I was at Elephant Room this week, a forum hosted by Harvest Bible Chapel for pastors and church leaders.

The best part for me was the honesty, candour and wisdom shared by the panel:  James MacDonald, Mark Driscoll, Steven Furtick, Jack Graham, T.D. Jakes,  Wayne Cordeiro and Crawford Lorritz.

Here are a few insights that really impacted me (in no particular order):

“It’s easier to be a critic than to be a pastor.”  Mark Driscoll

“The devil can’t steal my ministry.  He has no authority.  So he’ll just steal the joy of my ministry.”  Wayne Cordeiro

“Write the cheque.  Go back to sleep.”  James MacDonald on the limits of cheque-book evangelism.

“None of our books will be on sale in heaven.”  T.D. Jakes, on the limits of human theology.

“You can’t integrate the church until you integrate your life.”  T.D. Jakes on racial integration.

“You are ready for restoration in ministry when you are known more for your repentance than for your sin.” Spurgeon (via T.D. Jakes)

“You can teach what you know but you reproduce what you are.”  Wayne Cordeiro

“We use anger as a substitute for the anointing of God.” T.D. Jakes on how some preachers over-rely on anger in preaching.

“Just because someone doesn’t want you in their circle anymore doesn’t mean that they can’t be in yours.”  James Macdonald quoting Craig Groeschel

“There is a difference between leadership development and developing leaders.” (missed the source)

And finally, this raw confession:

“I always knew God loved me, but I thought it was because he had to. Now I realize he wants to.”  Steven Furtick

Loved the Elephant Room.

What other insights have you gleaned lately, at the ER or elsewhere that have helped you?

Had a great conversation last week with some leaders who lobbed a fresh thought my way.  We were talking about preachers, and being one, that always gets my interest up.

As we talked about effective communication,  one of the people said that the best ways to evaluate a preacher is to watch with the sound turned off.  Most preachers, he observed, look angry.

That was a huge insight.

How I say something is as important as what I say.  I had already noticed that most of us need to smile more; most of us look moderately unhappy much of the time.  But this observation really drove it home.

Now there are moments where we can rightfully be angry.  But all the time?  Every Sunday? Every day?  No. No wonder people are afraid of God.

Maybe this goes beyond preaching into life.  What if you simply decided to tell your face to match your mood every time you:

Walk into a meeting

Meet a friend

Arrive home at night

Greet your children

Picked up the phone

Start skyping

Pump gas

I don’t want my default to be a scowl.  In part because I don’t like people who are like that.  But also because I know a God who decided to make his final word “love”.

So…every time you move into a new situation today (if you don’t have something other than ‘the usual stuff” to communicate) try smiling.

It might communicate more than you think.

So what are you committing yourself to?

In most cases, you will be tempted to commit yourself to one of two things: process or outcome.

I found myself on the elliptical the other morning.  Unfortunately there was a mirror in front of it.  I saw visitbly the 15 pounds that still need to come off.  Then I had this thought:  there are a lot of overweight people who work out every day (please understand, I’m not slamming overweight people…I just know I have no excuse for being one.)

I’m tempted to give myself points for showing up.  Points for engaging the process.  I did a solid hour on the elliptical plus ab crunches and some push ups.  That counts right?  And I biked three hours last week.  Good for me right?

Well, sort of.  If you’re only scoring process.  But if you’re scoring outcomes, well that’s different. I know I’ve needed to get back to ideal weight now for a few years.  And I’m not there.

In every area of life, it’s easy for me to measure process rather than outcome.

I worked for hours on this message.

I followed everything everyone told me to do.

I got it done in record time.

I had exactly the number of people you asked for engaged on the project.

You have no idea how hard our team worked on that.

Everything was done precisely according to format.

And that’s fine.  The problem is that’s often where it ends: it’s just fine.  And sometimes it’s not even that.

Process is important, but what if you started measuring outcomes instead?

That message helped hundreds of people get closer to God.

That series drew a record number of new attenders.

Our client was so thrilled with the project he brought us five new referrals.

The 100th phone call finally resulted in a great job offer.

