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Category Archive: Servant Leader

Corporate Shepherd

Posted by on February 6, 2017

There are many leaders today that want to move beyond just making a profit to really making a difference. They want to be successful and that’s great but they also want the significance that only comes from adding value to other people.

When leadership is approached from a Christian perspective a new model starts to develop where the leader becomes more of a shepherd to their people than a boss to their employees. They do care about performance and productivity but they also feel responsible for developing alignment around core values and creating the right culture for work-life balance for their people.

They also see life beyond the immediate pressures of planning, project management, staffing, goal setting and execution. The legacy they want to create for their life and organization includes eternal metrics that must be included when talking about the ultimate bottom line.

The clear plan for every Christian is to use your professional life as a platform for ministry because we are all in full time Christian service. Our lives should no longer be seen as segmented into faith, family, friends, recreation and entertainment but become totally integrated into being one life on mission for God. The various roles that we fulfill are no longer competing with each other but complimenting the calling God has for our lives.

In the end there is only one performance review that really matters. The evaluation criteria is simple, How faithful were you with all that I entrusted to your care? Thinking about that moment should overwhelm us with gratitude and give us a renewed sense of passion to hear well done my good and faithful servant.

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Effective Leaders Value Their People

Posted by on January 20, 2017

Leaders have always been evaluated based on the two extremes of the tasks that must be done compared to the relationship skills involved in motivating the people who will actually do the work. The theory was some leaders are born project managers and others are great in customer service.

In the old industrial age model of the last century based these either high task or high touch leaders were placed in jobs that maximized their strengths and overlooked their weaknesses. So if someone could always hit their numbers but had higher rate of turnover they were viewed as someone who was not too good with people but they could always get the job done.

Today in the more highly participative style of leadership that is required to be successful in the 21^st century it is an absolute necessity that all leaders prioritize their people skills so they can positively interact with a wide range of constituencies.

Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His greatest 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 priority for any effective leader today is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the relational feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed and the organization or team will fail.

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Are You Personally Called Or Professionally Driven?

Posted by on December 7, 2016

It is very important that we all know the difference between these two power words. If you are not careful and buy into the culture’s definition of success you will be driven to get all the perks of this lifestyle.

Driven people see their career as the primary provider of their physical and emotional needs. It gives them power, possessions, position, pleasure and all the emotional significance they want from all the outward success they achieve.

Called people on the other hand see their career as a means to a much more important end and that is impacting other people. They get up every day on a mission to make a difference and the bottom line for them is not profits but people.

I am convinced that called people in the marketplace can be more successful in every way than their driven counterparts. They have a passion that goes way beyond just showing up for work and hitting the numbers.

All of us have a strong desire to look back at the end of our lives and know that we have made a real difference. That difference will not be who has the most toys but who has helped the most people.

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Why Gratitude Is So Important In The Workplace

Posted by on November 30, 2016

Most of the behavioral issues I deal with in the workplace are because the person I am coaching has lost their perspective. They focus in on a series of small hurts and dwell on them to the point they become bitter and negative. In every situation without exception, the key core issue is they are no longer grateful for all the good in their lives. This Fast Company post deals with why this is so important:

“Gratitude is absolutely vital in the workplace, says UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons, author of The Little Book of Gratitude: Creating a Life of Happiness and Wellbing by Giving Thanks, and a leading researcher on the subject. “Most of our waking hours are spent on the job, and gratitude, in all its forms, is a basic human requirement,” he says. “So when you put these factors together, it is essential to both give and receive thanks at work.”

Finding Real Success In Life

Posted by on October 28, 2016

We owe a great deal to several authors who have written excellent books on how to move from success as the primary goal in your life to real significance. Probably the book Half Time by Bob Buford has made the most life changing impact with people who have worked very hard to be professionally successful in the corporate world only to find their personal life lacked real purpose and meaning.

Significance moves way beyond profits as a definition of success to people and how is my life adding value to others. Success many times is simply about what do we get at the end of the day, while significance is about what are we willing to give away to make a difference.

If you want to have an eternal impact on the people who are a part of your life you must move beyond significance to surrender. When you live a total life of surrender your definition of success is totally determined by the One you are following. This definition alone will give you true significance as He uses your life story to impact other people in ways that will permanently change them for their good.

This means that we must die to the world’s definitions of success as the accumulation of power, position and pleasure and conform our expectations to His perfect will for our lives. This may include the ability to make a lot of money and have great positions of leadership responsibility.

A surrendered life is one that is lived in total partnership, so that He can use us as He sees best to change the world one person at a time starting with us. There can be no greater definition of success and significance in this life.

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Great Leaders Take Responsibility And Give Credit

Posted by on October 7, 2016

I have always been an Alabama football fan since the days of Coach Bryant. One of the things I always appreciated about him was when we lost a game he always took the responsibility in the press conference and never cast blame toward the players or officials.

