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?