I lost 10 pounds this month.

People can’t stop talking about that event.

We had 35 new families register with us after that appeal.

People who measure outcomes keep changing the process until they get the results they need.  And then they change it again to see if they can do better.

What are you measuring?  Process or outcome?

There are too many overweight people who work out every day.  Too many preachers who spend three days on messages that help almost no one.  And far too many people who will get to four o’clock and call the day a win because they got through the pile in front of them.

And no one will be much better for it.

How do you measure outcomes?  What keeps you stuck to measuring process?

I finished the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson a few months ago.  Not only is it one of the few books I actually wished was thousands of pages longer than it actually was (I LOVED it), it offered fascinating insight into Job’s character and management style.

Job’s style was everything they tell you in business school and leadership courses not to be. Impulsive, volatile, eccentric, extreme and driven are just a few of the words that would seem to describe Job’s style. He was, by most accounts, almost impossible to work with. He was deeply immature at times, even abusive.

In so many ways, he’s like a study in how not to manage and lead than anything.

Except that it worked. Except that he was also brilliant and exceptionally successful.

Had I worked with Jobs, my advice would likely have been for him to take the edges off his personality. Many tried that and failed.

But here’s the key question:  were his eccentricities a good thing in the end?  Was it in fact the edges of his personality that made Jobs the leader that he was and made Apple the company it became?

Please don’t get me wrong…I don’t think reading an account of Steve Job’s life is any justification to show up Monday morning to berate your staff and or create a 90 hour a week work culture (both of which were characteristic of Apple). Nor is it a licence to unleash the lesser elements of your character on the people closest to you.

Jobs was anything but a balanced leader. He was extreme in his personality.  And as I reflect on the great leaders I know and admire, I respect, I realize that only a few of them are actually what we call ‘balanced’ people.  Their personalities have edges. Edges that impact the people around them. They can be impulsive. They can work too much (or selectively). They stand out because they are different – often quite different – than most other people. It’s what makes them who they are.

Which leads me to a bigger question: Does greatness ever really involve balance?

Few great leaders we study were balanced.  From Lincoln, to John A. MacDonald, to Churchill to Kennedy to Edison to Billy Graham, few leaders lead a very balanced life.  Neither did Jesus. He was so extreme in his ethic and life that he alienated many who tried to follow him. Paul was hardly everybody’s best friend in the early church. Moses didn’t exactly clock out at four every day and settle down to watch TV with his family every Tuesday. I can’t think of a single biblical character who lives a balanced life.  In fact, most of them are strange enough that we might keep our distance.

So why think about this at all? Here’s why: just about everyone around you is going to try to take the edges off of your personality. And for sure, you should stop sinning.   You should never use a life story like Steve Jobs’ to justify outrageous behaviour.  You should listen to counsel and even cherish rebukes. But maybe you shouldn’t let it kill who you are.  Do you always have to ‘work on your weaknesses’ like every management review suggests you need to?

If you polished all the strange edges off your personality, do you kill what God created?  Maybe the things that drive you and some of the very people around you nuts are the things that God will use to help accomplish his purposes.

What do you think? Does greatness arise from balance? Or sometimes does it also legitimately arise from the edges of our personality that sometimes we wish weren’t there?

The problem with most of us is not that we don’t dream big enough, it’s that our dreams and goals get lost in the shuffle each working day.

The biggest casualty of the daily grind, surprisingly, is not your inboxes (they eventually get emptied), your meeting schedule (you make your meetings) or the urgent things that have to get done.

The casualty is the important things.  The things that will drive your life and organization forward.  The thing that will fuel your mission, move you to another level and the thing that will inevitably give you the deepest satisfaction.

The problem is you never get to those things.

Last year, I tried something different.  I decided to spend a chunk of my time and energy every month working on one big thing.  Something so big it was literally a goal that would take a full year to implement.  It became the one big thing I was working on.

