Ferguson Leadership
Lead from your scars, not your secrets.
About Ferguson Leadership
My Background
My Background
My Background
Some days I still can't believe I'm standing here. Not because I'm special — trust me on that. But because there was a time when I wasn't sure I'd ever lead again or even want to.
Life fell apart in ways I wouldn't wish on anyone. And somewhere in the wreckage, I had to figure out what leadership truly means when everything you believed gets stripped away.
Turns out, it means serving. Showing up. Adding value to the people around you — especially when you've got nothing left to prove.
Maybe that resonates. Maybe the job has become overwhelming and the vision has blurred, leaving you unsure how you ended up here. Or perhaps things are going well, and you just feel there's another level — for yourself and for the people you lead.
Either way, I believe I can help.
I've spent over thirty years working alongside leaders in churches, businesses, and organizations across Mississippi and beyond, coaching them through crises, helping them find their footing, and guiding them in building teams and cultures they can truly be proud of. Not with a formula. Not with a personality quiz. But with honest, hard-won advice for leaders who want to create something that genuinely lasts.
If that seems like your kind of leadership, let's chat.
My Philosophy
My Background
My Background
I don't think leadership is just a skill set. I believe it's a choice — one you make repeatedly, especially when it's difficult.
The leaders I work with aren't interested in a motivational poster. They're seeking someone who will tell them the truth, walk with them through difficult times, and help them build something worth leaving behind.
My philosophy is simple: people-first leadership is effective. Not because it's soft — but because it's sustainable. Leaders who serve earn a trust that lasts beyond a title, outlives a role, and influences the people around them long after they’ve gone.
That's not a legacy created by managing metrics. It is built through honest conversations, courageous decisions, and faithful days, one step at a time.
That's what I'm here for.
My Services
My Background
My Services
Every leader's needs are different — so I don't offer a one-size-fits-all program. Whether you need a keynote that moves a room, one-on-one coaching that tells you the hard truth, a group workshop that rebuilds a fractured team, or a vision-casting session that clears the fog — we'll find what fits.
What stays the same across all of it: honesty, practical tools, and a commitment to your long-term growth as a leader — not just a good day at a seminar.
The Maxwell Leadership Game is a board game-based team development experience designed to spark the kind of conversations most teams avoid — about strengths, blind spots, values, and what it actually means to lead each other well.
It's not a quiz. It's not a lecture. It moves, it engages, and it tends to reveal things about a team that a year of staff meetings never would.
Available as part of a coaching engagement. Maxwell Leadership Certified.
Transform Your Life with Ferguson Leadership Coaching
The History of Your Future is a guided coaching exercise created to help you honestly reflect on where you've been — and purposefully plan where you're headed.
Most leaders are too busy reacting to truly make decisions. This exercise slows things down enough to help you clarify what you want, recognize what's blocking you, and create a path that is genuinely yours.
Available in one-on-one or group settings.
Unlock Your Potential with Ferguson Leadership
Still Standing
There's a version of resilience that looks good on a slide deck. This isn't that keynote.
Still Standing tells the story of a man who lost his wife and son to an act of unspeakable violence — and found his way back to his feet. Not because he was extraordinary, but because he kept making one stubborn choice: to take the next right step.
Les shares three pillars that rebuild his life and leadership: Lead with honest clarity. Rise through resilient habits. Serve by turning pain into purpose. Audiences leave with the STAND framework — simple enough to tape to a mirror, strong enough to rebuild around.
You don't need to be invincible. You just must refuse to stay down.
~45 minutes | Corporate, nonprofit, church, and general audiences
Inspiring Change with Ferguson Leadership
For Organizations, Businesses, and Churches
Why Leadership Is Never Neutral
Some dates mark you forever. For me, it was October 10, 2011. What followed didn’t just test my faith — it forced me to rethink leadership.
In Lead Forward, I share what I learned the hard way: leadership shapes more than results. It shapes people. It shapes culture. It shapes who someone becomes under your influence.
This keynote challenges leaders to move from reaction to intention through five practical shifts — clarity, trust, sustainability, and legacy.
Leadership is never neutral. It either builds environments where people grow — or cultures they simply survive.
The question is: which are you creating?
Unlock your potential
As a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member, I'm licensed to teach from some of the most trusted leadership resources in the world — tools I don't just present but have lived.
Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn, How to Work with Complicated People, Developing the Leader Within You 2.0, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, The Leader's Greatest Return, High Road Leadership, and Everyone Communicates, Few Connect, among others.
From the pen of Les Ferguson
Available on Amazon
In the aftermath of a double murder, a shattered family, and a faith I wasn't sure survived the fall — I wrote this book.
Not as a theologian. As a man who needed to know if God was still there.
Still Wrestling is a raw, honest walk through the Bible's most broken characters — not to admire them, but to find ourselves in them. Their fears. Their doubts. Their stubborn refusal to let go, even when letting go seemed like the only sane option.
If you've ever wrestled with whether any of this is worth it, this book is for you.
About
Some people talk about resilience. Les Ferguson has lived it.
Les's path to leadership coaching and speaking winds through a Navy deployment to the Persian Gulf, over two decades in ministry, the unimaginable loss of his wife and disabled son, and the hard-won journey back to purpose, faith, and wholeness. He knows what it means to be broken — and what it takes to rebuild.
Les began preaching at fifteen and never really stopped. He holds a B.A. in Bible from Magnolia Bible College and an M.A. in New Testament Preaching from Johnson University.
But his education didn't come from classrooms alone. Six years in the U.S. Navy — including deployment during Operation Earnest Will in the Persian Gulf — taught him discipline, adaptability, and what it means to serve something larger than yourself.
For more than thirty years, Les served communities across Mississippi as a preaching minister and elder, pouring himself into congregations in Vicksburg, Laurel, Gulfport, Ridgeland, and Oxford. After Hurricane Katrina, he helped coordinate recovery efforts on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He was deeply committed to mission work in Honduras through Torch Missions. He was, by any measure, a man doing exactly what he was made to do.
Then, in October 2011, his world collapsed. The double murder of his wife and disabled son forced him to step back from ministry and face the most devastating trial of his life.
What followed was not a quick comeback story — it was a long, honest wrestle with grief, faith, and identity. That struggle became the foundation of his book, Still Wrestling — Faith Renewed through Brokenness, and the heart of everything he teaches today.
Les returned to full-time ministry in 2014 and served as a senior preaching minister in both Ridgeland and Oxford, Mississippi. In 2026, he stepped into a new chapter — bringing his story and his skills directly to people and organizations hungry for authentic leadership.
As a trained life coach through the Institute for Life Coaching and a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team member with certifications in speaking and coaching, Les brings both professional training and hard-earned wisdom to every engagement. His syndicated newspaper column appears weekly across Mississippi, including The Oxford Eagle, The Panolian, The Meridian Star, and The Vicksburg Post.
Les and his childhood sweetheart, Becki, are married and rooted in Mississippi.
Les doesn't just speak about leadership through adversity — he is a living example of it.
Referrals
Working with Les came at a time in my life when I truly needed guidance. I had just moved from Florida to Mississippi and was feeling stuck-not only with my job but with life in general. I felt uncertain about my direction and needed someone who could help me sort through everything.
What makes Les such a great coach is that when you talk, he truly listens. That may sound simple, but it is incredibly powerful.
He takes the time to understand where you are, what you're going through, and what you're trying to achieve. I never felt rushed or dismissed. Instead, I felt heard, supported, and encouraged.(Monica Preisendanz)