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Category Archive: Strategic Planning

3 Critical Questions For Leading Change

Posted by on October 31, 2016

I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process. You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.

Your team is out in the open and you are eating your lunch on the ground. The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.

In first scenario, you as team leader say to your team in a stern voice get up and follow me right now. A few people respond but the majority stay in place. Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.

The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move. Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind. The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.

The third scenario is you say to the team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe. Everyone moves and no one is hurt.

In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore, especially with the next generation workforce. The second scene was a perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading. The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.

The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story. Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change. What is the Problem? How are we going to Solve it? Why is this important to You?

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Developing Intentional Relationships With Non-Christians

Posted by on October 22, 2016

For years we have all been told that we are to be witnesses for Christ so that people can come to know Him. The major problem is that the prevailing strategy that has been used for years has never worked for the overwhelming majority of Christians.

The problem is not that this command is somehow out of date to the point that it should no longer be taken seriously. The critical failure is how we as leaders have modeled this ministry and trained our people to carry out this most important assignment for the church.

In the worst of situations we have trained our people to memorize a lot of facts and then after meeting a total stranger try to share all of the facts with them so they can make the most important decision of their lives all in thirty minutes.

I will acknowledge that in some cases there are divine appointments that God has prepared someone’s heart for just such a meeting. However, that does not mean that we should take this aggressive an approach with everyone we meet.

In the normal course of everyday we all tell stories about things that have happened in our lives. The subject matter can be anything from our last vacation, great new restaurants, job stress and personal family problems.

The reason why all of this works so easily is that it is in the normal course of our everyday lives within relationships that already exist to some degree. This is the biblical model of as you are going about your life share with other people the incredible and wonderful things that He has done in your life.

When evangelism moves from direct confrontation to casual conversations more people are going to respond to the good news of the gospel.

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Glocal Missions Strategy

Posted by on October 21, 2016

During the last century there were very clear distinctions between the concept of evangelism and missions. In the simplest of terms evangelism was reaching people for the local church and missions was reaching people for the kingdom.

Within the context of missions there was a local, national and an international segmentation. This implied the potential for several different strategies to be effective in all of these areas. It was understood that to reach people in an international context that significant cultural barriers had to be addressed for the gospel to be effective.

Today the cultural distance between the people who are in the church in America and the people who are not is significant enough to require a cross cultural missiological approach to reach them. They hold an entirely different world view and they are simply not going to come to our buildings regardless of how cutting edge our marketing may be.

For churches to be effective today in reaching the unchurched in America we are going to have to become missionaries in our own local context. We will have to find ways to take the gospel to where the people live, work and play and do it in a culturally relevant way.

That is why we need to stop thinking in terms of the old models of segmentation. The world has literally moved to America and through the use of technology and the new global economy everything has changed.

The church must become glocal in its thinking, which means one missiological mindset that produces multiple strategies depending upon who we are trying to reach in our area.

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Short Term Thinking Leads Long Term Failure

Posted by on October 19, 2016

In sharp contrast to the breakthrough impact of the companies that practiced the flywheel effect all of the organizations that could not transition from Good to Great were caught in The Doom Loop. Instead of the consistent daily movement of the flywheel they went for the big impact event that would give the immediate impression of progress only later to regress into failure.

They were not willing to use the deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done and then simply doing it. “The comparison companies frequently launched new programs-often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at motivating the troops-only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results.”

They wanted the big event or the grand program or the new celebrity CEO that would allow them to skip the daily discipline of the flywheel and move immediately to breakthrough. The repeated pattern of this cycle consistently produced disappointing results and then reaction without understanding starts the loop all over again.

Peter Drucker commented on these companies, “The drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”

The Doom Loop is a classic example of an organization continuing to do the same wrong things over and over again and yet somehow expecting different results. At the core of this problem is a leadership team that is more concerned with short term personal success than what is best for the long term benefit of everyone involved?

In the end this is not a strategy problem but a character one.

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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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6 Habits Of Trustworthy Leaders

Posted by on September 26, 2016

Trust is a hot topic and for all the right reasons. If you and your team have it, great things can be accomplished. Without it nothing gets done well. There are clearly things you can do to make deposits into your trust accounts and this Fast Company post lists some key ones:

“Do the people in your office trust you? Maybe not as much as you think they do. Consulting firm EY released its Global Generations 3.0 research which found that less than half of full-time workers between the ages of 19 and 68 place a “great deal of trust” in their employer, boss, or colleagues. Another recent survey from Globoforce’s WorkHuman Research Institute found that 80% of employees trust their colleagues, but only 65% trust senior leaders in their companies.”

