What's Best Next

On Leading Yourself – Bill Hybels

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I always enjoy listening to Bill Hybels, because he clearly has a sincere heart for God and is devoted to helping others follow Christ. Here are some key points from his message right now.

At the heart of leadership is self-leadership. “You are the most difficult person you will ever lead.”

At the heart of great leaders is energy. This is rarely talked about but is critical to leadership. Leaders have great energy and create energy in others. And key to maintaining your energy is leading yourself well.

[Some of my thoughts:] This is interesting. Hybels is talking about a time he sought to identify the six most important contributions he could make in the last six weeks of the year. This is analogous to a projects list if you follow GTD, basically. Here’s what’s interesting: Hybels didn’t list primarily individual contributor tasks, like “do this” and “get that done.” He had things on his list like “energize people to complete this initiative.”

That’s how leaders need to think. When identifying what we need to get done, it’s easy to think in terms of individual tasks. We need to fight against this tendency and think first in terms of mobilizing, equipping, and empowering others. If you keep a project list or task list, for some reason it becomes especially challenging to do this. Something about to-do lists seems to naturally incline us to think of things we need to do ourselves, rather than the things we need to do to equip others to get things done (which is a critical part of leadership).

 

Blogging the Global Leadership Summit

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I’ll be blogging the Global Leadership Summit today and tomorrow. Here’s a quick snapshot of what the Summit is all about:

We’re convinced that leadership is critical to church vitality. A church’s effectiveness in pursuing its God-given mission is largely dependent on the character, devotion, and skill of its leadership core—which can be formal or informal, staff or volunteer, clergy and laity.

The influence and impact of the church is felt most fully when Christ-centered leaders are at the forefront of establishing and growing well-led local churches and organizations…key reasons why The Global Leadership Summit exists.

The church is at its best, as God’s love and care inevitably spills out into our neighborhoods, towns and cities through acts of love, justice, mercy, service, and restoration.

And here are the speakers up this morning:

  • Bill Hybels
  • Condoleeza Rice
  • Jim Collins
One of the core purposes of a blog is to point and add. So here’s the approach I think I’ll take. I’ll summarize the key points and/or the things that most stand out to me during each message, and then do a post or something on my thoughts on the message. I’ll pry do that throughout my summaries as well.

Here's How I've Felt the Last Few Months…

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I’m sorry for being sparse in posting the last few months. If you haven’t guessed, it’s been because of the book. Winston Churchill sums up how I’ve felt the last few months (last year?):

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

I think this book skipped the “toy and amusement phase,” and that I’ve been in that tyrant phase for perhaps the whole time!

I had an interesting post written up on what has taken so long, but maybe I’ll save that for later. Several times I thought “oh, it’s done,” because of the length, but it still wasn’t what I wanted it to be. One piece of good news is that early on I suppose you could say I was struggling with writer’s block (though Seth Godin says it doesn’t exist!), and so I took the standard advice: just write anything, and you can always revise it and cut it back later. So that’s what I did, and I ended up writing a lot. The process of getting things cut back, however, was super challenging as a result (which is not what the conventional wisdom said would happen!), and I have actually taken out something like the equivalent of 4 books from this. For example, I have one short book almost ready to go on a Christian view of working in your strengths (and how to view our weaknesses). My priority, to be sure, has been this book, though hopefully this is one benefit that has come out of this process.

I plan, Lord willing, on writing many books in the future, and the whole process of writing this book (and all the writing that I ended up doing) will benefit that aim and make future books go much faster.

In the meantime, I’m sorry for the delay and, as Churchill would say, I’m just about to kill the beast. Can’t wait. It’s been fun, but totally brutal as well. The challenges will be worth it if it helps any of you be more effective in the important work you do every day, whether you are a stay-at-home mom or corporate executive. I believe the things we do matter immensely — both big and small, in all areas of life — and that God delights in them if we do them for his glory. I want to help you do them better, and with less stress and more joy, both where you are and in the service of fighting large global problems and reaching the nations.

Last, a word on missions. There is a relationship between our productivity in all realms of life and the advance of the gospel. We don’t need to and shouldn’t seek to justify all that we do simply on the basis of its evangelistic usefulness. Work matters in itself, and our ultimate motive in all things should be love for others and the glory of God. Yet, while the things we do matter in themselves, it is true that they are also a supporting testimony to the gospel and a means by which it naturally spreads. I don’t think small, and so I hope this book can also have the effect of helping equip the church in the task of putting a large dent in the Great Commission. I think a robust doctrine of work is key to reaching the nations, which means that part of the key to finishing the Great Commission is actually affirming that all work matters, not just evangelism and direct missions, and that we should seek to do all we do with excellence, creativity, and competence. And that learning how to work is key to doing everything we do more effectively.

I hope the book will help you immensely (and encourage you!), and keep me in your prayers!

In the meantime, I’m going to try to get back to regular blogging even as I finish up, and I’ll be blogging the Global Leadership Summit tomorrow and Friday.

