Leadershp Thoughts

The role of a leader is somewhat akin to the general practitioner n medicine.  Rather than concentrating most of their time on one area of leadership activity and becoming extremely proficient in it, the average leader is required to do a great many things fairly well.

Upon graduating from our various school studies, it is wise to remember that commencement is just that, it is a beginning, not an end.  Remember that sill increases the more you use a tool.  Do your best from the beginning, but do not consider yourself a finished product. You've only just begun!

In recent years we seem to have overlooked modesty.  We should admit that we are novices in many areas and need wise counsel and support of those who have been in the business for a while.  We need to remember that just as submission to authority is a two-way street, mentoring needs to go in two directions: leader to people in areas in which they are specially equipped; people to leader in areas where members of your team have gained expertise through years of priceless experience.  Even when you have become a seasoned veteran, maintain an attitude of an amateur willing to learn from the marvelously gifted team members that surround you.

Whatever you do should not be done casually or haphazardly.  Whatever is worth doing at all is worthy of your best effort.

Rather than impressing people with your giftedness, remember two basic factors that will hold you in high esteem with your team.

First, love your people extravagantly.  If they are convinced from your tangible performance that you genuinely loves them, it is often easy for them to forgive many of your inadequacies.  This kind of love evidences itself in the degree of sensitivity you demonstrate for them.  It surfaces in your ability to spend time with them and really enjoy them s people, not as potential means for accomplishing your programs.  It comes to light more dramatically as your people find that you are quick to assume the blame for something that goes askew, humbly admitting that you do not have all the answers, seeking and honouring their opinions, hurts with them when hey hurt, and is quick to ask their forgiveness if you feel that you have failed them.  Such a leader does not come into the team environment exuding the impression that they know it all.  You need to come in knowing that God has given everyone a gift and that the accumulated giftedness, working in harmony together, is what makes up the genius of your team. "I am humbled that God has called me to a position of leadership among such a superior group of people.  I'll share what I know. You share what you know. Together we'll discover what we need to be and do.  Together we'll work to bring about what we want to accomplish through this team."

Secondly, there are a great number of leadership tools out there for you to use.  Personally find the material that deals with the spiritual, emotional,  and mental support system you will need to succeed.

We will get tired serving, but we will never tire of serving.  In our emotional roller coaster of life, we will feel inadequate until we reach a level we determine is success.  Until then, along with unrealistic expectations put on us from others may tempt us to put inordinate amount of time and effort into your work.  As a result, for those with families in particular, you may neglect those very people that are the most important to you.  Then there are others who spend so much time with their families that they perform not enough service to their work.  Both extremes of ambition and indifference must be avoided if a person is to succeed in leadership.

We are called to feed, lead and serve a group of people making up our team.  We look for ordinary people called upon to do extraordinary things.  Most of the time we dread giving out specifics to a job, we would rather go through a list of character traits and that's because it is more important to us what a team player is than what they are able to do.


http://youtu.be/3sDgIQJlGYg

The Ideal Leadership Plan

Allowing for great creativity because God allows that in our lives, we should all have a very unique leadership plan.

Some of us who work with managers, supervisors and team leaders should be assigned to a few standing committees or project teams - reporting back to the greater team body.

Structure of the project teams need to be such that it encourages greater discovery and research at the same time freeing them to engage actively in the work.

The leadership of this team needs to have a road map that they trust in order to allow for such open creativity - and comfortable with their own skin to all small leaders to begin to grow and exercise.

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Leadership Task - Leading

Can we assume that everyone knows that leadership has nothing to do with being a dictator. 

Lose the haughty, superior or overbearing attitude.

Has nothing to do with whipping people from behind, urging them to get or keep going.

Rather, leadership, is about going out in front, setting the pace and inviting your team to follow you.

Also careful not to get to far ahead, you may discover when you look back that no one is following you.

The other end of the spectrum is the indecisive leadership style, which is not really leadership at all. This could be because you have left the discipline of planning behind and opted to go for a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants philosophy.

So instead of being out front, leading, you lag behind, hoping your team will not move ahead too rapidly.  Worse than that, you may actually serve as brakes when your team wants to put their dreams into action.

What do you think when you leave leadership to others?  Probably go on paths not intended for your team or even giant circles - spinning your wheels rather than progressing.

