I spent today First Alliance Church participating the 2008 Leadership Summit (beamed in via satellite). It was a really worthwhile first day, and if you’re a leader in any capacity, my notes from today may help you understand new facets to leadership. These notes can’t capture the vibrancy of the event, so if these notes interest you, I’d encourage you to check it out for next year – it’s broadcast to 117 churches world-wide. This is my second time attending this event, and every year I leave it feeling recharged.
These notes are my take-away from each of the speakers, not necessarily my own thoughts – though I can’t think of anything that I disagreed with.
The High Drama of Decision Making – Bill Hybles
- Leaderships’ highest usage is the furthering of God’s kingdom.
- Leadership is all about making decisions, and some decisions have very high stakes
- Leaders need a decision-making process that they implement whenever it’s time to make a decision
- Christian leaders should look to the bible first and foremost as a guideline for decision making
- What would smart advisors suggest I do? Proverbs 11:14: “In the abundance of counsellors there is much wisdom.” Advice from people will often conflict though – as a leader you must sort through the advice
- P/G/E/ Principle: Pain, Gain, Experience. What kind of pain have your past decisions caused? What sorts of gains have your past decisions resulted in? How has the experience of the results of your decisions impact you?
- Is there a prompting of the Holy Spirit in your decision making process?
- When you’re heading in the right direction, there will be an exhilaration of spirit
- Sometimes Hybles will make a “trial decision” – he tests out how the decision feels
- Leaders have to take responsibility for their decisions. If the decision turns out well, you thank God, your advisors, everyone around you. If the decision turns our poorly, you don’t blame anyone. You bear the consequences, you don’t point fingers, you admit that you got it wrong
- Taking responsibility for our decisions keeps the sharp edge on our learning process as leaders
- Some leader compress the above decision making processes into micro-sized bits of wisdom, a self-created proverb
- Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to destroy my enemy is to turn him into my friend.” The Christian application of this axiom is to build bridges with those who have wronged you
- Bob Galvin, Motorola Corp: “Create motion for motion’s sake”. Action is better than inaction. When people are moving, they often move onto a better place
- Colin Powell and the Powell Principles: “Check your ego at the door.” “Promote a clash of ideas.” “Reward your best performers, get rid of non-performers.”
- As a leader, do I reflect often enough about my own leadership and my leadership problems such that I have my own leadership axioms?
- Bill Hybles: “Vision leads.” “All I have to do is get the right people around the table.” “Facts are your friends.”
- Willow Creek did a survey called REVEAL that allows them to learn facts about their congregation. These facts helped them shape their decision making process
- Being misunderstood is sometimes the price of being a leader
- Bill Hybles Axiom: “When something feels funky, engage.” When a problem in the church is brewing, do not believe the lie that unattended problems go away
- Bill Hybles Axiom: “Leaders call fouls.” When something happens in a meeting you’re leading that crosses the line, the leader has to challenge the inappropriate behaviour. Leaders also have to call fouls on themselves and their own behaviour
- Bill Hybles Axiom: “Take a flyer.” Take a risk. Ask God to rock our world, and He will
- Bill Hybles Axiom: “This is church.” Relating to others, sharing meals together, growing together – this is church. Celebrating together, baptism, helping raise each other’s children – this is church. Comforting those who have lots, dealing with grief – this is church
- You will never know life fully until you are uncompromisingly devoted to Christ
Gary Haugen, Just Courage: Charging The Darkness
- Gary Haugen was a Department of Justice investigator, now he leads International Justice Ministry (IJM)
- All leaders want their leadership to matter
- What is the leadership that matters to God? Leadership that involves priorities that matter to God. Not everything that we’re interested in really matters to God
- What is God truly passionate about? For the world, and for justice
- God’s passion for the world: the incarnation of Jesus was motivated by God’s love for the whole world
- What’s the hardest thing for people to believe about the Christian faith? That God is good
- We’re the plan for showing the world that God loves it. When we show up to provide shelter for someone, they see the body of Christ acting
- Injustice in the bible is a particular type of sin; it’s about the abuse of power. Taking from other things that God intended for them: their life, their dignity, their freedom.
