Yes. And the leader sets the tone — if he is over challenged, the rest of the organization will likely try to keep up an unsustainable pace as well.
On the other hand, you can also under challenge your organization. That fails to develop people and is a disservice to them.
Hit the right target:
OVERCHALLENGE
CHALLENGE
UNDERCHALLENGE
The danger here is not to your health, as over challenge is.
The danger here is to organizations: people that are continuously underchallenged usually end up leaving.
Don’t under challenge your people.
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.
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:
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:
I’m still not entirely sure of my strategy today — whether I will do one long post with notes from each session, and then some overall reflections at the end, or a bunch of shorter posts as each session goes along.
As I think about it now, I’ll probably do some version of the latter.
Let me know any of your preferences, if you have any.
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).
Below is a short documentary of the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that was held in Cape Town, South Africa, last October.
Here’s the intro from the website:
Cape Town 2010 has been called the most representative gathering of Christian leaders in the 2000 year history of the Christian movement (Christianity Today). Four-thousand Christian leaders representing 198 countries attended the Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. The Congress was brought together by a globalized leadership team from Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, India, North America and elsewhere. Several thousand more leaders participated in the Congress through the Cape Town GlobaLink, Cape Town Virtual Congress and Lausanne Global Conversation. Learn more about this gathering by watching this short documentary.
Last December, Fast Company did a story on Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit. It’s a good article and worth your time. And I commend Fast Company for doing an article that features some of the excellent leadership development that is going on in the church right now.
I’ve been to the Summit twice, and it is fantastically helpful. In fact, the Summit often includes many of the leadership thinkers I tend to quote on this blog, such as Jim Collins, Chip and Dan Heath, Marcus Buckingham, and others. It has been a great experience to see some of them in person.
Here’s a great comment from Hybels on the importance of good leadership in the church:
The summit sprang from Hybels’s conviction that church leaders lacked leadership training. “I’d been trying to help churches train pastors, and I kept asking myself, Why do some churches flourish and others languish? Is it location? Denomination? Urban versus rural? Rich versus poor?” Hybels says. “I could think of an exception to every theory, until I realized that every thriving church was not just well fed but also well led. It was a potent combination of great teaching and great leadership.”
I agree with Hybels: churches need to be well taught and well led. For too long we’ve tended to create a dichotomy between the two. But good theology and good leadership belong together, and mutually serve one another.
Sometimes the Summit is criticized for bringing in secular thinkers (a criticism which would also apply to this blog!). I don’t think that criticism holds water; maybe I’ll talk about that issue sometime. I am grateful and excited for what the Lord is doing through the Summit to help teach his people more and more about effective leadership. It would be worth attending if you are able.
I’m in South Africa for the next few weeks for the Lausanne Congress.
For this week, I’m with John Piper and some others from DG as he speaks at a couple pastors conferences.
Then, beginning Sunday, I’ll be in Cape Town for the actual Congress. It’s a gathering of more than 4,000 Christians from more than 200 nations to discuss the state of global Christianity and world evangelization. The first congress was called by Billy Graham in 1974 and was a major landmark in the progress of modern missions. The second congress was in 1989, and this I now the third. You can learn more about it from the Lausanne website and the helpful article in Christianity Today, The Most Diverse Gathering Ever.
While I’m here I’ll post some updates from the congress and possibly some various insights on issues of missions strategy, Christianity and culture, solving large global problems, and just being in Africa.