You Probably Need to Hire More People Than You Think

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My wife and I were talking about gardening the other day. We had driven by some nice flowers that the city we were in had planted and was watering, and my wife commented on how planting those flowers (and others throughout the city) meant they also had to have people to take care of them. Someone needed to water them, obviously, but also do many other things–plant them initially, keep them weeded (an ongoing thing, apparently), fertilize them if desired, and so forth.

I thought that was interesting, because I’ve always taken those nice flower displays for granted. Turns out my wife had a job in college taking care of the flowers on our campus, so she knows all about it.

Which leads to the most interesting thing for me: It took a team of 7 people to keep the flowers planted, watered, weeded, fertilized, and in order on our campus. The university we went to had about 15,000 people, so the campus wasn’t super small, but it wasn’t incredibly large, either.

The reason this is interesting to me is because I’m just the type of person who would have been crazy enough to put “water flowers” in my repeating task list every other day and “fertilize flowers” every 6 weeks and think he could take care of the flowers all by himself. But in reality, it took a team of seven people.

I know that the standard notion is that most organizations have too many people. Or, that seems to be the standard notion at least among some consultants and executives. My thinking is the opposite of this, especially when it comes to ministries.

Caring for the flowers on a college campus, or for a city, is super important. If it takes seven people simply to do that, how much more should ministries make sure they have enough people devoted to their all-important task of teaching and spreading biblical truth?

Seven people for an internet team, for example, probably sounds like a lot for most ministries. But if my college that served 15,000 students had seven people taking care of its flowers, how much more important do you think it is for a ministry that serves 3 million people a month (or many more) to have a team of 7 expert, knowledgable people tend to its website and make it the best it can possibly be?

And so forth with every other area of ministry.

Enough with overworking people, or skimping on having the necessary people for the work of the ministry. If this is the most important work in the world, let’s act like it.

“But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more cloth you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30).

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38).

An Evening on Gospel-Centered Productivity in Orange County

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For those in the Orange County area next week, I’ll be speaking at Sovereign Grace Church on gospel-centered productivity on Thursday night, June 7. I’ll be giving two messages:

  • Why We Need to Think Theologically About the Practical for the Sake of Love
  • Overcoming the Greatest Challenges Christians Face in the Marketplace
It would be great to see you there, and also feel free to bring your hardest questions. You can find out more details and RSVP (it’s free) on their site.
(I’ll also be speaking at the Biola Digital Ministry Conference next week as well — would be great to see anyone there also.)

And the Greatest Enemy of Creativity and Innovation Is…

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Efficiency.

Patrick Lencioni makes the case very well in his article, The Enemy of Creativity and Innovation. Here’s a great part:

I’ve become convinced that the only way to be really creative and innovative in life is to be joyfully inefficient….

Efficiency requires that we subdue our passion and allow it to be constrained by principles of logic and convention. Innovation and creativity require us to toss aside logic and convention, even without the near-term promise of a payoff. Embracing both at the same time seems to me to be a recipe for stress, dissonance and mediocrity, and yet, that is exactly what so many organizations—or better yet—leaders, do.

They exhort their employees to utilize their resources wisely and to avoid waste and redundancy, which makes perfect sense. They also exhort them to be ever-vigilant about finding new and better products or processes, which also makes sense. And yet, combining these two perfectly sensible exhortations makes no sense at all, and only encourages rational, responsible people to find a middle ground, something that is decidedly neither efficient nor innovative.

This is why I don’t talk about efficiency a ton. It matters and has its place. But my goal is effectiveness, and often times the greatest path to effectiveness is quite inefficient.

More on this in my book.

The Job of Top Management is Not to Sit in Judgment on New Ideas

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I’ve seen this happen, and it’s not pretty. It’s a waste and it’s a tragedy. Peter Drucker:

“Professional” management today sees itself often in the role of a judge who says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to ideas as they come up…A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgment will inevitably veto the new idea. It is always “impractical.”

 

Managing Your Weaknesses

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A few thoughts:

1. Avoid working in your weaknesses if at all possible.

2. If you can’t, then seek to become competent in your areas of weakness. You won’t become extraordinary in areas of weakness, but competence is sufficient.

3. Continue to spend the most time sharpening and harnessing your strengths. This is where your contribution will shine. As long as you are competent in your weaknesses, they won’t detract and your strengths will stand out and make an extraordinary contribution.

An example (a slightly risky one since I’m not huge into basketball, but you will get the point): Let’s say you are a basketball player and you are great at making baskets but pretty bad at getting rebounds. You need to become solid at getting rebounds when they come your way, so you don’t do harm. But your focus should be on putting yourself in a position to take shots, not get rebounds, if that’s where you make an incredible contribution.

And here’s an example of avoiding your weaknesses altogether: if you are a great quarterback, it doesn’t matter if you are terrible at defense. Don’t play defense. This is so obvious as to be completely undisputed.

Why, then, do we feel like there is some sort of virtue in focusing on our weaknesses in our work?

Seek to contribute where you can make the greatest contribution.