- He told the story of David, a young man who was walking down the street when local police, who were drinking at a bar, stole what little money he had to pay their bill. They let him go and as he was leaving the area they shot him three times. He made it to a hospital, had to have his arm amputated, and when the police heard he was still alive, they came and arrested him, throwing him into jail
- In the developing world, between 60 and 80% of the prisoners have never been charged with a crime
- There are about 27 million people in the world living in slavery, 2 million children are held in forced prostitution
- If you want your leadership to matter, lead in the things that matter to God. If you don’t care about the things that matter to God, it may be that God doesn’t matter to you
- Leading easy, safe things matters less than leading when the task is hard
- How do we lead when the task seems hopeless? Despair comes from when we focus on ourselves. If we re-centre our focus on God, he is the center of hope
- He told the story of the disciples and the feeding of the 5000. Jesus said “Feed the people”. The disciples look at their own resources and said “We can’t”. Jesus said “Show me what you do have”, and Jesus took those resources and worked a miracle
- In the case of David, IJM worked to free David, and the five police officers are in jail. David is now in school taking courses on legal advocacy
- The work and the miracle will always be Gods, we’re only called to give what we have
- How do we lead when the task seems scary? IJM staff members have endured death threats and great violence (kidnapped, mugged, attacked)
- We lead people by reminding everyone that Jesus did not come to make us safe, Jesus came to make us brave
- Don’t go on the trip and miss the adventure
- We need to follow God beyond what we can control, and then we’ll experience God’s power. We need to pursue a calling where we actually need God
- What are the tools of leadership when the calling of God is hard?
- Choosing not to be safe
- Choosing to pursue deep spiritual health. Hopeless, scary, hard things requires deeply rooted spiritual health
- Choosing to pursue excellence when the task is hard. Somehow Christians have a Christian-adjusted scale of mediocrity. We need to re-set the bar for excellence.
- Choosing to seize the joy when the task is hard. The first thing to disappear when spiritual health flounders is laughter
- Jesus didn’t lack seriousness in his devotion to the kingdom of God, but his presence was described as the pure joy. Jesus was accused of being a drunk and a glutton because he was so joyful
- Work hard, suffer hard, play hard, laugh hard
- We need to get out of our cul-de-sacs of triviality and small fears
- The power of the gospel is going into the darkest parts of our world
- In a world of suffering, why are some of us given so much? He told a story about how as a young man he’d be working out in a gym and he’d look at the body builders, with all their massive strength, and realize that all that power is really only good for posing…or maybe opening a jam jar in the kitchen. As Christians with resources, we shouldn’t be posers – we should do something with what we’ve been given
Bill George, Finding Your True North: The Spirituality of Authentic Leadership
- Former CEO of Medtronic, Professor at Harvard Business School
- Leadership is a gift that needs to be developed
- We were born to make manifest the glory of God – all among us are children of God
- Peter Drucker said “Leadership is not money, fame and power. Leadership is responsibility”
- In the 20th century, leadership was about command and control: getting people to follow you
- In the 21st century, leadership is about four words: aligned, empowered, serving, collaboration
- “Follow your compass, not your clock”
- There are six things that leaders must do
- Understanding the purpose of your leadership
- Gain self-awareness through feedback from people in your group or organization
- Have good values
- Follow your motivating capabilities; lead from your strengths
- Building a support team around you
- Lead an integrated life. Be the same person in all environments
- Leadership is not about having power over other people, it’s about empowering people
- When you only have a few hours left in your life, and someone asks you what you did to make the world a better place, what will you tell them?
- When leaders fail it’s often because they fail to lead themselves – they fail to be grounded, they get caught up in the world (money, power, fame)
- Shooting star leaders put everything into their work, but they don’t get involved in the community, they have no family life, etc.
