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

This is a piece I originally ran for last year’s Orange Conference, but human nature hasn’t changed that much in the last 12 months (at least mine hasn’t), so I want to repost it again as over 5000 of us descend on Atlanta to learn together and (we pray) serve God better as a result.

Here are five conference traps 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?

I’m a senior pastor, and I’m passionate about “leadership” issues. But I almost missed one of the biggest of them all, all because it had to do with kids and teenagers.

While I have kids of my own, I thought kids in ministry were an issue that we programmed for.

It’s perspective many senior leaders fall into: hire or recruit some capable people to look after kids and teens so you can free up your time not to think about family.

I realize now that my old perspective was dead wrong. What’s more, it was incredibly unstrategic. And let’s add unspiritual into the mix too (I believe God has a heart for families).

My flawed perspective came into sharp focus several years ago. I had invited Reggie Joiner (who founded Orange) to speak at a conference I hosted. I wanted him to talk about leadership and give leadership talks. He agreed, on one condition: that he give one talk on the family.

I didn’t really want him to talk about family, not because I don’t like families (I love mine and many others), but because this was supposed to be about, well, leadership. I only agreed to let him do the talk because it was part of the deal.

So what happened?

I loved his leadership talks.

Almost everyone else couldn’t stop talking about his family talk.

It actually kind of frustrated me at the time. But I couldn’t deny it.

Talking about family lit up our families.

Talking about family lit up our families about their friends and neighbours and how to reach them.

I couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Over the last few years I realized that Reggie is on to something big. He’s onto something that every senior leader ignores to his or her peril.

Family is an issue that demands the focus and attention of every senior leader (and their team) for at least these 5 reasons:

1. Unchurched people never lie awake at night thinking about your next sermon; but they do lie awake at night wondering if their kids are going to be okay. When you start the conversation with unchurched people around the cause of family, you have a conversation they’re already engaged in.  And you want to reach families, right? What if the conversation about family is the greatest evangelism opportunity you’ve got?

2. Family is a universal issue. Sure, not everybody has a family. There are singles, and engaged couples, widows and many who are single again. And not every family is two adults with two kids (not that that was ever the Biblical definition of family anyway.) But everybody comes from family. And many of us spend great chunks of time being impacted by our families, even as adults. While families come in all kinds of different forms, when you speak family, you speak a language everybody understands.

3. Family is one of three arenas for applying any sermon. Most of the people any senior leader speaks to on Sundays tries to apply the message in one of three areas of life: family, work and friendships. By far, family is the biggest application area because most people spend so much time with family. To ignore family when preaching a message is to essentially tell people “this has no application in one of the most essential areas of your life”.

4. Your leaders think family before they think leadership. Guess why many of the leaders who serve in your children’s ministry and student ministry serve? Because they want to be better parents and have a better family. Speak to their hearts as parents even before you speak to their hearts as leaders. They’ll thank you for it.

5. This generation of parents is producing the next generation of leaders. If you want to see healthy leaders emerge in the next generation – both in the marketplace and in the church – then nurture healthy families. It’s simple as that. As goes the family, so goes the next generation. Your investment in family is an investment in next generation leadership.

Ministering to families isn’t something that should happen down the hall on a Sunday – it’s something that should be happening in the heart and mind of every leader every day.

Because family is pretty much everyone. If you miss family, you miss almost everything.

My posts this week will be about family.  This week, over 5000 leaders from the US and around the world will gather in Atlanta for the 2013 Orange Conference. I’ll be speaking there and also hanging out with a team of 17 from our church (Connexus) as well.  Stay tuned for posts (and notes from my talks) on the blog this week.

What are you learning about moving the cause of family higher on your agenda?

What do you think you’re missing if you miss family?

So how clearly are you seeing things as a leader?

Really?

Truthfully, there are important things in leadership that all of us miss. One of the toughest challenge for those of us who lead is that every leader develops blind spots.

A blind spot is simply defined as an area where your view is obstructed.

You just don’t see things that are there. All of us miss things that are clear to any other person, but not to us.

It’s why you turn around first to check beside you when making a lane change.

It’s why you crane your neck at a stadium so you can see the field unobstructed.

It’s why you trimmed that tree near your front window so you can see the view.

You want to see clearly.

It’s not that most leaders want to create problems, it’s that they don’t see the problems they’re creating. We’re blind to them.

I know I am.

Here are some blind spots I’ve identified in me over the years:

My personal style (which tends to land more on the truth side than the grace side) can unintentionally hurt or alienate people.

Casual comments I make can be mistaken as ‘directives’ by people around me, leading them to act on things I was simply asking questions about. (I’m the senior leader in our church and my words weigh more than I’d like them to sometimes.)

While being selective is important, I can sometimes be too picky about who I choose to move into senior leadership – sometimes backlogging the development of other leaders.

My attention to detail on matters I’m passionate about can be so minute that it becomes discouraging to some.

How did I learn about all these things?

I would love to say I was perceptive enough to figure them out on my own, or that the insight came as a result of enlightened thinking.

But that’s not the case.

I learned about all of these because someone told me. I wasn’t clever enough to see them on my own.  That’s why they’re called blind spots.

The longer you lead, the more important it is to develop a reliable, honest, accurate feedback loop. (This post from Jeff Brodie is a must read for those of you trying to help a leader see a blind spot).

Here’s the tension: the longer you lead and the larger your organization becomes, the less people will be naturally willing to tell you things you might not like to hear.

How do you overcome that?

Here are 3 questions you can ask as a leader that give other people permission to help you see your blind spots:

1. What am I doing that’s not helping our mission? I try to ask this question regularly to the people around me. Even if the answer is “I can’t see anything right now”, making a habit of asking the question creates a culture of openness and mutual support. It also signals to the team that the leader doesn’t think he or she is infallible.

2.  What do I need to do to make sure you feel comfortable telling me what you see? This second question is so necessary because often leaders won’t want to answer the first question truthfully. They’re too afraid. It takes a lot of nerve for someone to give ‘honest’ feedback to a leader. When a leader is defensive, dismissive or even indifferent, the leader makes it so easy for the staff member to never speak up again. By asking this second question, you show them you want feedback and you realize you might not always be easy to approach. And if you are easy to approach, you’ll find out soon enough. Either way, this question builds trust.

3.  How can I help make it better? Your job as a leader isn’t just to know something is wrong, it’s to leverage your influence or power to help make it right. When your team member knows you really care about a good solution and are willing to do what you can to make it better, it goes a long way.

Questions like this can create an open honest culture.

They will make you a better leader, and help your organization push past leadership lids.

What questions have helped you overcome blindspots? What are some tension points you continue to face?