Entries Tagged as 'Leadership'
Yesterday, Sarah and I celebrated our 9th anniversary.
I picked an amazing dinner spot at Ciao Bella. She picked a slow chick flick (me, two other guys + 100 teenage girls). Together we had one of the most fun, relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable anniversaries we’ve ever had.
Our marriage has really strengthened this year. We turned a corner in France that we’ve struggled to get around for years. It’s exciting.
Along with just having fun, we talked about some goals we have for our marriage for year #10.
- Pray together more (needs to be quantified)
- Serve more (needs to be quantified)
- Define our first official budget ever!
- Take a real vacation, this year and ever year (I’m praying for a miracle that we’ll spend our 10th anniversary in Italy or at least on a beach)
- Get a nice espresso machine to change my starbucks habit from buying drinks to buying beans.
For the first time in a long time, we feel more purposeful in our life. Like we’re heading in similar directions, even if we’re not on the exact same path, we holding hands and smiling at each other.
Posted in
Family, Leadership |
2 Comments
Vice Chairman and CEO of Best Buy
- Spent 7 years watching other people lead
- Being bankrupt, gives the freedom to have creativity bloom
Employee Engagement
- How do you let the uniqueness of the employee match up with the uniqueness of the customer.
- Highly engaged employees lead to better engaged customers
- It takes someone leading that authentically cares about the people they’re leading…
Leaders get into leadership because they want affirmation of themselves.
- True leaders get their joy out of seeing the leadership qualities of others come out.
- Once again: Marcus Buckingham rocks!
- The Biggest part of the job of the CEO: Staying engaged with the people that make the difference.
Motivating Leaders: Find your leadership base
- do you believe in it?
- how are coding what you’re doing? (are you masking what you really feel about your work).
Results
Oriented
Work
Environment
As long as you get the job done, there isn’t going to be someone there to check up on you all the time…who cares if you’re in your desk, not getting your job done, if you could sleep in and get your job done…AMEN!
Brad’s freeshot:
dissipate the lines of faith. de-compartmentalize faith, and let it be your life.
Thoughts:
- Brad seems like a humble guy for running a $40 billion company
- People matter to Brad. Without his investment in people he’s nothing. Where’s my investment in people, and how will I take it to the next level..presumably through conversation, huh?
- Brad is in Minneapolis, perhaps he’d love to get involved in a ministry that seeks to transform lives in North Minneapolis.
- Leaders aren’t born, their leadership skills are uncovered.
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
How many 25 year old women here the voice of God tell them they should take on the prison system?
Not many, I’d guess.
Catherine Rohr, overall else, seems to be a person who takes joy in being called to do work in the hardest places.
The Vision: She looks for proven entrepreneurs in the prison system. (Insert chuckle). The key is to find people who really are sick and tired of their old ways. First, she breaks down the tough guy barriers. Then puts them through business boot camp.
Then they graduate, get housing, job placement, medical insurance, and then they help them start the business ideas that burgeoned in prison. She achieves a single digit return to prison rate.
Unbelievable.
“These guys have been takers all their lives. Now, 70% of them give back to the program with financial donations.”
-Catherine Rohr
This creates the multi-generational community impact we’re all looking for. These guys get out, turn around their life and turn around their families too…
The message for the inmates
- We can be broken and still be loved.
Handling Criticism as a leader:
- Don’t let emotions over the criticism get in the way of the business.
- Ask if this is legit feedback. If it is, engage it. If it isn’t, ignore it.
Keeping from Burning Out:
- scheduled down time
- have no privacy, sacrifice privacy and gain acountability
- If there is time when someone doesn’t know where you are during the day, that’s a problem
Fundraising
- Connect your heart to the issue
- Model the behavior, give back to the organization personally.
- If you want money, just ask.
Final Words
- Reconnect with your calling and pray, “Bring it on God” and watch what he’ll do.
My Thoughts:
- Catherine grabs life by the …. and lives.
- What’s my call…Sometimes I think I know, but I get preoccupied with the junk of life rather than being focused on the purpose that God has put in me.
- Transformation is within all of our reach. God says so. Are we willing to be used by God, rather than using God.
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
The SwellHouse is a new prefab package from The Office of Mobile Design.
The SwellHouse advertises mass-customization. In essence, it’s mass produced, with the ability to quickly customize it to your modular needs…It essentially comes as a bunch of boxes that get shipped from the factory, bolted together on site with all the energy, plumbing and information systems hidden away in the cavities.
I like the standard design of this house. The “S” model as the call it, has sliding panels and walls that merge the inside world and the outside world by creating courtyards on the inside of the building. They use stand “green” practices and materials to make this house have a smaller environmental footprint, aside from the smaller footprint of the factory produced modular building process overall.
Check it out.
Posted in
Leadership, green |
No Comments
- Align
- Empower
- Serve
- Collaborate
People find their passion for leadership in their life stories…
How do leaders develop?
- Understand the purpose of your leadership.
- Get feedback, prayer & introspection.
- Will you be true to your values.
- Discover your intrinsic motivations. Lead from your strengths. (are you in your sweet spot?)
