Coaching Churches

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.

The concept of the flywheel was used by Jim Collins in his best selling leadership book Good to Great.  The major point of the illustration is that significant change occurs when you do the right things repeatedly over time and eventually you will have a breakthrough that results in significant success.

We all would love to have the quick fix strategy work instead, we want instant culture change.  For every company that moved from Good to Great there was no single defining action, no grand programs, no celebrity leader and no one killer innovation that produced the results.

“Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”

A great example that really makes the point is used is from the legendary coaching career of John Wooden at UCLA.  Most basketball fans know that he won ten NCAA Championships in twelve years and at one point had a sixty-one-game winning streak.

What most of us do not know is that for fifteen years coach Wooden worked in relative obscurity at UCLA before he ever won his first national title.  During that time he was building the foundation for the program of great recruiting, player discipline and refining his style of playing the full court press style of defense.

The real character question for leaders today is how many are willing to pay the price of not demanding short term success at the expense of long term sustainability for the organization?  It may keep you off the front page of the business section of your local paper but in this economic environment that can be a very good thing.