2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Patrick Lencioni

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child. To learn more about OCC click here...)

The Ideal Team Player

Thirteen years ago I spoke at Willow for the first time and for me that was a mind-blowing experience.  I talked about my book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” and how to take any group of people and make them a team.

It begged the question: are some people better at that than others?  As it turns out I did know the answer to that question but I wasn’t aware of it.  Years before I worked in a department that used core values based on Jim Collins’ book.  One of the things we help our clients with is identifying their core values.  Often they would say, “We’ll use those, too.” But we thought they were lazy and encouraged them to make their own values.  Then we realized those values were universal and were actually the descriptor of a person who can overcome the dysfunctions of a team.

We started to share these values with clients.  A few years later I was encouraged to write a book based on these values and I’m shocked that it’s selling more than any book I’ve written.  There’s something in it that seems to have struck a nerve with managers. 

It’s the overlap of the three values that makes it special.

Three virtues—

HUMBLE—means you’re more interested in others than yourself; not arrogant or ego-driven.  Sometimes people simply lack self confidence which is really an abomination of humility.  Someone who denies their skills tends not to passionately argue for what is right.  C.S. Lewis “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”

HUNGER—someone who has strong work ethic, hate the idea of being a slacker, will do whatever necessary to get the job done.

SMART—not intellectual smarts it’s about people smarts or common sense around people. People who are good at practicing emotional intelligence and can adjust their behavior to that of others. 

What do you do with this model?  First you need to know how to identify people on your team and yourself who have these qualities.  Start by looking at the possible permutations.

Humble but lack hunger and smarts = pawn—not very effective on a team; not dependable on a team; need our prayers but not to be invited on our teams

Hungry but not humble or smart = bulldozer—can get something done and leave a trail of dead bodies behind them

Smart but not humble or hungry = charmer—funny, joking, but don’t get anything done

Two qualities out of three are not enough and can create serious problems in organizations; however, no one is perfect and we all struggle.  We’re talking about people who exhibit over time a serious lack of these qualities.

Humble & Hungry but not smart = Accidental Mess-Maker—always need to make excuses for them; ruffle feathers; George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life” was in this category (blurting out things)

Humble & Smarts but not hungry = Lovable Slacker—tend to survive for a long time; they just don’t want to work; will do just enough work to keep you from doing something about them; frustrates the people who work really hard

Smarts & Hungry but not humble = Skillful Politician—ambitious and hard-driving and know how to LOOK humble; most dangerous and hardest to spot; like Al Pacino in “The Godfather”; sometimes in church it’s harder to deal with them because we don’t want to be unkind

What do you do with this?  Use it to develop your people.  Go to the people on your team and discuss what they might lack.  Had people in the group rate their qualities from first to last then go into a room with others with the same deficiency and brainstorm about what to do about the deficiency. 

Next step—help them get better—when we develop our people we have to have the courage to talk to them and let them know and to constantly remind them.  They will either improve or they will opt out on their own.  Either of those is more dignified than letting people stay and be miserable. 

Let’s talk about hiring.  If you ask most people, they want to hire team players.  Somehow there’s a disconnect between that desire and what actually happens.  The first thing we have to do is not over-emphasize technical skills.  We need to look for hungry, humble, and smart.  We tend to focus on that which is measurable and verifiable but behavior should always rise to the top. 

The interview process is broken. Get people out of the office to see them in a regular world environment and watch how they deal with human beings.  Tells the story of a ministry that made a bad hire and the person who hired said, “I should have taken her shopping.”  Also, ask questions more than once.  The “Law and Order” school of interviewing—keep asking the same question.  For me, a big part of humility is being able to ask forgiveness, so I asked an applicant, “How do you deal with conflict.”  When I asked again “How do you come back from an argument?  What would your wife say if I asked if you hold grudges?” He admitted, “I’m a grudge holder.”  We can’t afford to subject our ministries to people who don’t work well with others.

Stop doing silent interviews—get everyone together to interview candidate at once.

Scare people with sincerity.  You’re interviewing someone and you have lingering doubts. Say, “Hey, we’re fanatical about humility and hunger and people smarts and if you are, you’re going to love it here.  If you’re not, you’re going to hate working here.  We just want you to be aware of that.”  When you’re clear some people will opt out on their own.