The importance of effective relationships

It is my conviction that the most of the trouble experienced by a leader in their organization is not based on leadership but relationships.

If a leader is able to form effective, meaningful relationships with the people with whom they come in contact, in most cases, they will succeed in the organization. 

If they have severe relational deficiencies, they are likely to become a casualty to the organization and end up in some other profession. 

It would be extremely helpful if young leaders were to take whatever tests are necessary to see if relational deficiencies exist in their lives.  If they do exist, then the person should seek professional counseling to help them work out their difficulties or they should abandon their plans for a leadership position.


http://youtu.be/Z_Q46sDa4Nc


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The principle of mutual submission

An organizational structure resolves around some type of leadership hierarchical system.

The built in principle that applies to all those in leadership positions should be that of mutual submission.

There are some individuals who feel that they can do everything better than the next person, even when the next person is being paid to do that job specifically.  That usually happens to someone who has more educational training and they imagine that they have all the answers.  They believe that it is appropriate for them to impose those answers on everyone else, and goes about doing so with a grim determination.  Of course with a tad of humility, they would realize they are not the possessors of all wisdom.

God gave our communities a plurality of wise leaders.  A wise leader will realize that one of them should be discipling them.  Brighter still, a wise leader will keep themselves from clashing with older leaders, asking them to mull over the ideas and consider their wisdom.  Then when new ways of doing things are presented to the community they will be backed by a united front.

Pressure on the Leader

Let's face it - we all in a culture that screams at us to succeed.

Just recently I took a huge pay cut and by huge a 50% drop in pay in order to become the Executive Director of a very small start up ministry.  I can tell you that all my friends, all my colleagues, my wife, (not my kids though) and my partnership connections think that I am crazy and are offering me jobs because they think I have made a huge mistake. 

That is one kind of pressure as life has become exceedingly complex.  The work ethic seems to have been replaced by a corporate success syndrome that measures a person's worth in terms of prestige, promotion, wealth, and appearance.

Men, generally speaking, find themselves identifying their core being with their job and not with their family and the measure of their worth, not by the kind of husband and father they are, but by how well they do at work.

Here I give kudos to my wife - as my life was spiralling out of control, as I was enjoying building up my core identity through my giftedness, I was missing out of my family and my wife identified the problem quickly.  Before my daughter reached her seventh month, I had made huge and drastic changes in my life to ensure I was home every night (planned possibilities) and spent their every waking hour with them - playing or reading.

The problem if not arrested, is that the home is seen as an interlude between periods of work.  In desperation to succeed, we tend to spend more hours at work and not at home. 

The problem, is of course, that everyone wants you to succeed.  Believe it or not, your wife does want to see you promoted, you want to succeed so that your giftedness is recognized, your management team wants you to succeed because you make them look good, your company wants you to succeed so they can give favourable reports to the Board etc. etc.

Here is what I found - the voices, coming from all directions, are what kills us at the end of the day.  Each voice has a different expectation.  Expectations not met meet with disapproval, that means no recognition and it ultimately means you have failed.  Even though you most likely have only one direct line of responsibility to a senior person above you, your team, your other teams, your other partnering organization, even your volunteer places of service - have this voice communicating their expectations to you all the time and you feel you have to report to six different people all at the same time and all wanting something different.  At the height of my corporate climb I had a report for my direct superior, a report for a number of Board members, a report for a functioning committee from the Board and senior management team, a report for my own team on how well we were engaging with our goals, a report for major donors and a report for another Board that had loose requirements from my position.  Each report was entirely different than the other and definition of terms were different - the amount of work to obtain the numbers and do the analysis of each report consumed the activity of four staff, full-time, two weeks out of the 3 month period between meetings - and can you imagine how we also were able to do the job we were paid to do.

The solutions - we cannot be "all things to all men."  If you are married, try being the best you can be for your spouse.  Set up some realistic boundaries that determine what are the maximum number of nights a week you can miss dinner or how many nights a year you can travel away from home - those kind of flexible numbers keep control in the spouse who is adjusting and they will determine when and where they will make the sacrifices to be home with the family.

That is of course if family is still holding dear to your hearts today.

What does a leader look like?

