I got a text from a friend last week. He sent me a picture of his company’s logo and a comment someone had made on the logo online.

My friend is leading a great organization that’s helping thousands of leaders. His ministry is having a significant impact.

The comment was typical ‘hater’ stuff. The commenter questioned my friend’s motives and integrity and even hinted at whether my friend’s faith was genuine.

Even with all the success and affirmation my friend is receiving (deservedly), that random comment hurt.

That’s how it is, right?

A hundred thank you’s and life change stories can vaporize when a single negative comment comes your way.

And even though that kind of feedback is cheap (it takes real guts to post a critical comment on line, doesn’t it?) it’s still hurtful.

Chances are if you’re a leader, you’ve been on the receiving end of criticism.

You pour dozens of hours (and your heart) into a message just to have someone dismiss it as ‘irrelevant’.

You navigate significant changes in your ministry for the sake of the future and someone says you should be fired.

You challenge the status quo and argue for a better future and you get written off as a dreamer.

How do you avoid criticism like that?

Believe it or not, there actually is a surefire way:

The best way to avoid criticism is to do nothing significant.

So go ahead.

Stop trying to change the world.

Stop trying to make a difference.

Stop believing when everyone else has grown cynical.

Stop investing in the lives of others.

Stop caring when others merely shrug.

Stop devoting your life to a cause bigger than yourself.

Stop fighting for what’s right when others pass by.

Stop caring.

And then people will stop criticizing you.

Devote your life to doing nothing significant. The critics will leave you alone.

But of course, if you do that, you will come to the end of your life and realize you wasted it.

Here’s what’s true.

No significant progress is made without opposition.

And if you’re drawing unavoidable criticism (watch for my next post on the line between justified and unjustified criticism), you’re in good company.

The Israelites were ready to stone Moses, and even his siblings rebelled against him.

Joseph was sold out by his family.

Jesus was crucified by his enemies (you could argue that Jesus had more critics than supporters at the end of his life…just read to the end of the Gospels).

Luther was excommunicated.

Calvin was hated.

If you think there is a way to do something significant and avoid criticism, I’d love to hear it. I’m not sure you can escape it.

Case in point. There are few leaders in the church today with more influence than Andy Stanley. Being the Lead Pastor of a strategic partner church of North Point, I’ve seen Andy not only on stage but behind the scenes. I can vouch for his personal integrity at the highest of levels.

You would think with all the progress Andy has made not just for his church, but for the church, critics would leave him alone. But they don’t. When you read the comments on this CNN article about Andy, you’ll realize that anyone doing anything significant will get a boatload of criticism (often from people who have done nothing significant with their own lives). It both saddened me and made me angry to read the comments on the article.

Criticism is inevitably a companion of true leadership.

So, you have a choice.

Do nothing significant.

or

Prepare for some criticism.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how to handle and filter the criticism you get.

But in the meantime, I hope in some strange way, this post encourages you.

If you’re attracting criticism, it just may be a sign you’re doing something significant.

And if you’re not, maybe you should get started.

It’s almost unthinkable in leadership circles to say anything negative about teams.

Trust me, I am a HUGE believer in teams. I work with some incredible leadership teams, staff teams, volunteer teams and my kids both played lots of team sports. Teams play a huge role in any measure of success.

But teams are so positively raved about in leadership circles that sometimes we forget they actually do have even a few drawbacks and limitations.

In fact, you already realize this, because as much as you’re a fan of teams, you’ve also been frustrated by them.

Who hasn’t grown frustrated with

Waiting for far too long for a decision to be made?

Overly long agendas that are impossible to get through?

Great ideas that die on the table in meetings?

Teams that don’t have the courage to implement what everybody knows is right?

Even the healthiest teams struggle with a few of these on occasion.

Many of the frustrations around team focus around three key issues. I’ll share the three drawbacks and then suggest a better alternative to each of them.

1. Bottlenecks. As an organization grows, agendas can get so long and discussion can get so drawn out that decisions don’t get made in a timely way. Throw in a vacation day or two when a key team member is away and decisions that could have been made in minutes can take a month. People grow frustrated while waiting for ‘the team’ to get back to them.

2. Courage. As I blogged about here, I think individuals as a rule display more courage than teams. If all your decisions have to go through teams, chances are risks will be avoided and courage might get killed. Sometimes teams are more courageous than individuals, but often not.