Toxic Teamwork Making Destructive Comments

Posted by on July 11, 2016

One of the hallmarks of leadership in the 21^st century is participative team building and problem solving. We have moved from the old top down decision making model to one that allows and encourages everyone’s involvement in the process.

If you are a good leader then you will make sure that everyone has an opportunity to give their opinion and respectfully discuss and even debate the issues so that the best possible solution can be reached. For some people this type of give and take environment comes easy and for others it is very hard to open up and participate.

As a team leader one thing I watch very carefully is when someone starts to take on another team member personally rather than dealing with their ideas. This can be very subtle in the beginning but eventually something is said that really stings.

There is a big difference between I do not agree with what you are saying and here is the reason compared to you are wrong and just don’t get it. Certain people with strong personalities will go after another person when they feel threatened because they know they can intimidate them to back off.

During the meeting when I see this happening I will usually make a point to come back to the person who was attacked and draw them out again. After the meeting, I will go to the person making the destructive comments and make sure they understand that type of behavior will not be tolerated.

After clearly communicating with someone privately and they continue to demonstrate this type of behavior then they will lose their seat at the table and everyone will know why.

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Changing Missions Paradigm

Posted by on June 17, 2016

The one thing that has never changed about missions is that God has always been seeking people to know Him and then to make Him known. The unchanging message of the gospel started in a garden and will end in a city full of people from every tribe and nation on the earth.

The great commission was given to the early church and they immediately began to carry the message to every part of their known world. This message was primarily being shared not by a professional ministerial class but by average believers who had a personal story to tell about what Christ had done in their lives.

During the middle ages the formal church was the focal point of representing God to the world. The emphasis had shifted from individuals to organizations and the world suffered greatly in this period of isolation from the truth.

The reformation gave the scriptures back to the people and set the stage for all that followed in the modern mission’s movement where individual believers once again committed their lives to go into whole world with their message of hope. However these individuals became part of much larger organizations that took the lead in spreading the good news.

Today the major emphasis is still upon organizations, denominations, mission agencies and other groups that represent primarily the trained professionals who maintain the old paradigms that have existed for hundreds of years. These groups do a great work and will always play an important role in touching the world.

An exciting new movement is developing where committed Christians are once again being used by God in incredible ways and places where the professional worker model cannot work. They are using their career calling as a platform not only to make a profit but also to make an eternal difference.

If you want to learn more Great Commission Companies is a great book that points the way to how God is using globalization to break down barriers and effectively create genuine communities of new believers.

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Lipstick On A Pig

Posted by on June 17, 2016

I am convinced that we will do almost anything to keep from having to change the real problem. I see this in my own personal life and I see it in the workplace all the time.

Instead of admitting something is not working and killing it we give it a new and improved rebranding thinking somehow that will mystically make all the real issues go away. We fail to remember that every time we roll something out as new and improved, something else just became old and obsolete .

Superficial change makes us feel good and even seems to give us some temporary momentum. The hard cold truth is we just kicked the can down the road and it will be waiting for you in a week or a month to kick it again.

If it’s a people issue, never forget that conduct is the visible result of inward character. Stop dealing with behavior and start looking at their beliefs. Bottom line, after appropriate attempts to help someone improve, there comes a point in time that you need to pull the plug. Termination is always a better outcome than manipulation.

Leaders prove their real value to an organization in the trenches of leading change. Those who lack the courage to make the hard calls will put lipstick on the pig every time. Those who value the success of the organization over themselves will kill the pig and throw a party with barbecue for everyone.

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The Most Effective Teams Adapt To Change

Posted by on June 8, 2016

The ability to lead change well is both art and science. The development of the plan and the definition of the metrics are often the easy part. When to make the change and at what pace are challenging. The role of teams in leading change is defined in this Forbes post:

“A recent Economist article stated that “teams have become the basic building-blocks of organizations,” and I disagree. I disagree because they’ve always been the building blocks of performance, and it’s only now that leaders are beginning to realize the power of “we” and networks after working so long for “me” in hierarchies.”