My guest post at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics blog.
I would also encourage you to check out their blog in general. It is truly fantastic — and especially the last few days have some interesting posts.
Archives for 2013
Potential, Not Just Performance
Colin Powell, in It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
Leaders and bosses see qualities that separate some few from the crowd. What do they see?
For starters, they see consistently outstanding prior performance in different positions.
They see someone learning and growing intellectually, someone preparing for the next level, not just maxing out in his current job; someone who is ambitious, but not cutthroat.
They see someone tested by his assignments and challenges generally given to people with more seniority and greater experience, thus indicating early that he can probably perform well not only at that higher level, but at levels above that one.
They see someone reaching outside his comfort zone to acquire skills and knowledge that are not now essential, but are useful at a higher level.
They see someone who has demonstrated strength of character, moral and physical courage, integrity, and selflessness, and who will carry those virtues to the next level.
They see someone who is confident about the next step. His ego is under control, and he is mentally prepared for the added responsibilities and burdens of higher office. It won’t go to his head. He is balanced.
There are No Trivial Jobs
A very important point from Colin Powell in It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
Every person in an organization has value and wants that value to be recognized. . . . The person who came to clean my office each night was no less a person than the President, a general, or a cabinet member. They deserved and got from me a thank-you, a kind word, an inquiry that let him or her know their value. I wanted them to know they weren’t just janitors. I couldn’t do my job without them, and the department relied on them.
There are no trivial jobs in any successful organization. But there are all too many trivial leaders who don’t understand this oh so simple and easy to apply principle.
The Guys in the Field Are Right and the Staff is Wrong
I’ve seen so many ministries and organizations go wrong by failing to recognize and abide by this very true and biblical principle articulated by Colin Powell in his book It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
Whenever I took command of a unit, I announced early on that my bias was toward the guys in the field; I took their word as ground truth. Until I was persuaded otherwise, my staff must be wrong. This did not make my staff happy, but that was good.
My bias toward the guys in the field may sound unreasonable, but here’s how it worked for me. First, it let my staff know that our clients were the leaders on the line and their troops. My staff didn’t work for me. My staff worked for them. Problem solving went both down and up. Once every staff member realized that any field commander could drop a dime on them to me, they worked like the devil to solve field problems. The staff realized they couldn’t make me happy unless the line was happy.
….Over my many long years of experience, the line was right about 70 percent of the time.
Physical Books May Offer Better Reading Comprehension than Ebooks
This has been my experience, and it’s good to hear that science may be bearing this out. Here’s a key quote from a brief article on this subject:
“Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols,” writes Carr. “The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space. If you’ve ever picked up a book that you read long ago and discovered that your hands were able to locate a particular passage quickly, you’ve experienced this phenomenon.”
The question for me is whether there’s a way to be able to replicate this phenomena with e-books. I haven’t found one yet, but perhaps there is.
It's Fine to Start Sentences with Conjunctions
I’m not blogging this because my editor tried to reduce the number of sentences I started with “but” and “and” in What’s Best Next (though that did happen). I’ve had this down on my list to post for over a year; but I suppose this truth is not as appreciated as I perhaps thought it was.
So, here are two great words on this from two important books on writing.
From On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” But that’s wrong—there’s no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast.
From Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing:
Starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction is an informal style; it makes your writing sound conversational. In addition, a conjunction at the beginning usually draws attention to the sentence and adds punch.
The Drive Workshop
Dan Pink, bestselling author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and several other business books, has recently launched: The Drive Workshop: Using Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose to Transform Your Business and Yourself.
It’s a training workshop for organizations on how to move more effectively from the old methods of motivation (carrots and sticks), which typically create mere compliance, to more human forms of motivation that create engagement and develop employees — and organizations — more effectively.
It’s worth checking out.