With the loss of hierarchy in the workplace and with emphasis being placed on leadership as servanthood, everyone is deemed a leader and everyone is deemed a servant.

Sometimes we probably go to far in extremes where the position of the leader is almost indistinguishable from those who are without major responsibility.

Somewhere along the way, we need to introduce the acting and dressing with a certain degree of decorum and dignity.

Principal LeadershipTools

Have you ever complained to your dentist about the high cost of dentistry.  I have, only because I no longer have benefits.  When you do, be prepared to walk through the entire office where they will outline in detail the cost of each piece of equipment and the potential replacement time and cost as well.

Leaders require tools too, but unlike dentistry, there is no where to recoup the costs.

I remember buying gift cards to bookstores for my friends as they took on leadership roles in their lives.  Never seen so much excitement.  I just recently left the employ of a university and was absolutely amazed that the leadership team pitched in and gave me a gift card for the university bookstore.  Amazed because I thought that was a bit out of style - but am I ever glad they didn't think so.

My library is amazing - I still have books from when I was a child, books that were on my dad's shelf, books from the homes of those who found themselves downsizing in the later years of their life, books from university, my kids books from university, and books from Christian organizations. The temptation that seizes me when I walk into a bookstore today is incredible - this man of steel - and recovering bookaholic, should come across a book on sale - even in the library - becomes a fool in love.

Nowadays, I keep less and give more away.  Not sure if that is making a statement to the lack of theological depth in most books, or the absolute lack of contemporary exposure in others, but I am finding more less attractive.  So I change my strategy and take out the truths I need give the books away to help others in their journey.

With the desire for a great book to read, I am finding that my university librarian is an amazing fount of information and expertise - find one and use them.  The university bookstore I mentioned above always had a book ready for me to buy - find a great bookstore manager.  Talk to leaders that you admire, ask them what they are reading and would that be a book they would recommend or another and why - go find a leader you want to follow.

The greatest leadership book of all time is the Bible.  Since most of us are amateurs, we need a good contemporary translation and access to quite a few more and at least some access to the original language so that we are able to parlay our modern day parables without going to far astray.  If you do not know where to go from here - find someone who has a very open mind themselves and will help you to a study Bible and a few more specific commentaries that deal primarily with leadership issues.

 History is a great source of material.  My favourite happens to be books on war.  I like strategy and can relate very quickly to war plans, and have found myself engaging a few of them, philosophically of course, and succeeding.

Leadership theology are quite in-depth studies on what leadership looks like covering as many facets of leadership that you can imagine - providing breadth, but digging deep to find truths that are secure enough to build upon its foundation as you begin your own journey into building a case for what leadership really is.

Biographies cover a story of a leader's life that you would never see as clearly as when reading a book.  The movie does not cut it.

Pull together a group of "leaders" for a time of training, mentoring, encouraging, building, holding each other accountable in area like ethics etc.  It will make a difference.

Practice your leadership skills on kids.  Could be your own, join your church Sunday School program or mid-week activities, scouts or guides etc.  If you can't teach kids, chances are you are boring the brains out of the adults who are too kind to tell you so.

Look to missions as amazing models of leadership activity.  I just finished a book on the Jesuits.  Again, movies (just finished watching Behind the Iron Mask), wouldn't have helped me understand them well, but this book was an amazing articulation of what they did right - those things were incredible and I want to do incredible things - Jesuits lead the way.

Administration, the anvil of every ENFP (Myers Briggs) and yet I need to know how to organize my life, accomplish my tasks, organize my team, enlist and motivate others to carry out the work of our purpose.

Music, as simple as a phone call to a friend, actually a Skype call, and I heard music in the background.  My soul absolute sucked it up - and that was over Skype.  I hit myself silly, and as soon as I could, I put on my music.  Don't let the urgency of the day stop us from refuelling our soul for a leadership soul gives away constantly.

What are other leaders doing?  Sometimes it matters, sometimes not - but why re-invent the wheel we can take a roughly hewn one and replace it with wood , replace that with iron, replace that with steel and then cover it with rubber?  Just because someone came up with the idea to create a wheel out of animal bones and wrote a book about it - don't jump on bandwagons that do not have a proven track record over a considerable time period for you my find that they get brittle quickly and do not have any staying power.