Ideal team players: Steph Curry (Golden Stateplayer)—humble, hungry

Alan Mulally—one of the humblest people I ever met; hardworking (missed 6 staff meetings in 38 years)

Woody from Toy Story

I want to finish with something that’s been on my heart—especially for those who are followers of Jesus.  Jesus said, “Blessed are you when they persecute you…”   Persecution is real in our country today.  This is a golden age of leadership because you know something—we are not meant to cower under this. Pray we have the strength to stand strong and the grace not to become bitter.   May all of us leaders  be willing to suffer for Jesus.

2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Dr. Travis Bradberry

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

I love speaking to audiences who are interested in learning and bettering themselves.  Emotional intelligence will change the way you see people around you and how you go about your work. 

EQ is so important because IQ is a very small predictor of success.  Emotions are often what drive our behavior.  Phineas Gage was a foreman working to build railroads in Vermont.  He was polite, friendly—his workers adored him.  He was working with a metal bar called a tamping iron that tamped down the sand to create a precise blast with dynamite.  One day someone forgot to put the sand on top of the dynamite and when he used the tamping iron he was blasted from the site.  Six months later he was healed and he went back to work.  His workers noted he was rude and abrasive and prone to anger.  The area of the brain that controlled emotions had been damaged. 

What is EQ physically? – Signals in brain travel through the limbic system to the rational brain and how these work together results in EQ.   You may ask, why didn’t I learn about this growing up?  In our society we’re not always taught what we need to know.  We’re not always taught to use the skills we’ve been given.  We’re not taught to lead or how to motivate people.  We’re not taught to understand emotions.  Only 36% of people can identify their emotions. 

IQ=how fast you can learn information.  That doesn’t change much over time.  Personality also is fixed in your late teens and early twenties.  EQ, however, can be improved. 

People with high in IQ may or may not be high in EQ.  The four skills you need to know:

Self-Awareness – awareness of your tendencies and being prepared to deal with them.  The more you do self-discovery the better you equip yourself to use these skills.  Only certain things really bother us because they reflect something in ourselves we don’t like.

Self-Management—what do you do with the self-awareness.  You can be equipped with a lot of information. It’s not about stuffing your feelings; it’s about channeling it to provide the control you want.  Positive feelings need to be managed also.

Social Awareness—knowing what people are trying to communicate to you.  Requires you to focus more on another person than on yourself. 

Relationship Management—requires you to use the first three skills in concert.  You need to know what’s going on with you, what’s going on with the other person, and how to manage this.

             

The biggest mistake is winning the battle to lose the war and trying to prove you are right and losing the relationship.  Relationship Management is a tricky skill.  (clip from The Pursuit of Happyness--Will Smith’s character realizes he was wrong as a parent and recalibrates .) 

What is EQ Conceptually? – EQ is a skill that trickles into a lot of things, such as how you deal with stress, how you are on a team, how you are as a leader. 

            --EQ accounts for 60% of performance

            --90% of all top performers have high EQ

Research found the higher the responsibility in a company the lower the EQ scores.  Organizations get short-sighted when it comes to promotions.

Improving EQ involves a lot of practice because you need to form new habits.

Increasing your EQ requires—

--you get your stress under control – Stress is a necessary emotion and intermittent, mild stress helps improve memory.  Prolonged or severe stress causes degeneration in the area of the brain that controls behavior and causes more stress.  You need strategies like taking a walk, breathing exercises, turning phone off at night, developing an attitude of gratitude.  Gratitude alone reduced cortisol dramatically.

--clean up your sleep hygiene—getting more sleep will help (7-9 hours) but also you need quality sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep you have toxic proteins flowing around your body that cause you to feel sluggish.  To improve sleep quality—don’t take anything to help you sleep; no blue light in the evening (computer screens).  Not getting high quality sleep makes you fat—it increases cortisol and also makes you hungrier and not feel full.

--get your caffeine intake under control—stimulates ‘fight or flight’ hormones.  Caffeine has a 6 hour half-life so it takes 24 hours to clear your system.  Don’t drink caffeine after noon. 

2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Jossy Chacko

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)

Whatever You Do:

1.     Should not be prohibited by the law of the land, unless the Bible commands otherwise.

2.     Should not be prohibited in the Bible.

3.     Should emanate from the local church and be transformational to the local community.

4.     Should be replicable and multipliable.  Please don’t build Taj Mahals.

5.     Should be culturally relevant and appropriate to your context.

6.     Before you make the final decision, always ask and answer honestly—if Jesus was here, would He be doing what I am going to do?

