Leadership

Recharge, Reinvent, or Resign - Part Two Leaders in every generation have faced challenges. In the early days of the Jesus movement, church leaders were thrown to the lions (literally!) by Roman emperors. In modern times, leaders have navigated civil wars, civil rights, and economic depressions and recessions. Those are the large, public challenges. Then there's the personal ones: depression, discouragement, stress, critics, and fatigue. As I survey the leadership landscape at the end of 2021, I believe it is the most challenging extended season of my 30+ years of leading organizations. I will be addressing three ways a leader can approach this season of life and leadership. Each of them are equally valid, depending on your situation and the needs of your organization. If we lead long enough, we will likely experience all three. Click here to read the first post. Reinvent Your Leadership I love our country for...

Recharge, Reinvent, or Resign - Part One Leaders in every generation have faced challenges. In the early days of the Jesus movement, church leaders were thrown to the lions (literally!) by Roman emperors. In modern times, leaders have navigated civil wars, civil rights, and economic depressions and recessions. Those are the large, public challenges. Then there's the personal ones: depression, discouragement, stress, critics, and fatigue. As I survey the leadership landscape at the end of 2021, I believe it is the most challenging extended season of my 30+ years of leading organizations. Starting with this post, I want to address three ways a leader can approach this season of life and leadership. Each of them are equally valid, depending on your situation and the needs of your organization. If we lead long enough, we will likely experience all three. Recharge Your Leadership Here comes what I know will be an...

As senior leaders, we are responsible for shepherding the overall health and wellbeing of our organizations and teams. To do so effectively, we must have access to good information. Without good information to guide our decisions, it's easy to pursue priorities and projects that may actually be detrimental to the health and wellbeing of our organization. At lower levels of leadership, this access to good information is often first-hand -- it's right there in front of us. If you lead a single team, you can assess fairly quickly how that team (and individual team members) are doing. But as you move up the leadership level, your access to first-hand information becomes less and less. You become more dependent on others to provide both the information itself and the interpretation of that information. But all information and its subsequent interpretations aren't equal. While the information may be accurate, how it is...

In terms of finances, I wish I would have learned the lesson of compound interest when I was twenty-five years old. But, as with many things, it's better to learn the lesson later than not at all. Compound interest is when the interest earned on an investment is added back to the principal balance. This results in a larger balance, which then earns more interest. Here's an example from Forbes Magazine: "Let’s say you have $1,000 in a savings account that earns 5% in annual interest. In year one, you’d earn $50, giving you a new balance of $1,050. In year two, you would earn 5% on the larger balance of $1,050, which is $52.50—giving you a new balance of $1,102.50 at the end of year two." As the article goes on to point out, "The more frequently interest is compounded, the more rapidly your principal balance grows." Good leaders...

For some crazy reason, leaders in other organizations will contact me for advice. I usually chalk it up to desperation or having exhausted all other options. My price is pretty reasonable - it's the price of a cup of coffee. Since I've been leading organizations for over thirty years, one of the topics they often want to discuss is organizational change. What to change? How to change? Should they even change at all? To quote Farmer's Insurance, "I know a thing or two, because I've seen a thing or two." Often it is church leaders who want to sit down and talk. They love their church and want to see it succeed. In many cases, it's a volunteer who has devoted years of time, energy, and dollars to the cause. The last thing they want to see is their church decline, or even close down. Sometimes it is a pastor...