delay, finding out about problems months after everyone else did.
It isolates you completely. A man who can never say “Help me think about this” ends up carrying every load alone and then wonders why he’s exhausted in a building full of capable people.
It follows you home. This instinct is the part men miss. The reflex doesn’t stay at the office. It shows up when your teenager needs to be heard and gets a solution instead. It shows up when your wife needs a question and gets a verdict. Some of the most damaged relationships I see in coaching were damaged by a man who was, technically, right every single time.
Bob’s answer is a tool you can actually use: better questions. It’s not therapy, it’s not a personality change, it’s a different first move in the conversation. He’s spent his life collecting, testing, and giving away the specific questions that unlock people, and he gives them away free, which tells you everything about the man.
The shift he’s asking for is small enough to start Monday and large enough to change the next twenty years.
Why I Asked Him — and How We’re Working Together
Of all eight speakers, Bob Tiede’s message and mine are the closest thing to the same sentence.
My keynote is The Power of Asking for Help. His session is about why asking for help is the most powerful move a leader can make. He arrived at it through fifty-five years in global ministry and leadership development. I arrived at it sitting across from Christian men who were capable, respected, and quietly drowning. Neither of us was looking for the other’s conclusion. We both just kept following the evidence, too.
And here’s why that is relevant for you, not just for us: when two men from completely different worlds independently land on the same answer, you’re not looking at a preference. You’re looking at a principle.
There’s a deeper alignment here too, and it’s about who this movement is for. Bob has spent his career serving the men doing the actual work—the ministry leader, the volunteer, the guy leading eight men in a church basement, the executive nobody writes articles about. He’s not building a personal brand. He’s building other leaders and handing them the tools for free.
That’s the same instinct behind American Family Renaissance. We’re not here to gather an audience. We’re here to build men who go build other men. Bob has been running that play for five decades, and I’d be a fool not to learn from it in public, on a stage, in front of the men I’m trying to serve.
Now let me tell you how I found him, because I still shake my head at it.
Circle back to that original chapter I wrote in Cracking the Rich Code with Jim Britt — the first place I ever put The Power of Asking for Help on paper. I was deep in the research, and a question grabbed me and wouldn’t let go: how many questions did Jesus actually ask?
If asking was really strength and not weakness, the Son of God ought to be the evidence.
So, I went looking. And wouldn’t you know it, somebody had already written the book. Guess who.
Bob Tiede. 339 Questions Jesus Asked.
Three hundred thirty-nine. Bob went through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and counted them himself because nobody had compiled the full list. And here’s the part that ought to stop every man reading this: Jesus, who had every answer to every question that has ever existed, chose to ask three hundred thirty-nine of them and recorded direct answers to only a handful put to Him.
The one Person in history who never needed to ask led almost entirely by asking.
That made it clear to me. Asking isn’t the absence of authority. It is how the greatest authority who ever walked the earth chose to lead.
Can you see how the Holy Spirit works to bring collaboration together? I was researching a chapter for another man’s book, chasing down a question I didn’t have to ask, and it led me straight to the one man in America who had already done the work, a man who would eventually stand on this stage and say it better than I could.
What a connection. And what a remarkable human being.
One more thing worth saying. Bob’s message is the permission slip for this entire summit. Some of the men who register on September 14 will be carrying something heavy they’ve never spoken aloud. They’ll be listening for a reason to believe that asking wouldn’t cost them their standing as men. Bob will provide that reason, with fifty-five years of credibility behind it.
Bob shows you why asking is strength. I’ll close the day by asking every man in that room to actually do it.
Why You Should Be in the Room
If people follow your title but stopped bringing you their real thinking a while back, this session is for you.
If you’re the man everyone comes to for answers, and it’s wearing you out, this session is for you.
If your last three conversations with your kid ended with you solving something instead of hearing them, this session is for you.
If you’ve been carrying something alone because asking felt like admitting failure, this is the session that gives you your permission back.
Here’s what Bob’s session gives you:
- A redefinition of leadership strength that will take pressure off you immediately — from a man with 55 years of experience.
- Actual questions you can use, drawn from a lifetime of collecting the ones that work in real conversations with real people.
- The reason asking raises your standing instead of lowering it—and why the men who ask end up leading better than the men who always know.
The Details
The Power of Asking for Help — Creating the American Family Renaissance. Eight world-class speakers. One transformational day. Built for men who are done drifting and ready to lead.
September 14, 2026 · Online · Join from anywhere
Bob Tiede speaks sixth, following Scott Schilling, Chris Widener, Tom Ziglar, Jim Britt, and Vince Miller, and ahead of Bob Beaudine—and I’ll close it out.
Reserve your seat now → Meet all eight speakers →
Seats are limited. You don’t have to have the answer. You just have to ask.
Build the Man. Strengthen the Family. Restore the Nation.
About the Author
Mike Van Pelt (MVP) is the Founder of American Family Renaissance and True Man Life Coaching — a movement dedicated to restoring the foundation of God, Family, and Country by rebuilding the heart of the man. He is the author of True Man True Ways: A Roadmap of Discovery to the Masculine Heart, host of the True Man Podcast with 250+ episodes, and creator of the Master Class The 9 Marks of a Restored Man. Through coaching, speaking, and brotherhood, Mike helps Christian men break isolation, reclaim their God-given identity, and lead their families with faith, character, and conviction.
Know God. Know Yourself. Live Fully.