After we were married my wife wanted us to visit the Taj Mahal on our honeymoon and I asked an eight-year-old slum dwelling boy to come with us on our honeymoon. As we traveled and I learned about his life it derailed my own plans for my life. 

I was challenged by the parable Jesus told of the master who went away and gave his servants talents to manage.  The first two invested and built up those talents and the third hid the talent he was given.  The first two were commended by the master and takes the talent from the one who hid it and gives it to the first two.  The first two proved themselves worthy to be trusted with more.

All of us have been trusted with something.  How are we proving ourselves to be trusted with more?  Jesus has entrusted the church with everything necessary to transform the world, but I was becoming like that third servant and I thank God for that boy who came in and transformed my life.

What are you doing with your talents?  To Jesus faithfulness is multiplying what you have been given.  Just maintaining your things is not God’s plan or mission.  If you are faithful in small things and will multiply them He will give you more. 

The third servant who buried his talent is never heard from again.  I hope you won’t be one of those.  Just maintaining and keeping safe is not an option, especially for the followers of Christ.  He always gave the command to multiply and bear fruit.  We have no excuse or reason not to multiply.  God gives us the starting point, but what we do with it is up to us.

3 “E”s of Leadership—

ENLARGE your vision – the first two servants had a growing vision.   What is your vision today?  Is it about the mission of multiplication?  Is the Master pleased with your vision?  We need to reactivate the gifts and talents that have been entrusted to us and take risks and we will see fruit emerging around the world.   Being rich doesn’t make you a good leader or being poor does not make you insignificant.  When people hear your vision they should see the vision of your God and be inspired to do bigger things in their own lives.  Sometimes well-meaning people will try to pop your vision (vision-poppers.)  We had a vision to plant 100,000 churches and people said it was impossible.  But others have not seen or heard what God has put into you.  Don’t worry what other people say anyway.  In India we try to keep our skin white and cover it up—then I went to a beach and thought everyone was dead and robbed as they were lying in the sun and his friend said, “They’re all just trying to look like you.” 

Don’t let culture or popularity determine your vision—let it be determined by what God has put inside of you.  Stay focused but allow your horizon to get bigger and bigger.  Last year our prime minister was encouraging us to build toilets because so many have no facilities so we decided to take that on.  Now we have a toilet vision—it’s an enlargement of the vision to transform communities.  There are opportunities all around you to enlarge your vision.  I pray you will have the opportunities to see the vision around you.  You need to become passionate and have a living vision.  Your vision statement on the wall will not make people sacrifice their lives; they need to see your living vision. 

EMPOWER your people—as leaders empowerment can backfire and people in whom you’ve invested may leave.  We can lose confidence and start to lead with hurt and stop empowering people.  Did Jesus know Thomas would doubt him and Peter would deny him?  He did, but He still gave them a chance.  I pray today you will start to empower your people.  Don’t be fooled by the package they come in—they may be unlikely leaders.  (picture on screen of a crazy, homeless man they found under a bridge who is now leading and transforming three communities.)  Stefan was found by the side of the road 18 years ago and he now leads the ministry all over Asia.  Pascal is a blind man who is starting to plant his second church. 

Your leadership reach will be determined by your empowerment abilities.  A good test about how you’re empowering is to take a long vacation.  I intentionally live on another continent so the leaders under me will do the work of ministry. 

As leaders we often get stuck in the project and have no capacity to determine a new horizon.

             --you should focus on building character before empowering them – Great leaders focus on building character

            --empowerment has to be through relationship – without knowing a person you can’t truly empower them.  Empowering is about leading not from the front but  alongside.  All of our future leaders have to live in a small groups with established leaders for a year.

            --make sure you have the right agreed outcomes in place and build in processes to measure them (KPI=Kingdom performance indicators)

Eighteen years ago when I started I had the goal of 100,000 communities being transformed. When we recently added up the goals of all our leaders it totaled 127,000. 

EMBRACE risk—To me risk and faith is the same thing.  The Bible says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God.”  How many of you are pleasing God by taking risks?  It’s easy to move from pioneering to preserving unless you embrace risk.

