What's Best Next

You are here: Home / 2011 / Archives for August 2011

Archives for August 2011

The Danger of Being Overchallenged

by

Fantastic, fantastic points right now by Bill Hybels.

First, he pointed out that if we underchallenge ourselves, we don’t grow. We need to challenge ourselves and be rigorous at that. That’s how you grow.

But if you over challenge yourself, you break down. Think of weight lifting. You stretch yourself and that causes the muscles to break down, and then the muscles regenerate and come back stronger. But if you over do it, you injure your muscle.

When we over challenge ourselves, we lose our ability to be replenished. A three-day weekend is no longer sufficient to recharge you. You could keep taking three-day weekends and it won’t help, because the issue is not that you just need some rest, but that you are over stressing and over challenging yourself.

Studies have shown that, upon trying to sustain being over challenged for too long, your performance doesn’t simply drop; it drops to negative. It doesn’t just decrease your productivity to over challenge yourself; it leads to negative productivity.

The lesson is: Work hard and challenge yourself. But maintain the discipline of replenishment, and avoid the realm of overchallenge that becomes ultimately destructive.

Why Christians Should Learn About Leadership From Both Secular and Christian Thinkers

by

Bill Hybels is talking now, and just said (slightly paraphrasing): “This conference is unapologetically Christian. Yet, when it comes to who we invite to teach, we seek to learn from everybody — people in the church, people in the business world, people leading in all walks of life.” (The first interesting paradox, by the way, is why Christians don’t just act and do, but also worship — see the previous post.)

I think he’s reflecting here something true and essential for Christian leadership. First, if we are Christians, we need to lead as Christians. We need to think about leadership from a Christian perspective and lead for the good of others and glory of God.

Second, we need to be willing to learn about leadership from all people, not just Christians. There is some really solid and helpful and true teaching on leadership outside the church. Christians should not neglect that. It is a matter of humility to say “I’m going to learn what I need to learn from any source that is speaking truth and making helpful, winsome, solid observations.” And the speakers that are invited to the Summit reflect some of the best of this thinking, both inside and outside the church.

Some might be skeptical about the value of Christians learning about leadership from non-Christians. But let me just list three theological reasons that it is right and necessary and helpful to learn about leadership from non-Christians as well as Christians:

  1. The doctrine of vocation affirms the validity and helpfulness of the insight and work of people in all areas of life, both Christian and non-Christian. The issue is whether something is true.
  2. The doctrine of common grace affirms that there is truth in creation that is accessible and discernable to believers as well as unbelievers. To deny that Christians can learn about leadership from non-Christians is to unwittingly deny the doctrine of common grace.
  3. The Summit isn’t inviting non-Christians to teach theology. I’m not saying we should look to non-Christians to teach the Bible. But, in accord with the doctrines of vocation and common grace, there is value in learning from non-Christians about life and the world, and this includes leadership. We need to think through everything from a biblical point of view, but we shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy by rejecting something just because the person who came up with the idea or made the observation is not a Christian.

A Second Interesting Paradox of Christian Leadership, Exemplified at the Global Leadership Summit

by

Bill Hybels is talking now, and just said (slightly paraphrasing): “This conference is unapologetically Christian. Yet, when it comes to who we invite to teach, we seek to learn from everybody — people in the church, people in the business world, people leading in all walks of life.” (The first interesting paradox, by the way, is why Christians don’t just act and do, but also worship — see the previous post.)

I think he’s reflecting here something true and essential for Christian leadership. First, if we are Christians, we need to lead as Christians. We need to think about leadership from a Christian perspective and lead for the good of others and glory of God.

Second, we need to be willing to learn about leadership from all people, not just Christians. There is some really solid and helpful and true teaching on leadership outside the church. Christians should not neglect that. It is a matter of humility to say “I’m going to learn what I need to learn from any source that is speaking truth and making helpful, winsome, solid observations.” And the speakers that are invited to the Summit reflect some of the best of this thinking, both inside and outside the church.

Some might be skeptical about the value of Christians learning about leadership from non-Christians. But let me just list three theological reasons that it is right and necessary and helpful to learn about leadership from non-Christians as well as Christians:

  1. The doctrine of vocation affirms the validity and helpfulness of the insight and work of people in all areas of life, both Christian and non-Christian. The issue is whether something is true.
  2. The doctrine of common grace affirms that there is truth in creation that is accessible and discernable to believers as well as unbelievers. To deny that Christians can learn about leadership from non-Christians is to unwittingly deny the doctrine of common grace.
  3. The Summit isn’t inviting non-Christians to teach theology. I’m not saying we should look to non-Christians to teach the Bible. But, in accord with the doctrines of vocation and common grace, there is value in learning from non-Christians about life and the world, and this includes leadership. We need to think through everything from a biblical point of view, but we shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy by rejecting something just because the person who came up with the idea or made the observation is not a Christian.

Andy Stanley on Leadership from Catalyst Dallas

by

Here’s a very helpful three-minute clip on leadership from Andy Stanley:

Two especially good points:

“It is a fallacy that great leaders are great at everything.”

And:

“Your fully exploited strengths are always of far greater value to your organization than your marginally improved weaknesses.”

Why You Can't Buy Creativity

by

A great article from the 99%. Here’s how it starts:

“The work had better be good, I’m paying them enough.”