Last year it was a financial goal: to help hundreds of  families find financial margin in their lives, to help them live on mission financially and create a stronger future for us together as a church.  I did a few things to help me accomplish this goal. A few of the things I did include:

• setting time aside every week to work on this one big thing.
• engaging our whole team on this one big thing.
• enlisting  Casey Graham and Giving Rocket to help us (I’m not being paid to give this endorsement, but seriously, ministry leaders you should join Giving Rocket).
• deciding to make a full year commitment to the project, and an ongoing commitment to make it part of our DNA.
• being willing to measure results annually, not just weekly or monthly.

The results surprised even me.  We surpassed every target we set.  The only difference this year is this single subject had far more of my attention and the attention of our team.  Sure, we prayed and God was very gracious.  But God wasn’t any less gracious on the years we failed to meet our hopes and dreams.  He’s always been in favour of generosity.

It made me realize the difference the focus on the leader can have.  And with so many things competing for it, it’s our responsibility to choose our focus carefully and strategically.

This year, my focus is going to be on leadership development.  12 months of committed focus to helping raise up more leaders.  This has always been important.  It just hasn’t had my full attention.  But this year it will.

So what about you?  What’s your one big thing you need to get done but never find time for?  Here are some questions to help you discover it

• What would on things would most benefit the mission you’re trying to accomplish?
• What do you hope to accomplish more than anything else over the next twelve months?
• What would make the organization you help lead significantly better twelve months from now if you were to accomplish it?

We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish by focusing on something for a week, and underestimate what can be accomplished if we focus on something for a year.   Take it a step further:  after having focused on ten things over a decade, can you imagine how different your world could be?

What have you learned about setting one big goal?  How has it helped channel your energy and attention?

Leadership requires a certain amount of courage.  Actually a ton of courage.

A leader has to get people to go where they wouldn’t go if it wasn’t for the leader.   Did you catch that?   Great leadership calls people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do.  That’s why it’s so hard. How many of us really like to do things we wouldn’t normally do?

Which is why a major battle every leader faces is fear.  I’m increasing convinced that what’s capping the potential of so much in the church and in life these days is just plain fear.

We’re afraid of:

• People who will leave
• The unknown
• Not being up to the task
• Blowing the success we’ve already experienced
• People who will stop giving
• Losing our popularity
• Having to suffer

You and I need to deal with our fears.  Because something happens to fear when you let it incubate.

When fear becomes a habit, it becomes really difficult to tell the difference between fear and laziness. The writer of Proverbs 26:13 understood that:

The lazy person claims, “There’s a lion on the road!

Yes, I’m sure there’s a lion out there!”

I hear people say it all the time, there are more than a few lazy leaders out there.  Some may always have been lazy.  But I wonder if the rest just let fear become a habit.  And after awhile, there’s very little difference between the fearful leader and the lazy leader.

They get the same results in the end.  And it really no longer matters how they started out; the end is the same.

How many dreams have died in your heart because you were afraid?  How many dreams died in the hearts of others because you were afraid?  Have you been afraid long enough that people on the outside looking in can’t tell the difference between you and a lazy leader?

Don’t get me wrong, you never set out to lead something because you were lazy.  But eventually, people can’t tell the difference.

Maybe it’s time to start dealing with your fears.  Maybe it’s time to find some courage.  Because nobody likes to be called lazy, even if,  in the end, it’s hard to remember how you got there.

Maybe one of the very best things you can do today is to do something to confront your fears.

Want more time?  Who doesn’t?

I’m going to share one practice that has made the biggest difference for me in managing time. When I made this change, it was almost like someone handed me an extra day or two each week.

I had struggled for years to balance my time.  While I experienced some advances over the years, the biggest shift for me happened a few years ago when I moved to a fixed schedule. While this isn’t a particularly new discipline or astonishing insight, it took me a long time to get there. Most colleagues I know still struggle with balancing time.  The most effective leaders I know have mastered this.

Because what I do is so open ended (it’s ministry…you could have meetings all day, write all day, pray all day, work strategy all day or I suppose figure out other ways to spend your time) rather than seeing all my time as open, I created a master schedule for my work and life, and committed myself to it.  I decided to spend my time the same way every week; I committed to a fixed schedule.