To embrace risk:

            --see it as your friend to love and not your enemy to be feared—the Bible says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear,” so we should be the most audacious people in the world.  Give the fear back to the devil and embrace faith and go after the mission God has given you.  Don’t let the fear of losing what you have keep you from losing what God wants to give you.  When we stop taking risk we underachieve our potential.  In Jesus’ story, not taking risk was considered lazy and unfaithful.

            --see comfort and safety as your enemies—Comfort and safety and risk cannot co-exist.  Who is missing out because you are refusing to take the next step of faith?  Don’t see comfort and safety as good.  One of the ways we play it safe is trying to work everything out before we do anything.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t plan but don’t let the earthly practicalities make you forget the heavenly possibilities. 

            --begin to increase your pain threshold—You cannot take risk if your pain threshold is small.  Some of the greatest ideas that could have changed the world are in the grave because someone played it safe.  Don’t take your gifts to heaven.  Heaven doesn’t need them; they were put in you for a purpose.  Today is a decision day.  One of my greatest regrets—I loved my grandfather and wrote him a letter telling him this but forgot to mail it.  Then my grandfather died and he never got to read it.  When you get to eternity don’t have any regret about steps you wish you had taken. 

I want to ask you to do 3 things before you go to sleep tonight

            --make a list of all the dreams you have not followed, then make a column of the date you will  take action on them, then make a note of the person who will hold you accountable.  God has sent me to encourage you to pull the trigger on the things about which you have been procrastinating. 

God has given you talents and people are depending on you to use them.  In eternity you will be so glad you did.

             

2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Melinda Gates

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)

One-on-One Interview with Bill Hybels & Melinda Gates

Bill: I’ve admired you from afar for a long time.  You’ve been blessed with a lot of resources and have given back to the world.

Melinda:  Thank you.  That’s very kind.

Bill:  I think people really only know you from the Gates Foundation.  You grew up in a highly functioning family and went to a Catholic school.  You said you became an impatient optimist.  What does that mean.

Melinda:  Our parents were very determined we would grow up in the Catholic faith.  What I learned is that the world is getting better.  Poverty has been cut in half in the last 25 years.  That makes me optimistic, but I’m impatient that there are things we have in the US that could be given to the developing world that will hasten change.  We believe all lives are created equal but we need to treat them equally.

Bill:  Agreed.  What did you study at Duke University.

Melinda:  Computer Science.  I loved technology.  I had a high school teacher who saw I was good at math and she advocated for us to get a dozen computers and I learned programming.  The number of women graduates in computer science peaked at 38% and is now back down to 17%. 

Bill: Was Microsoft the only company offer you received.

Melinda:  I actually worked for IBM several summers in Dallas. Our parents encouraged us to go to college in a different geograpic area.  As a senior I was asked to commit to IBM but I said I was going to Seattle to interview with Microsoft.  She said if I got an offer at Microsoft I should take it because the chance for advancement would be so great. 

Bill:  So you were hired at Microsoft and you actually loved working there and were invited into leadership. 

Melinda:  I worked there for over nine years and I believed in the vision of putting a computer in every home.  I loved managing teams.  I felt like if you got the best out of people you got the best end result. 

Bill:  How did you just run into Bill Gates?

Melinda:  The company was really small—fewer than 1700 employees.  After three weeks on the job I was sent to New York to present.  I had a female roommate who invited me to go out to dinner with other employees and twenty minutes later Bill Gates arrived.

Bill:  Was this love at first sight?

Melinda:  I wouldn’t call it that.  He asked me to go out that night, but I had other plans.  A few months later we ran into each other at work on a Saturday afternoon and he asked me out again.  Apparently he was a little smitten.  After we were married and I got pregnant I surprised him by saying I wanted to stay home with them.   I told him it didn’t mean I would be home forever but that I’d be home for a time.   Jen is 20 years old, Rory is 17, Phoebe is in 8^th grade.

Bill:  Are they normal?

Melinda:  I wanted a normal family life.  I dated Bill when he was already known in the world.  I wanted our kids to have a normal middle class upbringing.  I used my maiden name when I enrolled the kids in school so no one would know they as “Bill Gates’ kids”. 

Bill:  I was interested in your spiritual practices.  In your attempt to stay close to God, what do you do?

Melinda:  I think one of the really important things I learned in high school is that one individual can change the world.  They also taught us the importance of silent and took us on silent retreats.  They gave us spiritual lectures and readings.  In the middle of the school was a chapel where you could spend time in silence.  That became so fundamental to my life that I try to take time in silence every day.  I do a spiritual reading, light a candle, and spend some time in prayer. 