Over the years I’ve heard this statement — or versions of it — from many different managers charged with getting creative work out of their teams.

From a conventional management perspective, it probably sounds like common sense. But to anyone who understands the nature of creativity and what motivates creative people, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Guest Blogging the Global Leadership Summit This Thursday and Friday

by

On Thursday and Friday of this week (August 11-12) I am looking forward to being one of the guest bloggers for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit.

Speakers this year include Seth Godin, Steven Furtick, Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), Bill Hybels, and lots of others. It looks like about over 50,000 are registered so far to attend on-site and at the extension sites. I think that afterwards the speakers are translated into several different languages and the Summit is made available to thousands more Christians internationally, which is especially exciting.

Here’s the purpose of the Summit: “The Global Leadership Summit exists to transform Christian leaders around the world with an injection of vision, skill development, and inspiration for the sake of the local church.”

And here’s an excerpt from the website on why they started and host the Summit:

“Why We Host The Global Leadership Summit”
Over the years we’ve come to appreciate just how critical leadership is to church vitality. We have observed that a church’s effectiveness in pursing it’s God-given mission is largely dependent on the character, devotion, and skill of its leadership core. This is why WCA’s focus is to elevate the quality of leadership within the church.

That leadership could be formal or informal, staff or volunteer, full-time or bi-vocational, clergy or laity. It doesn’t matter where the leadership comes from; it just matters that it is present.

WCA recognizes that the leadership core of any church includes leaders from the business, education, government and social sectors. The Global Leadership Summit welcomes leaders from all these sectors and fully believes that the maximum influence and impact of the Church is felt when all of its Christ-centered leaders are at the forefront of establishing and growing well led local churches, companies, schools, governments and social enterprises. This is the Church at its best! This is when God’s love and care inevitably spills out into our neighborhoods, towns and cities through acts of love, justice, mercy, service and restoration. Each year, we do our best to provide a world-class leadership training event that challenges, inspires and serves the leadership core of every church.

I’ve attended the Summit twice before and have always found it fantastically helpful. One of the reasons I find it so important is because I believe that, as Bill Hybels has said, local churches need to be both well taught and well led. Too often, our churches are either one or the other (or, worse, neither!). We either care about theology to the exclusion of leadership (thinking good leadership will just “take care of itself” and happen automatically — which it doesn’t), or we focus on leadership without a sufficient theological foundation. Let’s not fall for that dichotomy and help our churches be both well taught and well led, and continually growing in both. The Summit is a key resource that can help this happen.

The Global Leadership Summit telecasts live from the campus of Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, reaching more than 185 host sites across the United States. To attend one of the host sites you can find a location on the website.

To follow the guest blogging, go to the Willow Creek Association blog on Thursday and Friday (as well as this blog here, where I’ll also be posting).

The Right Kind of Individualism

by

Sometimes it is suggested that attention to our gifts and unique interests is just “American individualism,” rather than a feature of biblical Christianity.

This is wrong-headed. There is a wrong kind of individualism, to be sure. But there is also a right, biblical kind of individualism that, while affirming the uniqueness and importance of each individual, also affirms this in relation to the value of community.

In fact, I would argue that “American individualism” actually arises from biblical values. Sometimes these values are perverted into a narcissistic, wrong kind of individualism. But they don’t have to be.

The biblical notion of individualism is best captured in the doctrine of vocation, which was a major emphasis of the Reformation. Here’s how Gene Veith summarizes it in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life:

The doctrine of vocation looms behind many of the Protestant influences on culture, though these are often misunderstood. If Protestantism resulted in an increase in individualism, this was not because the theology turned the individual into the supreme authority.

Rather, the doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual’s uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person’s life.

The doctrine of vocation undermines conformity, recognizes the unique value of each person, and celebrates human differences; but it sets these individuals into a community with other individuals, avoiding the privatizing, self-centered narcissism of secular individualism.

What Should I Contribute?

by

Drucker:

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question.

What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself as it was for the peasant or artisan — or by a master or a mistress — as it was for domestic servants. And until very recently, it was taken for granted that most people were subordinates who did as they were told. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, the new knowledge workers (the so- called organization men) looked to their company’s personnel department to plan their careers.

Then in the late 1960s, no one wanted to be told what to do any longer. Young men and women began to ask. What do / want to do? And what they heard was that the way to contribute was to “do your own thing.” But this solution was as wrong as the organization men’s had been. Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfilment, and success achieved any of the three.

But still, there is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Consider the experience of a newly appointed hospital administrator. The hospital was big and prestigious, but it had been coasting on its reputation for 30 years. The new administrator decided that his contribution should be to establish a standard of excellence in one important area within two years. He chose to focus on the emergency room, which was big, visible, and sloppy. He decided that every patient who came into the ER had to be seen by a qualified nurse within 60 seconds. Within 12 months, the hospital’s emergency room had become a model for all hospitals in the United States, and within another two years, the whole hospital had been trans- formed.

As this example suggests, it is rarely possible — or even particularly fruitful — to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be. Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The answer must balance several things. First, the results should be hard to achieve — they should require “stretching,” to use the current buzzword.

But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved — or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances — is not being ambitious; it is being foolish. Second, the results should be meaningful.

They should make a difference. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable. From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.