Category Archive: Church Scattered

Community

Posted by on January 28, 2009

In the book Good to Great the author makes a big deal about getting the right people on the bus, in the right seat on the bus and also getting the wrong people off the bus.  Hopefully by now everyone gets the importance of this concept to the success of any organization.

Another interesting point that often gets overlooked is that he also states the people who are on the team are more important than what they do together.  This goes far beyond the truth that if you have the right people they will figure out what you need to do.

He even says that one of the keys to having a great life is to genuinely enjoy the team of people that you are working with on a daily basis.  He uses words like love and respect to describe these relationships.

This week I was speaking at a conference where a departmental group of employees were having an annual getaway event.  As I watched them for over two days and listened how they responded to each other I was extremely impressed with the community they have developed over the years.

I left with the clear impression that the relationships within that department were far more important to them than the specific jobs they accomplished on a day to day basis.  Oh by the way, because of their strong sense of community their performance metrics were outstanding.

Building a team spirit that highly motivates people because they care about and enjoy the people they work with should move to the top of any leader’s agenda.   This also may be the key factor in attracting and retaining the top performers in any industry.

Categories: Career Development Servant Leader Staff Development | Comments Off on Community

Significance

Posted by on January 23, 2009

We all need to ask ourselves what we really want out of life.  For many it is success and all the outward benefits and rewards that come from achievement in the corporate culture of our day.

I will never forget an interview that I saw with Tom Brady after he had won his last Super Bowl.  After he talked about all the fame and fortune he had achieved, he then made the following statement, “there has to be more to life than this.”

There is and it is called significance which is all about adding value to other people.  I have talked with a lot of people near the very end of their lives.

The common denominator for all of  these conversations is that when it is all said and done all that really matters is have we made a difference in the lives of other people.

Today if we are not careful we are in danger of reducing all of our important relationships down to a few words on voice mail, or a picture attachment to an email. 

Can someone be professionally successful and realize personal significance at the same time?  Absolutely.

Everyone who has accomplished both has come to the critical understanding that professional success is only the means to the end of having personal significance through helping other people.

Categories: Core Values Personal Leadership Spiritual Growth Work Life Integration | Comments Off on Significance

Reaching Your Potential

Posted by on January 21, 2009

From a personal standpoint one of the things I love doing is hiking.  A hiker is somewhere between a camper and an adventure racer.

One of the great advantages of living in the Atlanta area for ten years is the close proximity to the Appalachian trail in the north Georgia mountains.

My favorite hiking story is about a great one day hike in the Alps.  If you start early in the morning you can reach the summit and get back to the car before dark.

About half way up the mountain is this incredibly beautiful rest house where everyone eats a great lunch.  The owner of the rest house has noticed an interesting pattern over the years.  When everyone reaches the rest house they are all excited about reaching their goal of the summit.

They warm themselves by the fire and about half way through lunch somebody inevitably speaks out what many people are thinking.  Ii think I will just stay here while you finish the climb and you can pick me up on the way back down.  At that moment everyone must the make decision to stay or go.

For all those who stay the first few hours are incredible.  They sit by the fire and tell mountain climbing stories about other great mountain climbers from the past.  They may even reminisce about some of their great climbing experiences in the past.

By early afternoon the mood dramatically changes in the room and everyone becomes silent.  One by one they make their way over to this huge window in the back of the lodge and they stand there and stare at the summit.

For you see it is at this painful moment that they realize they have settled for second best in their lives.

Someone has well said, “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”

 

Categories: Core Values Personal Leadership | Comments Off on Reaching Your Potential

Family Matters

Posted by on January 19, 2009

I have never known a successful leader who did not know how to establish goals, develop plans, execute priorities and finally evaluate success in their career.  The old saying about goals is true, if you cannot measure them, then they really don’t matter.

However, tragically for most people that is exactly what happens to them in their personal lives.  They say this part is ultimately the most important but they never take the time to write down what they want their legacy to be for the people that matter the most.

Because the personal does not get the priority of the professional the family usually ends up with the leftovers.  Leftover time, passion, affection and energy.

I have know people who can make million dollar decisions at work without blinking but by the time they get home they do not have enough emotional energy  to decide if they want hamburgers or soup for dinner.  They have been nice to other people all day, co-workers, suppliers and customers only to come home and be so fried they have to retreat to the T.V. because they have nothing left for spouse or children.

Someone has well said that the person who cannot see the ultimate always becomes a slave to the immediate.  Meaningful relationships with family and bottom line professional results are not mutually exclusive but you must be willing to pay personal leadership price to have both.

 

Categories: Core Values Marriage Pastoral Leadership Personal Leadership Servant Leader Work Life Integration | Comments Off on Family Matters

Leadership 21st Century

Posted by on January 16, 2009

There has been a tremendous amount of change in the area of leadership over the last twenty years.  We have moved from an industrial age to an information age to the present idea age.

People in the industrial age were primarily paid for what they did.  In the information age they will be primarily paid for what they know and in the idea age how well they think.

Add to this mix the power of technology and the rise of the ever changing and highly competitive global economy and you get the new realities for leaders in the 21st century.

The real tragedy is that most corporate cultures today are still leading and managing from an old positional leadership model rather than a new participative one.  Under this model the leaders at the top make all of the decisions and the followers at every level simply carry out their instructions.

These old models are designed around preventing failure rather than ensuring success.  The process is trusted and valued more than the people within the organization.