Bill:  I want to move ahead to talk about the Gates Foundation.  You give away billions and billions of dollars.  You have your own building with 1400 employees.  Tell us how the foundation functions.

Melinda:  The foundation is the embodiment of our philosophy in the world.  We think of it as a huge responsibility.  It’s a gift to be in this situation.  We’re giving away other people’s money—like Warren Buffett’s money.  We’re trying to give bak to the world responsibility.  We’re trying to allow all people to have the same healthy start in life we have here in the US. 

Bill:  You’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to get kids vaccinated around the world and staggering investments in education around the world.  The one that was blowing my mind recently was your work on the timing and placement of pregnancies.  Start from zero and explain this.

Melinda:  We think of this foundation as a learning journey.  We were working on childhood vaccines and now there are 7 million children alive because of those vaccines.  As we are doing this work I spend time time sitting with women in the villages.  You have to listen.  I ask about vaccines but what I learned is if I stay long enough and listen to them what they wanted to talk about is “what about that shot I used to get?”—they were talking about depo prevara.  There was a crisis that contraception was not available.  Condoms are being given out but women will tell you they can’t negotiate a husband using a condom.  The women know if they can space their children they will be able to feed them and educate them better.  I kept thinking there has to be someone who will lead this call.  I’ve been part of leading this charge to make contraceptives available to all women.  I’ve had lots of meetings with the Catholic Church and we move forward on our areas of commonalities.  I want to keep alive women and babies. 

Bill:  You’re actually an introvert more than an extrovert.  Is this just something God wanted you to do?

Melinda:  You can’t turn away from these voices.  When I come back from these trips I take time in silence so I can hear these cries.  You need to let your heart break and take it in.  If I could do something about that, I needed to act.  The truth needs to be spoken.  We can do something about this. 

Bill:  At some point in time you and Bill felt ‘we’ve just earned too much money’ and knew the right thing to do was to invest in the world.  Yet there are many who don’t have a social conscience and just keep earning.  How does it affect you to see people of great means who do virtually nothing for the poor.

Melinda:  We made this decision before we got married.  We made a trip to Africa and realized we only need so much.  Warren Buffet says if you have close to a billion dollars it’s not going to hurt you to give away half of it.  I grew up in a middle class family and we were giving back.  We started presenting this to the wealthy and we have 155 billionaires signed up to give away half their wealth.  We gather those who want to give once a year and they begin to catch the vision of giving and see the possibilities.

Bill:  You’re helping the world awaken to the fact this is not good money thrown at hopeless projects.  Extreme poverty and child mortality rates have been cut in half.

Melinda:  Part of that is bed nets—for $10 you can buy a net to reduce deaths.

Bill:  Maternal mortality rates have fallen by 43% and proportion of undernourished people has fallen to half. 

Melinda:  I go to places that used to feel destitute and they’re starting to thrive.  Seeds that give 1/3 more profit on their farms have made a difference.

Bill:  One thing I appreciate about you and Bill is you took your intellectual horsepower and built a company and then took that same horsepower and used it to help the poor.  Was it harder to build Microsoft or is it harder to leverage the resources to solve world problems.

Melinda:  Bill would say he did a lot of things right but he also got lucky.  He never expected to make a billion dollars.  When we came to this nonprofit we started to see how hard this was but the biggest lesson we could apply from business is that we used data to evaluate.  In the nonprofit world many decisions were being made without data so we worked to get that data.  One of Bill’s goals is to eliminate polio in the world.  He gets reports of new polio cases and they send out vaccination teams.  Now we send women into the developing world to ask about contraceptive questions and what is available and I get those reports coded red, green, and yellow.  We know where malaria nets are being applied and where they’re working and where they’re not.  Warren Buffett says we are working on the tough problems that society has ignored but we are getting the data and working to make changes.  I can’t ask people to give unless I can show them their giving makes a difference.

Bill:  You were making a presentation to spiritual leaders about these needs and I saw you moved to tears.  It’s still very personal to you.

Melinda:  It’s in the humanity of work that you connect with other people.  I have gone into those villages and lived that life so it’s very personal.  The people I meet in the developing world open up and show me what life is like.  A woman in a village said, “I want to give every good thing to this child before I have another one.”

Bill:  Why don’t we thank Melinda for all the good work she’s doing.