For me, I landed on spending 40% of my time meeting with people and 60% of my time out of meetings.

Deciding to spend 60% of my time alone, writing, creating messages, working on strategy, leading and creating was very liberating;  like you, I have enough meeting requests and opportunities to spend 100% of my time in meetings and never attend to some of the most important work I do: lead, reflect, pray, write, plan, create and develop.  And the urgent requests to meet always seemed to be more pressing than the important things I needed to get to but didn’t have time for.

So I simply decided ahead of time to spend over half my time doing the things a leader should be doing but no one ever asks me to do (people only ever ask you for meetings or attention to their needs).  No one ever asks you to book time to write a message, think, advance the mission or create something new.  So I just decided to book it for myself.

While everyone will be different, here’s how I organize my time:

Monday: Writing day – no meetings (message prep, blogging, meeting preparation, brainstorming, time for reflection, leadership projects)

Tuesday: Meeting day (various staff teams meetings, all day)

Wednesday:  Writing day – no meetings (message prep, blogging, meeting preparation, brainstorming, time for reflection, leadership projects, sometimes a coaching call with another leader or mentor)

Thursday: Meeting day (direct report one on one meetings most of the day)

Friday: Float day (often I work on messages and if I travel, I often make it a Friday-Saturday)

Saturday: Off

Sunday: Teach and lead

The game changer for me in this is that when people used to request meetings, I would usually feel obligated to book them into any and all free space in my calendar. Now I don’t.  Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays are legitimately ‘busy’ days…spent working on the things no one ever asks you to work on.  If people want to meet in person, my assistant keeps two breakfast slots (Tuesday and Thursday) and one free slot a week open.  I usually spend that time with our staff, elders or someone who is new to faith or going through a significant life transition.  Everyone else gets referred to someone who can better help them with what they are going through.

One final tip: when people ask you for an immediate appointment, you or your assistant can legitimately say you have no available time that week.  That’s not mean, that’s just true; you’re working on what will best advance the mission you’ve all committed yourselves to.   And with some wide open slots in your calendar, you haven’t completely cordoned yourself off from the people you love and serve.   This is not an excuse for isolation, laziness or inaccessibility.  It’s just the best way I know how to ensure you spend your time advancing the mission.

Every week I still get more requests than I can handle, but people are patient.  Sometimes other people in the organization are better suited to meet with them anyway.  At other times, the issues that were so pressing the day they asked resolve themselves by the time a spot in the calendar is open.  Plus it frees me up to work on what is best going to advance our mission, which should benefit everyone, including them.

The details are far less important than the principle: decide ahead of time how you can best spend your time, create a fixed schedule, and stick to it.  No guilt.

What are you learning about time management?  What’s your best insight?  What do you still struggle with?

Here are some random changes you can make to help make 2012 a better year:

1.  Believe the best about people. Make trust your default, not suspicion.

2.  Be on time. Great leaders are rarely late.

3.  Under promise and over deliver. Our tendency is to do the opposite.

4.  Stop blaming people. Just stop.  Your will start taking responsibility for yourself as a result.

5. Pray for your enemies. You will forgive them…and they will not be your enemies for long.

6.  Review the week ahead on Sunday night for ten minutes. Monday won’t seem nearly as intimidating

7.  Get up earlier. The early bird actually usually does get the worm.

8. Go to bed earlier. Stop falling asleep on the couch.

9.  Read the bible. Read at least 3 verses of scripture every morning, more if you’re up to it.

10. Never say “I don’t have the time.” Instead, say “I’m not going to make the time.”   It will change how you see time…and priorities.

11.  Smile. Most people look moderately unhappy most of the time.

12.  Clean your personal space. A clean desk, car or office makes you feel better about yourself.

13.  Give 10%.  Give away the first tenth of everything you make.  You’ll be surprised at how liberating this is.

14.  Pay cash (as in bills in your wallet) for discretionary items. You will spend less and save more.

15.  Exercise.  Enough said.  Just get moving.

16.  Do something for yourself everyday. People who care for themselves are better at caring for others.

17.  Read outside your area of interest. Apps like Zite and Flipboard even make this so easy.

18.  Automate what’s important. Schedule appointments with yourself for what matters.  Automatically take savings and givings out of your bank accounts.