This core belief about leadership results in trying to manage people with a carrot and stick mentality instead of leading them as the most valuable part of your team.

All effective leaders in the 21st century will prioritize hiring great people and then empowering them to make decisions and take risks or they will absolutely fail in this new global economy.

 

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Character

Posted by on January 15, 2009

Simply put everything you eventually accomplish in life will be based upon you personal leadership DNA.  What you do is based upon who you are.

Someone has well said:  ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.  If you do not believe that then just ask the former governor of New York.

I had to learn the importance of this lesson very early in my career.  I changed jobs four times in five years right out of college because I did not realize that the major problem was not the company I was working for or the supervisor that I had, the problem was me.

All I did was move from company to company and take all of my unresolved character problems with me expecting different results.  I learned the hard way that if you are consistently failing where you are there is no real reason to believe that you will be successful somewhere else.

However, if you learn how to be successful where you are regardless of your circumstances and become an A Player then there is every reason to believe that you can be successful anywhere.

 

 

 

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Resignation

Posted by on January 12, 2009

If you are an A player as defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great you are a character driven leader.  This means that you are willing to set aside any personal agenda for the good of the team and the organization.

It also means that as a leader you are by nature a change agent.  You want to deal with the brutal facts facing your team and find new solutions to old problems.

In some situations the people that you report to are not as open to change.  This is where your character must lead you to deal with this situation in the right way.

The right way is to approach you boss directly and openly share what you are recommending to do and why.  The absolute wrong way is to talk about your superiors to someone else in any negative way that would be disloyal.

If after a long period of respectful dialogue you are not sensing any openness to change within the culture of the organization then your decision is clear.  What you must not do is to try to change your boss, that is not in your job description.

A players realize one fundamental truth about organizational culture.  You will over time help be a part of a team effort that will change it for good or if you stay too long in the wrong culture it will change you.  That is an unacceptable price to pay and that is why it’s time to leave.

 

 

Categories: Pastoral Leadership Personal Leadership Staff Development | Comments Off on Resignation

People Skills

Posted by on December 20, 2008

When you are evaluating any leader’s effectiveness you tend to look at two major categories that summarize everything else.  They are the character that defines the core values of the person and the competency or skill set that they bring to the position.

Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His latest book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a great read for all leaders who want to reach their maximum potential.  He identifies twenty habits that can completely destroy your influence as a leader.

The amazing thing that he confirms for all of us is that the most critical problems related to executive leadership have very little to do with core industry specific competency or even the expected qualities of productive leadership.

The overwhelming majority of smart, disciplined, experienced and passionate leaders are failing in the one major area of basic people skills.  They do not relate well to their superiors, peers, subordinates and sometimes even customers.

They do not listen, make negative comments about people when they are not in the room, and always tend to punish the messenger when bad news is delivered just to list a few.  Almost always these potential fatal flaws are obvious to everyone but the leader who does not even see them as an issue.

An absolute necessity for any effective leader is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed.

 

 

Categories: Career Development Personal Leadership Staff Development | Comments Off on People Skills

Hire Winners

Posted by on December 18, 2008

In the old days of the Industrial Age model of leadership everything was pretty simple.  The leaders made all of the decisions and the followers did all of the work.  There were very clearly identified lines of authority and policies and procedures for everyone.

The major goal of the company culture at the end of the day was to prevent failure.  Therefore if you had a problem with two people that were chronically taking too long for lunch breaks then you would design a system where everyone would have to sign out and sign back in.

Then it became some middle managers job assignment to monitor the system until it became a part of the new and improved culture for the company and that would solve the problem with lunch breaks.  This cycle was repeated over and over again and the best people in the organization were always assigned the duty of cleaning up the mess produced by the worst ten percent of workforce.

Today you better have your best people working on your biggest opportunities or you competition will eat your lunch and you will not need to sign out and in anymore.  You must move from a culture that tries to prevent failure to one that ensures success.

This means that you define success not by how the process is managed by what type of results your people are achieving.  The leaders number one responsibility now is to hire great people and set the vision for the organization.

The winners will take care of the strategy and it will produce results but you will probably have to live without your weekly employee lunch report.  You will not need it any more they fired the two people.

 

Categories: Career Development Staff Development | Comments Off on Hire Winners

Pride

Posted by on December 16, 2008

Pride is a terrible thing.  It causes you to focus only on what is in your personal interest and blinds you to the reality of what you are doing to hurt other people.

The public spectacle that played out in the news concerning Reverend Wright and Barack Obama was been painful to watch. In this tragedy you have two people who once genuinely cared for each other now forced to publicly attack the other person because of what has been said.

Pride also causes you to lose touch with the truth about yourself and what you really believe.  You literally become like the thing you hate but you cannot see it.

The great irony about some of the positions being advocated by the Reverend Wright on the extreme right of black liberation theology is they are really no different than those of other hate speech being advocated by the leaders of the extreme right of white liberation theology.

The only difference between the two groups is literally the color of their skin and if they heard that they would deny it to the death.  What should we all take away from this?

This is not a story just about politics.  It is about every relationship we have in our lives.

When you think the other person is always wrong and you are always right be careful.  The reason you may be able to see their faults is because you are looking at them through the mirror of your own life.

We as Christians are told to always clean up our own issues before we  even begin to criticize someone else.  God does resist the proud but he will give His grace to the humble.

Categories: Personal Leadership Spiritual Growth | Comments Off on Pride