2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Alan Mulally

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)

The Art of Working Together

As an aeronautical engineer I joined Boeing and was able to serve on the team for the development of every aircraft.  An average commercial airplane has around 4 million parts so over the years I’ve learned about working together.

Working Together Principles and Practices

--People first

--Everyone is included

--Compelling vision, comprehensive strategy and relentless implementation

--Clear performance goals

--One plan

--Facts & Data

--Everyone know the plan, the status, and areas that need special attention

--Propose a plan, positive, “find a way” attitude

--Respect, listen, help, and appreciate each other

--Emotional resilience—trust the process

--Have fun—enjoy the journey and each other (humor can never be at anyone else’s expense)

Thought I would always stay at Boeing, then I got a call from Bill Ford at Ford Motor Company.  Having purchased many other brands their branding was diffused and there was no synergy between companies.  Consumer tastes were changing and the market wanted smaller vehicles.  Ford has become a fast follower instead of a leader in technology.  They were losing money on every brand and every vehicle.  I left my job as CEO at Boeing to become CEO at Ford Motor Company.  I noticed there were no Ford vehicles in the employee parking garage.  I think I was the first CEO hired from outside of the automobile industry. 

We went to work.  I selected leaders for each of the divisions around the world—16 of them.  They’d never been in a room together.  We got together and I shared the plan with them.  We found our vision in Henry Ford’s vision to “open the highways to all mankind”—not just the wealthy. 

We then worked on strategy on the brands—Ford and Lincoln—for a complete family of vehicles with each one being ‘best in class’.  We agreed we’d serve all markets around the world and would aggressively restructure the business and would accelerate development of new vehicles despite the economic slowdown.  We raised 23+ billion dollars to finance this. 

We instituted business plan reviews and at the first review we anticipated losing 17 billion dollars.  When problem areas were identified, I encouraged them to be labeled as problems.  When those problem areas were identified by placing them in red charts it identified them visually and helped others collaborate to solve them.  In a few weeks some of those problems were solved and others felt confident enough to label their problems with red charts.  I knew everything would be okay.

The company became healthier and sales increased.  Let’s give a shout out to Ford store owners.  I brought them all to Detroit when I began.   I asked the Ford employees to look at the store owners and say “We love you.”  All of the store owners knew it would be different and we would all work together. 

We used to be rated as the worst auto company to work for and now we are number two.  We’ve increased the dividend five times.

When we started 42% of all Ford employees had positive feelings about the company they work for.  That means 58% of all employees were just coming to work for the pay check and not to “build a cathedral”.  But now the percentage of those with positive feelings is 98%.

Through the worst economic time since the depression we did not ask for or need any precious taxpayer money.

Thank you to Willow Creek for inviting me and giving me the chance to hear your stories. 

Leadership is needed in our world now more than ever.  We’re going to move from “I” to “we” and from “me” to service.  I wish you each a fantastic leadership journey.

2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Bill Hybels

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)

The Lenses of Leadership

Our mission is clear; we’ll try to stretch your minds and grow your leadership because everyone wins when a leader gets better.  The stakes of leadership are sky high. Our world is calling out for leadership that will unite instead of divide and build up instead of tear down.  Our world awaits for leaders who will put bold solutions on the table instead of kicking the can down the street.

The highest value here at the Summit is humility with each of declaring we have so much more to learn about leadership.  With enough humility you can actually learn from anyone. 

Look at this rack of glasses (four sets of glasses) – some people’s image is etched into history because of their type of eyeglasses.  I want to talk to you about four lenses of leadership.

Bright red lenses—might belong to a passionate leader who understands the effect unbridled passion has on every single follower.  Leadership involves taking people from ‘here’ to ‘there’.  I stress every year leadership is not a position, it’s moving and energizing people and taking them on a journey from where you are into a preferred future.  Team members will have to feed off the passion of their leader—passion is like protein that sustains the team.  I once did a study on the power of inspiration—a motivated worker will outperform an unmotivated worker by 40%.  While generous compensations and work environment matter a lot, what matters most is to work for and around a passion-filled leader.

How does a leader get passionate? Passion is usually derived from the mountaintops of a beautiful dream or the valley depths of frustration with something that is going terribly wrong in the world. Wright brothers studied the flight of birds and were inspired to build an airplane.   A few years ago the title of my talk was “Holy Discontent”—when you are so upset with needs or poor service or poor products or poor leadership that you become passionate to fix them.  Unbridled passion becomes an unstoppable force.