The Virtual Assistant Solution
The Virtual Assistant Solution: Come up for Air, Offload the Work You Hate, and Focus on What You Do Best
The concept of a virtual assistant was first brought to the forefront, it seems to me, by Tim Ferriss in his book The Four Hour Workweek. What Tim had limited space to talk about, Michael Hyatt now fleshes out for us in much more detail, going into why a virtual assistant is such a good idea and how to do it well.
Here is the table of contents:
1 Why You Need a Virtual Assistant
2 Why a Virtual Assistant Beats a Traditional One
3 What a Virtual Assistant Can Do for You
4 Answering the Most Common Questions
5 The First 90 Days with Your Virtual Assistant
6 Tools for Staying in Sync
And here’s a helpful overview from the introduction:
The term “virtual assistant” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. To be clear, I’m talking about someone who works remotely and with whom you contract for professional services like clerical work, meeting and event planning, project management and coordination, even marketing and social media. The idea is having help that fits your needs, your schedule, and your budget. And you can have it without the constraints of payroll, benefits, and recruiting.
Authors, coaches, consultants, creatives, doctors, entrepreneurs, executives, nonprofit leaders, lawyers, pastors, professors, and speakers— there’s a long list of people who could benefit from a virtual assistant.
But despite how many people could benefit, I’ve noticed that many are reluctant to take the plunge. As a result, they miss getting the help they need. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you think hiring a full-time, in-office assistant is your only option. Maybe you have no experience with virtual assistance (or have had a bad experience like I did) and don’t think it can work for you.
It can.
This book will clear up the misconceptions and allow you to be more effective with your time and talents. It will equip you to understand the dynamics of a virtual workforce, define how one or more virtual assistants can help you accomplish more than you ever thought possible, and offer practical advice on how to hire, integrate, and fully benefit from your new virtual staff.
(Hyatt, Michael. The Virtual Assistant Solution: Come up for Air, Offload the Work You Hate, and Focus on What You Do Best
You can also read more about the book in Michael’s post introducing it.
Remarkable Work is Often "Unreasonable"
Seth Godin, in a post from about a year ago:
The false choice of mediocrity
Too often, we’re presented with choices that don’t please us. We can pick one lousy alternative or the other. And too often, we pick one.
I was struck by Apple’s choice to put a glass screen on the original iPhone. Just six weeks before it was announced, Steve Jobs decided he wanted a scratchproof glass screen. The thing is, this wasn’t an option. It wasn’t possible, reliable, feasible or appropriately priced. It couldn’t be done with certainty, and almost any other organization would have taken it off the list of appropriate choices.
It was unreasonable.
And that’s the key. Remarkable work is always not on the list, because if it was, it would be commonplace, not remarkable.
What's the Difference Between Mission and Vision?
When reading on leadership, you very quickly come across references to “mission” and “vision.” Unfortunately, the meaning of those terms, and the difference between them, is not often made clear.
So, here’s the difference.
Mission: The ultimate purpose of the organization; it’s reason for existence. It’s why you do what you do. A mission is never “finished,” so a good mission is one that you would still be able to affirm 100 years from now.
Vision: Used in multiple ways. It is sometimes used just to mean a vivid description of what it will look like when you are fulfilling your mission in all the ways you want. More precisely, though, it is typically a large goal, usually 5-10 years out, that represents the chief focus and state of affairs you are seeking to bring about during that time period. Hence, it has a finish point and can be completed — but it is a stretch. A good vision derives from and is aligned with the mission.
Here’s an example for a church:
Mission: To glorify God as a loving community of Christ-centered people.
Vision: To have a vibrant worshipping community of 1,000 people, from all age groups, who are active in the city for justice and mercy and loving one another, being built up by solid preaching, and meeting in regular fellowship groups.
Note, of course, that if you are a church you don’t need to make numbers central to your vision. I just did that here to help keep the example clear. A good vision is quantifiable in some way; but numerical growth doesn’t need to be central to how you define success for your church. (On the other hand, I don’t think it’s bad to care about numerical growth, either; in fact, I would argue we have a mandate to care about it in some sense, because every person matters.)