19. Serve somewhere. People who serve others live longer and are happier.

20.  Show up prepared. Whether it’s a meeting or simply coming home, prepare yourself before you show up.

21.  Play. Most of us have forgotten how to play.  Rediscover it.

What would you add to this list?  What’s helped you the most?

I love New Year’s because I love progress.

Over the weekend I wrote a full page list of goals I want to accomplish in 2012, personally and in ministry.  What scared me is that a few of my goals look eerily like some of my goals from early 2011.

Some of that is understandable: big goals don’t always get accomplished in 12 months.  But some was honestly just a lack of follow through.  But what I don’t want to do (and what I don’t think you want to do) is to make resolutionsonly  to break them or ignore them.

So what’s the secret to keeping the resolutions you make?

Writing them down? Nope.  I’ve not kept resolutions I’ve written down.

Commitment? No, I’m pretty committed to what I write down.

Developing a plan? I’ve had plans that I’ve not followed before either.

Discipline? I can be pretty disciplined in some areas but not in others.

So what is it?  Why do I keep some resolutions but not others?  I spend some time reflecting on that and realized that when I add two key ingredients into my new year’s resolution process, my accomplishment rate jumps significantly:

Specific Accountability. When I personally track with someone on my goals, I am far more likely to meet them.  Whether you join a club, hire a trainer, meet with a consultant or share the goals you have with mentors or a personal board of directors, creating specific accountability will help you fulfil far more of your goals.

Measuring the Cost of Non-Fulfilment. When I count the cost of not fulfilling a goal, I am more likely to fulfill it.  The tough part is that a lot of the consequences to not fulfilling your goals are far down the road.  Not losing 20 pounds probably won’t kill you this year, but it might in 20 years.  Financial irresponsibility may not bankrupt you in 2012, but it could expose you to real hardship three years from now.  Neglecting your relationship with God, your marriage or your parenting might not create any immediate crisis a year from now, but give it five years and you could end up divorced, estranged from your kids and feeling like God has lost all interest in you.

In addition to writing down my goals this year, I’m focusing in on specific accountability on each one of them with a couple of key people in my life.  In fact, last week I had a friend tell me to give him my list of goals and he was going to personally commit to helping me accomplish them this year.  What an incredible gift!  Even writing them knowing we were going to have a year long dialogue on every one of them made me realize that I’d better be serious about each of them.

I’m also going to pay more attention to what’s at stake if I miss any of them this year.  Again, the short term cost might be small, but the long term cost could be much higher.

How about you?  What do you find helpful in reaching your goals?

…is standing in the way of what you should do.

As your life gets more complicated and the world gets smaller, there are so many things you could do with your time, resources and energy.

That wasn’t always true.  In a pre-wired world, our personal universe was smaller and many of us longed for opportunities.  You only got news when you bought a newspaper or turned on a tv (and even then, what you saw had been pre-narrowed for you).  You only really learned when you had a book or took a course or got out into another forum.  It was far more difficult to start something, whether that was a writing project (who would publish you?) or a not-for-profit or a business.  But now you can start almost anything anytime you want.  It’s just easy.

There is so much you could do.

But there are only a few things you should do.

What you could do will always compete with what you should do, until you figure out what you should be doing.  And that will help refocus and eliminate all the coulds until you focus 90% of your time on the handful of shoulds that will become your life. (You can leave the 10% for fun and experimentation with what could be.)

I’ve had to spend a lot of time over the last few years figuring out what the best use of my time is because the possibilities keep multiplying.  What I could do seems to keep growing for me as it does for you too.  It’s just the nature of world we live in.  But the more you realize that could doesn’t mean should,  the more you will discover what your true mission in life is.  In fact, you may finally find your sweet spot.

What you could do is always standing in the way of what you should do.

What should you being doing today?  Eliminate a few more things you could be doing and you might find out.