According to Jim Collins in his best seller Good to Great all great leaders do the very same thing. His team noticed this pattern in all of the very successful leaders and they called it the window and the mirror effect.

All great leaders would look out the window and give credit to other people and not themselves when things were going well. At the same time, they would look in the mirror to assume responsibility for failure and never blame bad luck or someone else when things went poorly.

The comparison companies did just the opposite. These leaders would look out the window to blame someone or something when they experienced negative results. When they did get it right they would look admiringly in the mirror and take all the credit with great fanfare.

We all need to apply this lesson on a personal level. It is always easy to justify our bad behavior when we can use what someone else said or did to hurt us as an excuse. Assuming personal responsibility for our attitudes, words and actions is the first major step in becoming a leader who is driven by character and not by the fading recognition of the crowd.

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Moving Beyond Paycheck

Posted by on August 12, 2016

As Christians we are to do everything as unto the Lord and not unto men. That means we have far more than a job we have a calling.

We tend to live segmented lives with separate time and devotion given to work, family, faith, friends and entertainment. What comes with this mentality is the faith part of our lives tends to be limited to what we do on Sunday and it has very little practical impact on how we live the other six days of the week.

For some of us it goes way beyond that. Our careers become the major source of emotional fulfillment in our lives and we become seduced by all the power, position and possessions that come with worldly success.

In my opinion every Christian should see themselves living in full time ministry on mission for God. Their career then becomes their platform for impacting other people and not merely project deadlines and performance reviews.

When your whole life is integrated around your faith everything you do and every relationship you have takes on eternal significance. The person you are now working for is not your boss but the One who died for you so that you might live for Him.

Changing the world one person at a time is a career worthy of God’s grace in our lives and it is way beyond any paycheck that any company can give.

How do you keep your work from just being a job?

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Circle of Influence

Posted by on July 1, 2016

Several years ago Stephen Covey wrote one of the all time best selling leadership books The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a book that I have read several times and refer to often.

The first habit in the book is to be proactive and take responsibility for leading our own lives. He writes, “It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.”

One of the most practical tips for doing this on a daily basis is what he calls the circle of concern in our lives vs. the circle of influence. The circle of concern represents all the things we really care about but have no control over to change the outcome. If we are not careful we can spend most of our day here with nothing to show for all the emotional effort.

The circle of influence though contains all the things that are important to us as well but we do have the ability to control the outcome. When we focus on what we cannot control during the day that just means there were many things that should and could be done that were not.

The amazing thing about this principle is that the more you prioritize the things you can do and start accomplishing them the things you cannot control proportionally diminish in their importance.

When we are doing the things we know we should do it not only allows us to accomplish something but it also gives us the needed perspective to deal with all the things that are beyond our control.

To quote another Covey principle: WIN WIN

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Customer Service At Home

Posted by on June 10, 2016

We all enjoy the experience of some organization or person who goes the extra mile and delivers high quality personal service. In a day when most companies either put you on a phone tree from hell or only allow contact through email it is really nice when another person is simply pleasant and nice.

Mobile Travel Guide declares themselves as the gold standard of travel ratings and reviews. They rate hotels and restaurants on a system of one to five stars based on their performance. When you see their sign and there are at least three to the coveted five stars rating you know that the experience will be a good one.

Every day when we all go out into the public world of work and our daily to do list we interact with lots of other people. Most of the time, we really try very hard to be courteous and polite to others especially if they are customers, suppliers, co workers or friends. We give, give, and give to other people all day until we are emotionally spent by the time we head home.

When I evaluate my customer service rating at home I have to admit many times I would not receive even one star much less three to five. I treat the people I care about the most with the least amount of patience and kindness.

If the Mobile staff were to interview the people who are the closest to you how many stars would you receive? I am going to do whatever it takes to consistently improve my score. How about you?

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The Problem Of Marginless Living

Posted by on March 11, 2016

In the past I have talked about the need to create margin in our lives. Margin is the space that used to exist in all of our lives between all the physical, emotional and mental pressures of every day and our capacity to respond in a meaningful way to all of the people and circumstances that we must address.

The lack of margin is exactly the opposite when we have too many demands and not enough resources. For most of us the public parts of our lives centered around our work life demands its percentage first. I know people who can make million dollar decisions all day long at the office only to be so spent by the end of the day they can’t even decide if they want pizza or hamburgers for dinner.

They put other people first all day whether they are customers or co-workers only to come home with nothing left for a lonely spouse or stressed out children. We may feel successful at times because of all the public praise that comes with making your numbers but at the end of the day we know something is terribly wrong.

Whatever it takes all of us must find the courage to stake out some core values that are non-negotiable. This will allow us maybe for the first time in our lives to have the margin we need to live the life we want rather than the one someone else has scripted for us.

You have the capacity to write your own script, so take out your pen and start writing.

Find out what works for you to find time for the people that matter most.

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