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.”
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).
Wherever knowledge workers perform well in large organizations, senior executives take time out, on a regular schedule, to sit down with them, sometimes all the way down to the green juniors, and ask:
- “What should we at the head of this organization know about your work?
- What do you want to tell me regarding the organization?
- Where do you see opportunities we do not exploit?
- Where do you see dangers to which we are still blind?
- And, all together, what do you want to know from me about this organization?”
Update: I think it’s important to add one more thing, and I hope it’s not too blunt.
If the employees in an organization don’t feel that they can be honest with those at the top about genuine problems in the organization, then I suggest the organization has the wrong leaders.
I don’t think leaders should be second-guessing themselves all the time. But the truth is that there are some people in leadership, either by accident or who knows what, that simply shouldn’t be there.
One outcome of this exercise may be that the leaders realize they are the wrong people to head the organization. This would be the rare instance (or should be rare!), but if the leaders simply assume they are competent and somehow “appointed” to lead, despite lacking actual competence and having failed to create a work environment that truly builds people up and treats them with respect and unleashes their talents for good and makes them excited about their work and the organization, then the most important thing they might need to think about is whether they are the right leaders at all.
Andy Stanley, in Visioneering: God’s Blueprint for Developing and Maintaining Vision
If God has birthed a vision in your heart, the day will come when you will be called upon to make a sacrifice to achieve it. And you will have to make the sacrifice with no guarantee of success.
I talk to people all the time who have what seem to be “God ideas” but who are unwilling to commit with both hands and feet. The conversation often begins with, “If I had a million dollars.”
A well-meaning lady once said to me, “You know, I am so burdened by the problems in the inner city. If I had a million dollars, I would love to go down there and start a school for underprivileged kids.”
As sensitively as I knew how, I said, “I know people with far less than you have now who have started schools for inner-city kids. You don’t need a million dollars to start a school.” What she needed was the courage to act on her vision.
The difference between those with a burden for inner-city kids and those who actually do something is not resources. It is a willingness to take risks and make sacrifices. The people who make a difference in this world commit to what could be before they know where the money is coming from. Their vision is enough to cause them to jump in. Money usually follows vision. It rarely happens the other way around. Consequently, vision always involves sacrifice and risk-taking.
My post today at the Global Leadership Summit blog.
A good video from the Global Leadership Summit, which is happening August 11-12:
Here’s an abbreviated transcript:
“I do leadership development as a discipline. I don’t do it as a recreation. I read one or two leadership books a month by sheer discipline. I don’t ask myself if I feel like it. I need to read–I have to take responsibility, God has given me, whatever size platform it is- big or small. I have some people I’ve been given charge to lead well. I have to read to get better as a leader. I’m asking you leaders, take responsibility for your leadership development and read more and read as a discipline.
I’m asking you to get around other leaders that are better than you –as a discipline, I’m not asking you to do it recreationally. Every 30 days, ask yourself who could I ask to lunch or dinner? Who can I get around who’s been where I haven’t’ been – built something I have not yet built? How can I ask them the right questions so I can stretch my mind and heart and get better?”
Andy Stanley makes this point well in Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future
Every leader has authority over arenas in which he has little or no competence. When we exert our authority in an area where we lack competence, we can derail projects and demotivate those who have the skills we lack.
On any given Sunday morning, I have the authority to walk into our video control room and start barking out orders. The fact that I don’t know the first thing about what’s going on in there does not diminish my authority. Eventually the crew would do what I asked them to do. But the production would suffer horribly. If I were to do that Sunday after Sunday, our best and brightest volunteers would leave. Eventually our paid staff would start looking for something else to do as well.
There is no need to become an expert in, or even to understand, every component of your organization. When you try to exercise authority within a department that is outside your core competencies, you will hinder everything and everyone under your watch. If you fail to distinguish between authority and competence, you will exert your influence in ways that damage projects and people.
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.
Richard Florida is talking about community leaders here, but his point applies to all forms of leadership, including leading and managing in organizations:
Unfortunately, leadership more often than not works in the opposite direction by squashing civic energy. Jane Jacobs once told me that communities everywhere are filled with creative vigor, but that some of them are run by squelchers. Squelchers are control freaks who think they know what’s best for their city or region, even as their leadership (or lack thereof) causes a hemorrhage of bright, talented, and creative people.
Squelchers, he said, are the kind of leaders that use the word “no” a lot. They constantly put roadblocks in the way of community energy and initiatives. I’ve seen firsthand how these squelchers drain the life and energy from their communities. The respond to new ideas with phrases like “That’s not how we do things here”; “That will never fly”; or “Why don’t you just move someplace you’ll be happy?” (From Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
)
Sometimes, the quest for efficiency is a red herring. Consider the example of the first light bulb, described in The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy
Thomas Edison’s first light bulb wasn’t at all efficient. One 1905 observer complained that “the incandescent lamp is an extremely poor vehicle for converting electric energy into light energy, since only about 4 percent of the energy supplied to the lamp is converted into light energy, the remaining 96 percent being converted into heat energy.” And the power plant that Edison built to light his bulb didn’t convert even 10 percent of its heat into electricity.
But the end-to-end losses of over 99 percent seemed worthwhile to produce such a wonderfully clean, compact, cool, and safe source of light. Efficiency was beside the point. As Jill Jonnes recounts in Empires of Light, gas and oil lamps didn’t stand a chance against such a superior alternative.
Sometimes a concern for efficiency undercuts what really matters. To have said “96 percent of the energy that goes into the light bulb produces heat, not light, so let’s get rid of this thing” would have missed the most important thing: we have light. And this is way better than oil lamps.
It’s often the same way in organizations. An organization often starts out vibrant and energetic and full life. Things are getting done, and people love what they are doing.
But then someone says “we need to get this organized better.” So they bring in the efficient organizers, and the life and spirit of the organization is efficencized right out of it.
Of course, organizing is a good thing. The problem is in treating it as the main thing. Or, which is the same thing, sacrificing the things that create the life and spirit of the organization to the perceived need to “have control” and be efficient.
Don’t be an efficient organizer — someone who cares about cost-cutting and efficiency as though they are more important than the mission and goals of the organization. Put the mission first. Be efficient where you can, but don’t let that become the point.
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