If passion is so important, how filled is your passion bucket?  Is your bucket so full that people feel your energy when they are around you? Or do people have to poke you to see if you’re still there?  No one really cares where your passion was derived from, they just want the passion.

Whose job is it to fill a leader’s passion bucket? It’s the leader’s job to fill his or her own passion bucket.  It’s your job to fire yourself up.

How does a leader keep his or her passion bucket filled?  This is where reflection time is warranted.  We’re all different so you need to figure out what fills your bucket.  For me, it’s reading books by passion-filled authors or going to places that stir my soul.  I recently spent two weeks in Jordan at the end of a speaking engagement.  I went to see a partner church that’s taken on the job of serving food to Muslim refugees.  I visited there with a refugee woman who is living there in poverty and doesn’t know what happened to her husband.  Her child walked in and he was the age of my oldest grandchild.  I noticed there was something wrong with one of his eyes and his mother told how he was bullied at school because of this. Something inside of me broke and I became physically sick with a feeling of hopelessness.  God planted an idea in my mind to get the child’s eye repaired.  I later told the pastor I wanted to get this done and the pastor said it would be complicated and costly. Several months ago we were able to have this surgery completed and the boy is able to return to school.  I can’t tell you what this did for my faith and my passion level.  It’s refilled my passion bucket.  I didn’t solve the refugee crisis but sometimes just helping out one kid does wonders for the human soul.  You must do whatever you must do to get your passion bucket filled.

When the pulse rate of an organization speeds up because it’s feeding off the leader’s passion it’s cool.  Find your passion!

Second set of lenses—has shattered lenses – When I started leading my ‘people lenses’ were shattered.  My father’s family company employed many warehouse workers he’d hire right off the street and fire them right on the spot if they didn’t perform.  The culture was spontaneous and low frill.  There were no suggestion boxes. It was a fear-based, performance-oriented culture and that was all I knew.

I came into organizational leadership without ever experiencing a high-trust developmental culture.  Decades into my leadership I hired a HR Director and he challenged me about leading to change our staff culture.  We’ve been on this journey for nine consecutive years.  Imagine my surprise last fall when Chicago Tribune named Willow Creek the top company to work for out of all medium sized companies. I was proud of our HR Director and staff who worked to prove that even if you start with shattered lenses you can grow and build a beautiful culture. 

An organization will only ever be as healthy as the top leader wants it to be.   If you’re wondering where to start, I recommend you hire a consulting company to evaluate your organization.  As senior leaders we have the opportunity to change the story lives of our younger employees by how we lead and accept them in our organizations. 

God only treasures one thing in this vast cosmos—that’s people.  When God entrusts people to our leadership we need to lead them well to their potential. 

What’s the difference between religion and true Christianity?  Religion is all the things people do to please a God they believe is disappointed. Religion=DO

Christianity=DONE – What Jesus Christ has done for you on the cross is the only thing that can reconcile you to the Father.  A businessman said he heard me preach this and was so taken with those simple words DO and DONE that he made a decision to follow Christ.  Then he decided he should become a pastor.  Then God impressed on him that he should be a pastor/leader with all the employees of his business as his flock.  Now he is a businessman who pastors his employees.

I have to tell you one of the things we are working on in our culture at Willow.  We are working to reduce transactional noise.  Transactional noise is that rumble of discontent you hear in the hallways from employees.  This used to be called ‘water cooler conversation’--people chattering about other employees and who is advancing and why.  This takes a toll on health and performance in organizations.  We have been using a tool called the Competency Card Sort Process.   We ask employees to flip through the cards and identify 20 top competencies in their leader’s life and also identify those areas with low competencies—then place leaders in areas where they show most competencies (people-oriented persons working directly with people and strategy-oriented persons working on strategy, etc.)  This has dramatically lowered transactional noise. 

As a leader I am developing the skill of ‘talent observation’.  It’s easy to get increasingly distant from people in your organization you don’t directly supervise. I am learning to discipline myself to sit in these meetings and observe staff and evaluate their needs and strengths.

Third Lens—Self-Adjusting Performance Lens (allow you to adjust the prescription of the lenses to see well)  Leaders have to get things done and have to maximize team performance.  Sooner or later you’ll need to set goals for achievement.  As I went into church leadership I thought I’d have the luxury of leading without goals, but I quickly realized that even in churches people need goals and want to know if they are achieving them.  This involves constant readjusting of your lenses involving goals.

