My friend Ken Cochrum blogs at www.onleadingwell.com. He doesn’t post often, but when he does they are gems. He recently posted a link to this short interview with Warren Bennis from HBR’s Ideacast: http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2010/07/the-art-of-leading-well.html
Worth listening to for those of you who want to master leading well.
I’m a systems guy. I naturally think about how to organize people and processes to produce consistent outcomes. Systems need to be simple. They should make it easier to produce outcomes. Systems easily become complex and when they do they have the opposite effect. Instead of the system serving people by helping them produce the desired outcome people end up serving the system at the expense of the desired outcome.
Check out Todd Henry’s post on this. (Todd’s blog and podcast are brilliant – well worth following.) He says,
The more structures we have to navigate in order to do our work, the more difficult it is to do our best work. When we are required to resolve the dissonance of complex systems, reporting relationships and accountability structures just in order to get our objectives and check off our direction we will begin to lose our drive to do brilliant work. Over time, this complexity only pulls entire organizations toward systematic mediocrity.
Sometimes you need to ask what system can we build to help us do this better. Sometimes you need ask what system you can demolish in order to free people to do their best work.
I’ve been reading “Hearing God” by Dallas Willard as part of my devotion time. This line jumped out at me this morning:
“It is absolutely essential to the nature of our personal development toward maturity that we venture and be placed at risk, for only risk produces character.”
I was watching Shawshank on my cross country flight home on Thursday. A line at the end got me thinking about essential ingredients again – what are the essential ingredients for developing leaders?
“That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time.”
I don’t know about the “all” part, but I agree with pressure and time. Development, or training, is just change towards a particular focused outcome. Change almost always requires pressure and time. Pressure, because without it we almost always choose the comfort of the way things are. Time, because old habits need to die and new ones need to be formed.
Essential Leadership Ingredient #2 & 3 – Pressure and Time.
One of the examples in Daniel Pink’s book Drive that caught my attention was the candle problem.
Individuals were asked to fix a lighted candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below. They are given a candle, a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks. Solving the problem requires overcoming something called “functional fixedness.” I would just call it creative thinking – putting things together in a new way.
All of that is just the necessary background What caught my attention was an experiment conducted by a Princeton psychologist named Sam Glucksberg. He added a simple twist to the candle experiment – figure it out faster than everyone else and you’ll be rewarded – and discovered that the promised reward made people SLOWER not faster. Apparently creativity and rewards don’t mix.
So if offering rewards hinders creative thinking, how do you motivate yourself and others?
I’ve been craving some fresh guacamole. The last batch of avocados have been sitting on the counter for a week – and still aren’t ripe enough. No avocados, no guacamole. They are an essential ingredient.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we develop leaders for church planting and wondering what are the essential ingredients? That prompted me to pick up a book I haven’t read since college, Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde. Hyde was an active member of the Communist party for 20 years before converting to Catholicism. He wrote the book as a series of lectures to offer the church lessons in leadership he learned while in the party. There are many great insights, but this one speak the question of essential ingredients.
Any communist tutor conducting a course in leadership would insist right at the start that the very foundation and starting point must be dedication.
This is something for others who are concerned with producing leaders to appreciate too. It is of course quite possible to produce leaders of some sort by teaching certain techniques. These are not the sort of leaders the communists are interested in, nor, I suggest, are they the ones the Christian cause requires most today. You can learn certain techniques and so become a leader who leads for himself – if by leadership you simply mean getting to the top whether it be of an organization, a business, a profession or the political system. But the first requirement, if you’re going to produce a leader for cause, is that he should be dedicated.
Essential Leadership Ingredient #1 – Dedication.
Yeah, I’m trying to get your attention with an unexpected title, but it’s true – leaders are loser.
If you don’t believe me, read Genesis 15 or better yet Mark 15. Leaders own no sacred cows, because they’ve already sacrificed the very things they hold most dear. If you find that difficult, I understand. These are the words of a man weighing some big losses. A still small voice is telling me, leaders are losers.
I am sitting in my hotel looking out over the lights of Bracknell. Rolling around in my head are the things I learned today:
• Flying through Chicago in February is a game of chance. I landed in a blanket of snow and made it to my departing gate for London in 15 minutes. John landed and spent an hour on the tarmac waiting for a gate to get off his plane and missed his flight.
• London is very diverse. If you counted ethnicity on your hands at Heathrow you’d run out of digits in just as many seconds.
• Driving on the left side of the road is not so bad – until you come to an intersection. Making a right turn in the left lane in traffic will really mess with your head.
• English pubs were built for short people. I’m 5’ 10” on a good day and I had to duck through every doorway at dinner.
• The people of Kerith church are amazing hosts. I am sitting next to a plate of fresh strawberries and white chocolate as I write. Thank you Simon and gang!
Mostly I learned that you can fly half way around the world and the need of Jesus’ church is the same – capable leaders who are willing to ask what will it take to see lives change and the church flourish, and then willing to go do it.
A friend and colleague posted on humility yesterday. (ouch!)
This morning I was in Hearing God, an excellent but often overlooked or unknown contribution by Dallas Willard, as part of my devotional reading. Again the subject of humility:
“God will gladly give it to us if, trusting and waiting on him to act, we refrain from pretending we are what we know we are not, from presuming a favorable position for ourselves in any respect and from pushing or trying to override the will of others in our context.”
No pretending.
No Presuming.
No Pushing.
(Ouch again!)
I was having a conversation today about change. The subject of values came up and the conversation slowed way down. Leaders love to talk about vision and strategy – where we are going and how we are going to get there. Values don’t get the same billing. If you lead a team, that’s where the hard work and the real payoff is.
The first challenge is figuring out what values are really motivating your team. It’s probably not the 7 things alliterated into the name of your church and posted on your website. It’s also not that hard to find out, you just have to be brave enough to start taking things away, or at least threatening to.
People aren’t afraid of losing things they don’t value. They’ll give them up or give them away easily. Want a Windows PDA? Its yours if I can even find it in the box of abandoned electrontic gadgets. Take away something people value for comfort and they’ll probably complain. Shut off my electricity and I’ll probably whine about the cold shower. Go after something people hold dear and you can just watch the fear rise. My kids, well… you get the picture.
Get a room full of people, even better a church full of people, to have that reaction to a shared value – now you’re going somewhere.