Featured | Jeremy Scheller

Jan 26, 2010

Brainwashed: Seven ways to reinvent yourself.

What an awesome mini-manifesto from Seth Godin over at ChangeThis.com

It’s like this: we were brainwashed. Brainwashed into believing a set of rules that aren’t true (any more). And because the brainwashing has been so complete, the shifts in our world and new opportunities they open up are easy to see as ways to shore up yesterday’s faltering system. Please, don’t fall for that. Don’t use the tools of today to support your effort to do yesterday’s job better.

This is an opportunity to completely reinvent your role in the system.

Here are seven levers available for anyone (like you) in search of reinvention:

Connect

Be generous

Make art

Acknowledge the lizard

Ship

Fail

Seth’s thinks this is the time. If you’re going to make a big move in life, if you’re going to live an extraordinary life, if you’re going to “do something with yourself,” now is the time.

Guess you’ll have to read it to figure out exactly what he means by “Acknowledge the lizard.”

It’s on you now…Go get the short, 15 page, BIG TYPE, easy read pdf.

Jan 25, 2010

Posted by jeremyscheller | 2 Comments

Leading Through Change: Thriving in the Unknown.

Many of you may know, my friend, pastor, and boss of 6 years has been called to a new position. Efrem Smith will be moving on from Sanctuary this summer to a new position as Superintendent of the Pacific Southwest Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church. It’s a huge honor with a new realm of influence and a higher call on his life in leadership.

This is really awesome for him, and while transitions are really hard, I think great things can come to Sanctuary during this time.

Anytime time there is a major shift in leadership in an organization there are emotional, visionary and team dynamics that are affected by the changes taking place. So how do you survive?

During this time of leadership change I’m planning on focusing on 3 areas as we move into a new season.

Being a TEAM PLAYER
At this crucial moment, there is no room for sanding against the grain. When you sand against the grain, you leave deep wounds in the wood that requires you to remove even more layers to get things smoothed out again. Being a team player will make it less painful to readjust when new leadership is in place.
No Better Time for SELF EVALUATION
– How does my personal spiritual journey affect the spiritual journey of our community?
– What do I need to improve, let go, start or stop?
– Where have I been dropping the ball and what’s my plan for picking it up?
– Am I acting from my strengths and mitigating my weaknesses?
– How does my performance affect the whole team?
Finally, I plan on BEING HONEST about the future.
This will not be easy. In fact, if it is easy, I think we’re probably not living up to our potential. Being honest about what this team needs in order to fulfill the vision in front of us means we won’t dance around the holes. The holes in our team, the holes in ourselves and the holes in our faith.

Even though this will be a tough transition and I will miss Efrem and what he brought to Sanctuary, I’m looking forward to being pushed and pushing myself to grow in new ways.

What are your thoughts about leading through a leader change? Have you been on a team that lost a key player? How did you navigate?

Jan 25, 2010

Posted by jeremyscheller | 9 Comments

Freebie Giveaway: Kem Meyer’s Less Clutter, Less Noise.

The first book giveaway isn’t even over but I’ve got another one to give away for all you church marketing peeps.

You all know about our great teacher Kem Meyer, and most of you probably have the book. For the rest of you, you need to read it. I’ve got an extra copy or two laying around, so somebody else might as well benefit.

Leave a comment on this post and I will choose a random number to give one away to on end of day Wednesday.

Read my review of the book here.

UPDATE: Mr. Chad Maag has won the thesis of our responsibility.

Dec 17, 2009

Posted by jeremyscheller | 1 Comment

Allow your team to be Mischievous

There’s a great short post on the Signal vs. Noise blog this week about creating a culture of trust with your teams.

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden.

But “control” is a tricky thing. The tighter the reins, the more you create an environment of distrust. An us vs. them mentality takes hold. And that’s when people start trying to game the system.

read the rest of the post…

One thing that has been a continual learning process for me over the years has been to give up control to my teams. I generally know how I want to do things and I’ve always kept a tight reign on my teams to make sure things fall in line.

This type of control generally leads to

me over-working myself
my teams feeling un-empowered to serve
a stifling of creativity

Over the last two years, I’ve been working to give up control to allow room for others to lead and for others to serve in freedom. I’ve been working to widen the boundaries and allow people to be mischievous. What I’ve gotten is

teams that are more committed
teams that do better work
teams that feel empowered to be creative
I also end up not feeling like I have to do everything.

It’s a win/win.

Even though I’m still the lone staff member over IT, Communications, Media and the Web and I have more teams that I’m responsible for, we’re actually producing more outcomes and I’m not feeling as stretched thin with church work as I used to.

Dec 10, 2009

Posted by jeremyscheller | 1 Comment

5 Sites for Design/Web Inspiration

Here’s a quickie: 5 Sites I revisit for design inspiration.

Design Sponge

Behance Network

LogoPond

Smashing Magazine

Screenfluent

Jul 15, 2009

Posted by jeremyscheller | 5 Comments

Diary of a Website Overhaul 1 of 4

About a year ago, I began dreaming about a new website that would serve our people better than what we had. The last version of our website (which was actually sanctuaryweb_v3) was broken. So much about it was not functional, misinforming, and a pain to upgrade.

Anatomy of the old site:
Infrastructure: Built on Joomla
Designed By: Me
Concept: Get something up whether it’s right or not.
Launched: January 2007

Some of the significant issues with the old site:

It didn’t connect people well.
It required us to get people to it, rather than getting itself out to the people.
Most of the higher functionality I desired didn’t work.
Joomla. Joomla. Joomla. Left it and never going back.
Inflexible.

So I had this website, that everybody wanted some presence on, but it just didn’t work well. Not for me. Not for our staff. Not for our community. I started dreaming. I started asking myself some basic questions about purpose. To a point, I had to stop and wonder about what the website was really for.

I went to my friend Kem Meyer’s Blog and started digging through it for valuable insights into Web Strategy.

I came across these helpful links:

How do you “do” web strategy?

Using Discover, Define, Deliver as my guide, I immersed myself into a web process that soon became a much bigger project than just a website. It has become a communication and data overhaul of which the website is just one component.

After about 2 months of soul searching, I knew that there was work that needed to be done before building a website. When I made the old website, I mistakenly built it based on what I thought a website should do, rather than truly trying to extend the Sanctuary Church online. But to have the web presence I dreamt of, I needed to deal with other issues deep under the hood of Sanctuary or the web presence would continue to lag.

Next up: I know what I want, but how can we make it happen? Prerequisites, Conversations, and tough decisions.