There is a sense, if you are an achiever and hard working,  that to achieve the mission you can’t afford to have much personal margin.  You need to keep pushing evening and weekends and even plow through vacation.

The last couple of months have been intense.  With a full plate at Connexus where I serve as lead pastor, a potential building campaign and capital campaign, special projects, and even writing a book, there haven’t been a ton of free hours.

My mistake this time around in writing my latest book, Leading Change Without Losing It, (due out next month) was that I tried to work on it almost every weekend and evening that was free.  So I was never really “off” and also less effective on most things.  While I’m really thrilled how the book turned out, I’m not as thrilled with how I turned out.  I didn’t ‘lose it”, but man, I got tired.

Fortunately, this is just a season, a season I can learn from.

The problem, of course, is if you consistently fail to build margin into your life, you kill the mission.

Over time, leaders who constantly sacrifice margin discover this: There is no mission without margin.

I mean you can try to keep pushing ahead relentlessly (and some of you are tempted to do that), but eventually, you’ll end up both exhausted and ineffective.  The more tired you get, the less productive you become.  The more exhausted you become, the more likely it is that you will stop working – even for a season – like a laptop that drained its battery completely.

Sometimes those of us driven types see margin as an enemy. But margin is not an enemy:  it is our friend.  Without margin, there is no mission.

Laziness is resting when you’re not tired.  Sabbath is resting because you have laboured six days.  God opposes laziness, but he loves well-deserved rest.

Next time I run through a busy season, I’m going to better block out time:  one night a week and one day a week (one of my weekend days)  for ‘extra’ work and a greater time window for completion.  I think it will result in greater balance and ensure both the book and the writer come out the other side better.

What are you learning about margin and mission these days?  What helps you?

It’s really quite simple: give everyone a say.

Change is almost impossible when everyone has a say.

The problem with giving everyone a say is that everyone has an opinion.  When everyone has an opinion, it’s impossible to get consensus.  And even if you pull off the Herculean feat of getting consensus from a crowd, the vision will be so diluted it won’t be worth sacrificing for.

So here’s a tough question to start your week:  how much time are you spending as a leader trying to get consensus from everyone on the change you are trying to make? Ever wonder if that’s killing your ability to change?

I realize this thought runs counter to much of what we accept in church world and even in business, but push hard.  Can you ever find an example where an effective biblical leader tried to give everyone a say?  I suppose the best example is when Moses disappeared and Aaron took over and listened to the people (Exodus 32).  If the goal of our change is gold calfs and idol worship, giving everyone a say may be exactly what we need to do.

Later this week we’ll look at how input works best when it comes to change, but in the meantime, ask yourself this:  how much time was I going to waste this week trying to get everyone to buy into the changes I want to make?

If you stop focusing on everyone, you might get somewhere worth going.

As you seek to make changes as a leader, you’ve probably asked these questions:

Why do people resist the changes we’re trying to make?

Why can’t people just see that this is a great idea?

Why do some people push back so hard?

While there are quite a few answers to those questions, here’s one we often overlook.

Change is a good word for you as a leader, but it’s not necessarily a good word for everyone else.

Nobody is more excited by the changes you’re proposing than you are.  You have a hard time understanding why anyone would oppose what seems so logical, smart and obvious to you.  For leaders, change is a good word.

Except for the fact that when you’re not acting in your capacity as a leader, change is rarely a good word.  If you don’t believe me, consider your emotional reaction if today anyone asked you to do even one of these things:

Change all your online passwords

Change a tire

Change a diaper

Change your vacation plans

Change your diet

Change the batteries in your smoke detectors

Do you feel any positive association with any of these activities?  Didn’t think so.

See, when you’re not  leading the change in question, you don’t like being changed either.

What that can give you as a leader is empathy for the people who are undergoing change with you.  It can help you understand their mindset, and help you realize that change is indeed, difficult, even if you are hyper-stoked about it as a leader.

And if you understand that people will at first be resistant, they’ll realize that you understand their push back.  And once they realize that you understand, they’ll be more likely to come on board.

What have you learned about resistance to change?

We’re talking about change this week on the blog.  Yesterday we talked about the need to transfer the tension you feel to others if you hope to bring about change.  And one of the best ways to bring about change is to raise people’s discontent with the status quo.

But how do you do that?  How do you transfer the tension?  How do you raise the level of discontent in others with the status quo.

A natural way to do that is to make statements.

Things need to change.

No one should accept things the way they are.

This is unacceptable.

We should really be open to X.