Bill Hybles Interviews Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach For America
- Teach for America gives college graduates the opportunity to give up two years of their lives to teach in low-income schools – sort of like the Peace Corps for a new generation
- Great leaders have something that burns inside them
- Teach for America’s vision is that one day every child in America will have the opportunity for an excellent education
- She didn’t set up to become a leader
- Teach For America has an “insanely” aggressive recruiting policy
- They look for people that have more leadership skills than teaching skills
- In Washington DC, one Teach for America teacher took the students from the 13th percentile against the national average to the 90th percentile
- My take-away from this session is that most of what I thought I knew about why students under-perform in school was completely incorrect. I also found myself getting rather weepy-eyed at many parts of the interview – I’ve always known I have a real heart for educating others, but I didn’t realize how impacted I would be by hear about the successes they have in bringing children to a new level of education and understanding
John Burke, Leading in New Cultural Realities [Part 1]
- Gateway church has signs up that says “No perfect people allowed”
- 1st Corinthians 3:6
- We don’t have the responsibility to cause change in order people, we simply have to water and tend the soil
- Many leaders don’t want to get their hands dirty working with the soil
- Does the soil we’re tending allow for questions and struggles?
- He described several stories about people in complex situations that the typical church would find “messy” (hard to deal with): like a sexually active atheist drunk-driver, three years later this man is a devoted Christ-follower
- “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, it’s the sick.” Jesus came for the messy, broken people who recognize they need God’s help
- If we’re Christian leaders but our hands aren’t dirty with the mess soil of the people we serve?
- Are we leading more like Jesus, or more like the Pharisees?
- We need to cultivate the soil with grace-giving acceptance. Grace is where people grow the best
- The world doesn’t naturally do grace, the world does law
- Grace says come as you are, God will welcome you in. God’s grace heals and restores
- Many people never experience grace from Christians. Are we willing to look at people through the eyes of grace?
- Grace makes beauty out of mess, ugly things…but grace gets leeched out of the soil of this world
- Churches can make it difficult for the emerging culture around us to move toward the church
- The perception that the church hates gay people creates huge barriers to grace – the way the church answers this question either opens the doors or slams them shut to people
- When he was teaching in Kazakhstan he would often be asked what the church thought about Mohamed. In every culture there are barriers to grace
- Leaders must cultivate the soil with authentic, confessing community
- The soil that involves growth involves re-connection with God and with others
- When we model and teach grace, others being to see that and experience that
- Our job isn’t to fix, change or grow people – that’s God’s job
- Apart from God, we can do nothing. If we remain in God we will accomplish many things. Stay connected, “fruit happens”
- Soul Revolution.net has stories from people who participated in an experiment where people would spend 60 days radically focused on communicating with God and staying in Gods will on an hourly basis
Efrem Smith, Leading in New Cultural Realities [Part 2]
- We live in a multi-cultural, multi-ethic, multi-racial, technological world – this is the soil we grow up in
- 1 in 19 children in North America are children of mixed race – there’s a generation that will not live by the rigid race labels of the past
- 1st John chapter 4
- How do we engage culture for kingdom purposes?
- There can be no beloved community without beloved leaders
- A faith leader must be one that loves and is loved simultaneously
- “When Jesus comes back, that’s ultimate justice, but until then it’s just us.” – Pastor in Colorado
- If you can’t love across race, class, urban, suburban, you can’t be a leader today
- God’s in the business of recruiting under-qualified people
- The church needs to go to the places where churches are; where there are hurting people
- 1st John 4:14
- We must be confessing leaders – we must admit our mistakes as leaders, taking responsibility
- The church can be one of the places that makes the erroneous argument that people only want to go to church with people of like race, like-minded, and similar life stories
- Churches need to look at what caused racially-divided churches in the first place
- Perfection can come through pruning
- We must take an organic approach – we must create places where people of diverse communities can find reconciliation and common ground
- Sometimes it must be programmatic – they created a hip-hop program to reach a specific group of people