Coaching Churches

There are so many different factors that must be in place for you to reach your true potential.  Many of these skills and values can be learned and some can not.  This post by Michael Hyatt was a great read:

Researcher Angela Lee Duckworth studied West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee contestants, teachers in tough schools, and sales peoples, asking who would succeed and why.

“In all those very different contexts one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success,” she said in a popular TED talk. And it wasn’t the usual suspects. What was it? “It was grit.”

Duckworth defines grit as “passion and and perseverance for very long-term goals … sticking with your future, day in day out.…”

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There has always been a delicate balance in goal setting between what can be done and what could be done.  Goals should be realistic and achievable but they also must be courageous and challenging.  Safe is not good enough anymore and we must be willing to take risks that stretch us outside our comfort zone to achieve greatness.

I absolutely love this quote that is extremely timely in our current environment, “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much no suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.”  Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

When President Kennedy said in the early 60’s we are going to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of this decade the overwhelmingly majority of people thought he had lost his mind, and yet we did it.

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade.  The power of technology and the globalization of all the world economies are driving change in unprecedented ways that no one could have imagined either just a few years ago.  When this recession is over we are never going back to the ways things used to be.

What goals are you setting for yourself and your organization that are commensurate for the challenges that lie ahead in the 21^st century?  They must be big hairy and audacious if they are going to lead to outstanding performance.

If goal setting is so simple why do so many of us never reach them?  Even though the methods may differ, the common principle is to state clearly what the outcome is you want to reach.  I am always looking for new techniques and this post by David Whitt is very helpful:

“Performance expert John Hester identifies four common mistakes that managers make when they set goals for employees in the latest issue of Ignite!  The negative result is poor or misaligned performance, accountability issues, blame and resentment—not to mention countless hours spent reviewing tasks and redoing work.”

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You have heard it said that if you don’t measure it then it really does not matter.  There is a tremendous amount of truth in that statement.  But the reality is that you can’t just throw out a percentage number you want to grow your revenue next year it must be realistic.  These principles by Ken Blanchard will work in any context:

“Although most managers agree with the importance of setting goals, many do not take the time to clearly develop goals with their people. As a result, people tend to get caught in the “activity trap,” where they become busy doing things, but not necessarily the right things. In his book Leading at a Higher Level, business author Ken Blanchard recommends that managers set SMART goals with their people. SMART is an acronym for the most important factors to remember in setting quality goals>”

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