Statements have a role to play, and they work if there’s a crisis everyone can see.  The problem is as a leader that often you’re one of the few that perceives a crisis.  Many others don’t.  And when they don’t statements can backfire.

No one like to be told what to do.  We resist being told how to think.

So if you want to raise the level of discontent with the status quo, how do you do it in a way that facilitates buy-in, not push-back?

Ask more questions, and make fewer statements.

Instead of telling people what you think in every conversation or telling them what they should think, try asking questions.

What do you think the opportunities are to reach people in our community?

If we kept going this way, what do you think might happen in five years?

What do you think might happen to our kids if we’re not open to change?

What can we learn from other churches that are making an impact in their community?

What would happen if we started rethinking some of our assumptions?

When you start asking more questions, a few things happen:

1. People buy in faster.
2. They become more engaged in the conversation.
3. They ‘own’ the answer.
4. They might even come to think that the change was their idea.

And suddenly, something that was your idea becomes shared. A tension you felt over your discontent with the status quo becomes shared by others.  And you are a few steps further down the road toward change.

What have you learned about asking questions?

If you’re a leader, you feel tension.

Part of the tension you feel is your dissatisfaction with the status quo; you’re not fully satisfied with the way things are. After reading a book, coming back from a conference, meeting with other leaders or simply landing on a new idea, you want to change things.

I’ve been there many times as a leader. In fact, sometimes I think I live there. That tension fuels the drive to create, the drive to dream, and the drive to change. I am relentlessly dissatisfied with the status quo. I want to trade in what is for what could be pretty much every day.

I realize some of that may be unhealthy, but ultimately that tension is what actually drives all change.

The problem is, most people don’t feel your tension. They are mostly satisfied with the way things are. Part of what attracted them to whatever you are leading are the changes you made yesterday, not the changes you want to make today. They cannot see what you see until you make them discontent enough to see it.

If you work at it, they can start to feel the tension you feel. In fact, if you are ever going to be successful at driving effective change, you need to become successful at transfering tension.

If you can solve that, you can solve so much more.

What if you made it this week to transfer some tension?

What if this week you shared your vision of what could be with someone who can help you change your world?

If that tension ultimately gets shared by dozens, hundreds, or thousands or people, you might have a revolution on your hands.

And that may be exactly what everyone needs.

So you’re almost ready to head home from three days of high octane inspiration and information at Orange Conference. You have ideas and dreams that have you incredibly motivated and excited. There are only two problems:

1. You aren’t the senior leader in your church.
2. The senior leader isn’t here (or is but doesn’t buy in).

What do you do? Here are five strategies on how to lead up when you get home:

1. Slow down. You will be tempted to go home and burst onto the scene with unbridled enthusiasm, casting vision for sweeping change. That might be a mistake. Don’t overestimate what you can accomplish in a month. But don’t underestimate what you can accomplish in a year if you have a well-thought through strategy and approach.

2. Think comprehensively. Orange is a strategy. It’s designed to work throughout the church. Make sure you take some time to process what you’ve learned to see how it impacts the entire organization. Understand that your senior pastor may have budget restraints and many other interests to balance. Show him or her that your proposal understands that and you’re willing to be flexible on some points. Showing your senior leader you understand the bigger picture is huge.

3. Express desires, not demands. No one likes a demanding person. In fact, when someone demands something there’s something inside me that wants to not give them what they asked for. I don’t always follow that impulse, but expressing demands damages relationships. Instead, talk about what you desire. Show respect and tell him how you feel – don’t tell him how you think he should feel. And above all, don’t be demanding.

4. Explain the why behind the what. Your best argument is not the what (we need to completely transform our church and here’s how to do it). It’s the why (I think I’ve discovered a more effective way to reach families in our community and help parents win at home…can I talk to you about that?) The more you explain the why, the more people will be open to the what and the how. Lead with why. Season your conversation with why. And close with why.

5. Stay publicly loyal. Andy Stanley has said it this way: public loyalty buys you private leverage. It’s so true. If you start complaining about how resistant your senior leader is, not only does that compromise your personal integrity, he’s not dumb. He’ll probably hear about it and he will lose respect for you. In my mind as a senior leader, the team members who conduct themselves like a cohesive team always have the greatest private influence. Your public loyalty will buy you private leverage.

Well, those are a few thoughts from a guy who is a senior leader. What are you learning in this area? What’s worked for your team as you’ve engineered change?