3. Ownership. The old adage is true, when everyone is responsible for watering the horse, the horse dies. I thought you were going to do it. Well, I thought you were. Meanwhile, the horse has been in heaven three days. Sometimes you leave a meeting excited by the future only to have that fizzle. No one personally owned the decision. No one was put in charge of follow up. And “everyone’s in favour” has become ‘no one has done anything about it”. All you did was make a decision, but it didn’t impact your direction one bit.

So what do you do about these problems?

Push as much decision making as possible to the individuals responsible.

There are, in most organizations, very few decisions that have to be made by a group. Outside of the annual budget, a change in mission, vision or direction, and maybe a few others, few things really need to be decided in team.

Inspired by books like this, we recently changed our meeting structure at Connexus so almost no decisions are made in team any more.

Meetings are held for the purposes of communication and discussion, but decisions are made by the staff and volunteers responsible.

Here’s why:

1. If you can’t trust your staff or volunteers, you probably hired the wrong people. If you are constantly second guessing your people, why are they on your team (or why are you on theirs)?

2. Individuals own decisions. When you make the decision, you are far more likely to feel a sense of responsibility for the outcome.

3. Fewer ideas get watered down. When an individual makes a decision (even in consultation with a team), they are likely to run with a ‘pure idea’ (if you have the right people on your team that is). They take more risks.

As a bonus to those who subscribe to my blog via email, I’ll send you the full text of my staff memo to our team empowering individuals to make decisions without team permission. If you haven’t yet subscribed, just fill out the subscribe box on the right of the blog today and you’ll have this post and the document in your inbox tomorrow (February 28th).

What are your frustrations with team decision making? What would you change about team in your environment?

I’m a pastor and, I hate to say, I sometimes tell lies.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate lying. And I try hard to live a life of integrity.

I’m not even good at lying; my wife and kids tell me I’m a terrible liar. They can tell within seconds if I’m trying to pull one past them (practical jokes are really hard to pull off because of this).

But sometimes, as a by-product of what I do in ministry, I say things that aren’t 100% true.

And I’m not sure I’m alone.

In the hopes of keeping me honest (and maybe helping non-pastors understand a pastor’s world), here are 7 lies I’ve caught myself telling:

1. I’m doing great. That’s what I say to almost anyone who asks me how I am. But it’s not always true. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you should burden strangers or Sunday morning guests with the ‘real’ answer, but sometimes I’ve said this to people close to me when I haven’t been great. The point is not that you tell everyone when you’re struggling, but you do need to tell someone.

2.  There were X hundred (thousand) people at the event. There’s even a name for this – pastor math. I have a tendency to round attendance up if I don’t watch myself. Maybe it stems from insecurity. Or a sense of inadequacy. Or insanity. I don’t know. But I have to check myself to make sure I’m accurate. Why do I feel I the truth is inadequate?

3.  It was awesome! Sometimes I’m tempted to spin events as better than they really are. It’s a much better practice to pick out specific things that were genuinely wonderful, and leave things that bothered me to a private debrief later. And if you make it a pattern to say things were awesome when they weren’t, people know. Fortunately for me, I’m part of a church where things are actually awesome a lot of the time. But I need to make sure my vocabulary matches the experience.

4. It was awful. And other times I can write something off as terrible, when the truth is it had redeeming characteristics I’ve missed. It’s rarely as great or as awful as I think. I have to discipline myself to call it what it really is.

5. Yes. Sometimes I say yes when I don’t mean yes. I say yes to make someone happy or to get someone off my case. That’s just not good. Nice is a poor substitute for honesty.

6. No. Sometimes I say no when I don’t mean it either. Sigh. Even when it’s more complicated, it’s good to give the full answer such as “I do weddings occasionally…let me explain how that tends to work” rather than to simply say I don’t do them.

7. I’ll pray for you. This one hurts the most. I know I have sometimes told someone I’ll pray for them, and then I forget. And sometimes (man I’m trying to banish this tendency), I’ll even say “I’ll pray for you” because I know it’s the ‘pastoral’ thing to say. And then I forget. To combat this, sometimes I’ll pray for people on the spot as I walk away so I don’t forget. And I do try to bring to mind people to pray for when I pray. I’m also comforted by the hundreds of people at our church who are praying for each other. But I want to be 100% certain that when I say I’m praying for you, I am.

Jesus’ words are clear; let your yes be yes and your no be no.

If you want to continue to build your integrity (like I do), here’s a post on 5 practical ways to build your integrity. And if you want a quick test on your integrity level, here’s a post outlining 5 signs you lack integrity.

Pastor lies need to go. Even the innocent ones.

How about you? Ever catch yourself in an ‘un-truth’? Any others lies you’ve noticed?