- Build a supportive team around you. Have one person that you’re able to have complete transparency with.
- Lead an integrated life. Be the same person in all environments of life. Congruency.
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
Leadership that matters to God
- Leadership in endeavors and issues that matter to God.
- Just because I’m leading and people are following, doesn’t mean that I’m leading in things that matter to God.
- Are Jesus and I on the same page?
We’re the plan
- You are the light of the world, let your light so shine among men that they’ll give glory to the father.
- We’re the ones that get to share the good news, that get to be the good news.
- When people in pain see the body of Christ show up, then they actually can believe that God is good.
Injustice
- The abuse of power to take away the good things that God intended for them
- Rank injustice makes it hard for people to believe that God is good.
The Big Idea: “If you want your leadership to matter, lead in the things that matter to God.”
- This is the pivot point for great leadership.
- Leadership that matters, matters precisely when the calling is hopeless, scary and hard.
What have we learned about leading when the task seems Hopeless?
- By re-centering the basis of our hope
- Jesus asks his disciples, “What do you have; will you give it to me?”
- He doesn’t ask for what is needed, he asks what we have, and he will be responsible for getting it done.
What have we learned about leading when the task seems Scary?
- Lead by reminding the people of God that Jesus did not come to make us safe, he came to make us brave.
- Safety=Stuck
- God asks us to follow him beyond what we can control. Do it, and you will experience the adventure.
What have we learned about leading when the task seems Hard?
- Bring people to a place where it is absolutely unsafe to go without God. They will either go with, or fall away.
How then should we choose to lead:
- Choose not to be safe
- Choose to pursue deep spiritual health
- Choose to pursue excellence (let us be the generation of church leaders that resets the bar for excellence)
- Choose to seize the joy
Pray that God would rescue us from all things petty.
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
I love that Bill genuinely feels the weight of leadership at his core. You can tell that it’s not just fluff for him.
A few of Bill’s axiom’s that hit me:
“If it feels funky, engage.”
- This is me to a fault
- I need to extend this by saying, if it feels funky, engage diplomatically.
- Great leaders have the courage to call out when things are heading in a God-inspired direction, I want to grow in this area.
“Sometimes, leaders have to call fouls on themselves.”
- I’m not impervious to being out of line, in fact, I’m pretty good at it.
- I need better discretion in how to handle issues that arise.
- Perhaps it just comes back to diplomacy again for me.
I realize, based on this talk, that I need a more clearly defined process for making leadership decisions.
I tend to fly off the seat of my pants making decisions based on past experience and my own “knowledge base.” While that includes a history of strong Biblical teaching, I rarely just crack open the book when facing a hard decision. In the end, I tend to trust the leadership skills God has been building in me, but I think he’d love it if I took a deeper look into his word first. Then consulted others, rather than living only in my personal leadership box.
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
Teaching leadership, unapologetically, from a Christian perspective.
Rom. 12:8
Starting off with general Bill Hybel’s candor….
Do you have a framework that helps you arrive at an effective, God-honoring decision?
Questions Christians tend to ask:
- Does the Bible say anything about this?
- What would smart advisors, advise me to do? (A story of the young king seeking out wise counsel…he took the advise of the young advisors…hint, hint.
- What experience have you had that would inform you about these decisions?
- Is there a prompting of the Holy Spirit that I need to be paying attention to? (When you’re instep with the spirit, it leads to life and peace.)
At some point, leaders have to make decisions. Leaders cannot be decision averse. For good decisions, you thank everybody, for poor decisions, you take the blame.
Some Leaders learn how to compress all of the above into Leadership Axioms for their up-coming decisions…Nuggets of wisdom…proverbs…
“The best way to destroy my enemy is to turn him into my friend.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“Promote a clash of ideas”
“Reward your best performers, get rid of your non-performers.”
– Colin Powell
Are you composing your own leadership axioms? You should. You should coin, complete, and implement them for yourself.
One of Bill’s famous axioms:
“No matter how many times you share it, no matter how passionate you are, Vision Leaks.”
“Get the right people around the table”
“Facts are your Friends”
– Hybels
The circles of the Willow Community:
Explorers, Beginners, Growers, Christ-centered
The chasm between Growers and Christ-centered folks is enormous. The potential for change is huge for people who no-longer see their life as their own, but as wholly given to the activity of God in the world.
“Leaders have to call fouls.”
“Sometimes, leaders have to call fouls on themselves.”
“When things feel funky, engage.”
– Hybels
Every once in a while, your church needs an action plan that will take your breath away. Dream big vision, then teach it, unleash it and experience it.
Seek the abundant life, talked about in 1 Tim.
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
Today, I’m attending the Willow Creek LEAD Summit 2008. This was one of my highlight conferences from last year. Marcus Buckingham changed my life last year. As well as Richard Curtis and Colin Powell’s messages.
This year, very exciting, my own pastor and supervisor, Efrem Smith is at the Summit talking about the Church and Reconciliation. Can’t wait to hear how it goes. Pray for him today as he prepares for his message.
*If you want to send text questions during the summit, send questions to: 72265
Posted in
Leadership |
No Comments