I love conferences. But like any good thing, if you’re not careful, you can still fall into some traps:

Here are five I see, most of which I have had some personal experience with:

1. Accepting inspiration as a subsitute for execution. Sometimes you really do need a new idea or insight. And inspiration is amazing! Conferences provide that. But what you absolutely must do is execute. So many great ideas fail for lack of execution. A great conference is not about how inspired you feel, what you did with what you learned (and experienced).

2. Assuming the speakers have it all together. As Steven Furtick has somewhat famously said, all of us compare our B roll with everyone else’s highlight reel. What you are getting from conference speakers is their very best material. They go home to problems just like you do – just different problems. When we forget that – even for a moment – we start to feel badly about our own ministries and begin to imagine how awesome it would be if we worked for another church. Guess what? Once in a while even the best speaker feels the same way. They see all the cracks in their organization too – just like you do. Ironically, good leaders always see the problems. You just see yours more clearly.

3. Poking holes in other people’s success stories. This is the flip side of trap #2. You can believe that some leaders live in a land of bliss, or you can become the cynic who discounts every other success story and comes up with a thousand reasons why they have met with more success than you have. Quite frankly, that’s just envy. And insecurity. And not from God. Just don’t go there. That kind of conversation doesn’t help anybody, not even you.

4. Skipping out. Somewhere on day two, we all get overwhelmed. It’s easy to skip out on sessions and you are on full overload and go for a coffee instead. I suppose if you paid for the conference fully out of your own pocket, you are free to do that. But if you didn’t, you kind of have a responsibility, don’t you? And althought it might be two or three days of intense learning, if you take good notes, you can really benefit from what you learned over a few days for years down the road.

5. Not thinking systems. Sure, we all get dozens of ideas at a conference. But they tend to come from a variety of sources and contexts. Most leaders operate within a consistent ‘model’ or ‘system’. When you hear multiple speakers, you are actually hearing mutiple models and multiple systems. While they are all ‘successful’, they are not all compatible. It’s work, but it’s a great idea to think through the assumptions and systems underneath each idea and then figure out how they integrate together and how they might integrate in your system. Otherwise it’s a bit like taking your MacBook in for repair and fixing it with parts from an iPad, an Android smart phone and a gaming system. They all work within their context, but put them together randomly in your computer and nothing might work.

These are some traps I’ve seen (and sometimes fallen into). What traps have you discovered?

This week we’re talking about conferences and how to get the most out of them.  Along with about 5000 others, I’m in Atlanta for the Orange Conference, an amazing gathering of world class leaders to talk leadership, family and church.

In addition to figuring out how to apply what you’ve learned (we talked about this yesterday), conference provide another challenge and opportunity: the other 5000 people in the room with you.  If you are like me, you instinctively duck crowds, and you intuitively gravitate to the people you know best.  I love investing in our team and connecting with leaders I know, but in the midst of this it’s easy to miss one of the best opportunities a conference like Orange provides: meeting other great leaders.

Here are five lessons about networking that have helped me:

1. Be willing to learn from everyone. Let’s face it, the ‘food chain’ shows up everywhere in life. And well known, influential people show up at conferences. Don’t just try to meet people further up the career/status ladder than you are. I have learned a ton over the years from people in smaller churches who are not ‘famous’. And there was a day when the people giving keynotes on the mainstage were young leaders no one had heard of sitting in a back row like the rest of us. I have learned a ton of great lessons from ‘ordinary’ conversations over the years. Treasure those.

2. Don’t lead with your numbers. Why is it we feel we need to disclose our attendance and budget in the first five minutes of a conversation? Maybe we feel we have something to prove. Maybe we feel superior or inadequate. This is something God is beating out of me. But when I try to show how ‘big’ my church is (it’s not that huge, actually) or how much money we’ve raised, I build a wall between me and the person I’m talking to. It turns your first few minutes of conversation into a comparison game where someone wins and someone loses. Sometimes it is good to talk numbers, but usually only after a relationship has been established, and with a view to gaining insight, not gaining advantage. Humility doesn’t seek to impress.

3. Be fully present. This is such a learned behaviour for me. When I start a conversation, I’m rarely thinking only about that conversation. My mind is racing. Even if I’m not thinking about something else, I’m thinking about how not to mess up this conversation or what I’ll say next. That’s never good. Increasingly, I’m focusing on looking the person in the eye, really hearing their story and asking questions. Guess what? The more I do this, the more meaningful these connections become.

4. Follow them and friend them. While you can’t follow everyone you meet, there are a few for sure you’ll want to track. Take your phone out and follow them on twitter or friend them on Facebook…either during or after the conversation (if during, tell them you’re looking for them!). One of the reasons I love social networking is it allows me to track with hundreds of people I couldn’t track with otherwise. I’ve developed some great friendships with people I rarely get a chance to see.