Sometimes at Willow we became goal-aholics and did church work in ways we weren’t proud of. Then sometimes we swung to the other extreme and that lost its luster and staff got confused and unmotivated.  Our new system is called ‘Thrive’ and leaders get together to decide what progress needs to be made, how to measure it , and to set goals.  Six months later the Thrive team meets with each department and gives them one of three designations:

Thrive (you are exceeding goals and taking new ground)

Healthy (you are maintaining ground)

Underperforming (losing ground)

Every employee wants to know how they are doing.  It is cruel and unusual punishment to employ a person and not let them know how they are doing.  Every staff person needs to know how we feel about them and how they are doing. 

James 1:5—if you lack wisdom, ask God for it

Fourth Lens—Lenses with a Rearview Mirror—Legacy Lens – In leadership we have to press ahead, move and inspire people, but every once in a while we need to look in a rearview mirror and evaluate our legacy.  What kind of leadership legacy will you leave?  You should reflect on this on at least an annual basis.

If your leadership journey were to end soon, would you maybe not be all that proud of what you leave behind?  Leadership is not about time; it’s about energy.  Where do you invest your energy?   Draw an energy pie chart to see where your energy is going.  Throughout history God has specialized in helping people write new narratives.  You can start now to draw a new ‘energy circle’ and put more energy into what God wants you to put energy into. 

Leadership can become a kind of legal drug that provides a ‘high’ that other areas of life cannot compete with.   When you’re setting new records at work, why would you want to go home and change a dirty diaper?  Why would you get your hands dirty serving the poor?  It’s tempting to keep popping the ‘leadership drug’ but God never intended our vocations to crowd out every other dimension of our lives.  His idea was that we would flourish at work but also in our marriages and with our kids and with our friends. 

When you look in the rearview mirror do you like the kind of legacy you’re leaving behind?  Your legacy can change in an instant (like the life of the thief on the cross next to Jesus) as you reflect and ask God to change your story.  A single humble prayer in this moment can change how your life will unfold. Do you need to pray a prayer like that?

Leadership matters.  The older I get the more I realize it matters disproportionately. It matters so much it scares me.  So we need to get better—every single one of us—

--You need to find and feed your passion.  Life is too short to live with an empty passion bucket so pursue your passion.

--You need to repair your shattered ‘people lenses’

--Adjust the way you think about goals—being neither a goal-aholic nor without direction

--Make sure your legacy is God-honoring

If you prompt us, God, we will obey whatever the cost.

Serving Has No Glass Ceiling

As I get ready to attend the 2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit tomorrow, I'm reminded of Bill Hybels' opening talk at last year's Summit.  He spoke about grit and used "The Little Engine That Could" as a model for persevering.  I loved reading that book to my girls when they were young, and I was so taken by Bill's reference that we based our next Operation Christmas Child team meeting on the idea of "getting the toys (and good food) over the mountain to the good girls and boys on the other side."

Well, I got a new revelation about this story yesterday.  A co-volunteer at the clothing pantry where I volunteer on Tuesdays brought in the book.  She read it and pointed out that both the small engine who needed help at the beginning of the book AND the little blue engine who finally comes to the rescue in the end are both referred to as 'she' while all the engines who refused to help are referred to as 'he'.  Interesting.

The earliest version, written by Rev. Charles S. Wing from Brooklyn and published in the New York Tribune in 1906 is more abbreviated and doesn't have these gender differences, but Watty Piper's classic 1930 story book edition of the story does.

Some Internet research (gotta love Google) reveals there have been conflicting interpretations of the gender identifications and the meanings of such in the various versions of this story.

Personally, I think it just proves there is no glass ceiling when it comes to service.  Jesus was followed by a group of women and women have been the ones getting much of the work done throughout the church age.

I love the image of that little blue female engine who is unsure about whether she can pull the train but is willing to try.  And not only willing to try but WILLING herself to keep pulling even when it seems impossible.

Our Operation Christmas Child conferences and events are becoming increasingly diverse with more men and youth reflecting the makeup of our teams around the country.  However, many of those volunteer team positions around the country are still filled by women who serve like the little blue engine--sometimes with trepidation but with a Spirit-infused will that says not, "I think I can," but "I KNOW He can."

No glass ceiling here.