5. Ask yourself some good questions. Increasingly when I’m in conversations with new people (pretty much every day), I walk into those encounters with two questions:
a. What can I learn?
b. How can I serve?
It doesn’t matter who I’m talking to, I can always learn something. Also, I decided a while back that I would try to serve everyone I meet. I know it sounds a bit cheesey, but we are servants after all. Sometimes it’s a word of encouragement. Sometimes it’s a piece of information they are looking for. Sometimes it’s something tangible. It’s not that I have anything to offer nearly as much as it is that Jesus commands us to serve others.

These are five things that help me become a better networker. I can honestly say I’ve loved the connections God has allowed me to make over the years.

What have you learned about networking?
 

So this is Orange Conference 2012 week!  I love conferences and have had the privilege of attending (and even teaching) at every Orange Conference so far.  I love it!  And this year I’m even more excited than before (don’t know why, just am…).

So I thought I’d share some reflections on this whole art of attending conferences and talk about some of the pitfalls and opportunities a lot of us run into at conference.  Today, let’s start with what I see as the biggest pitfall most of us (including me) run into at conferences.

Over-learning and under-applying.

We can’t really help the over-learning part.  Being at a great conference is like drinking from a fire hose.  Having spent good money on the registration, hotels, flights and meals, you would hope there would be more than a few insights. And there will be.  Ironically, most of them will be lost if you don’t know how to capture them.

So here are some ideas to help you apply what you’re learning:

1. Capture notes in a way YOU will use them. Conference books and handout sheets aren’t for everyone.  I tend to come home, park them, and forget them.  I do a better job when I enter the notes in something I will use.  Like Evernote, or even the note application on your phone or iPad.  Or if you love analogue, bring your favourite note book and use it.  Just make sure that you capture them in a way you will use them.
2. Capture ONE main takeaway from every talk. Not every insight is created equal.  Just because you have yellow highlights all over a set of notes doesn’t mean it will help you.  Before you leave the room, circle what you think your main, do-able point is – the one thing you don’t want to forget.  Better yet, rewrite it at the bottom of your notes.  When you rewrite it, you remember it.
3. Process with your TEAM. We’ll have a dozen people at Orange from Connexus.  At night, we’ll process big take aways with the whole team.  This helps, and gets us ready for step four.  And if you don’t have a team, make one up.  Find a friend and go have lunch and dinner with them and process together.  The more you talk about things, the more they will sink in.
4. Write a REPORT. I am so not an admin guy, but I have to admit the value of something our Director of Operations put in place a few years ago.  If you go on a church-funded trip, you need to write your top insights down on paper when you get back.   Make this your summary – capture your best insights with practical action steps you will take over the next weeks and months.
5. CALENDAR Your Action Steps. Make some appointments with yourself in your calendar or to-do list and review your insights and action steps to stay on course.

The conference will still be tons of fun, but you won’t just walk away with memories of great experiences, amazing conversations, inspired talks and powerful worship – you’ll actually be a better leader and your ministry will be stronger.

What have you learned about applying what you’ve learned at a conference?  What would you add to this list?

PS. Tomorrow we’ll talk about networking at conferences.

If you’re a leader, you’re the lid.

The group and organization you lead, over time, will rarely grow past where you’ve grown. If you stop growing in an area, people who want to grow past that point will simply find another leader to follow.

When I think about it, it makes me nervous.  I realize that, as a leader, I set limits that impact others.  It challenges me to get better every time I realize I might set the lid on our organization’s:

Spiritual maturity

Emotional health

Relational depth

Financial balance

Cultural vibrancy

And so much more.

So what do you do about it?

1. Get healthy.  Spend time with Christ.  Go see a counselor.  Get the help you need.

2. Become more self-aware.  Seeing your limits is one of the best ways to begin to address them.  Self-deception is one of the worst kinds of deception around.  Healthy leaders don’t gravitate toward people who lack self-awareness.

3.  Recruit people who are better than you. One of the keys to creating a better organization is to recruit around your weaknesses.  You will never be the best at everything.  Focusing on what you do best but finding people who are far better than you are at most things can help you create a community that excels at far more than you do.

Knowing I’m the lid challenges me to get better in every area, even while realizing that others will be better than I am.  One of the things I’ve done to help with this is to get feedback on my strengths and weaknesses.  Other people see you far more clearly than you do…and if you’re willing to come to terms with what they see, it will really accelerate your growth.  Not to mention the health and growth of your community.

What are you doing about your lid today?