Archive for Leadership
One of the Most Disturbing Things I’ve Ever Read
Posted by: | CommentsThis morning I was reading an excellent book recently referred to me – “The Hole in Our Gospel” by Richard Stearns, President of World Vision. As advertised, it is an amazing book and I can feel my heart being molded and shaped by His hands as I continue to read. Though I’ve yet to finish the book, I highly recommend it. But it reminded me of something that I had read (and forgotten) long ago.
Amy Carmichael was a Christian missionary to India. The following is a dream, called “Thy Brothers’ Blood Crieth” she had while serving. This is simply the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. I pray it will wreck you, too!
The tom-toms thumped straight on all night, and the darkness shuddered round me like a living, feeling thing. I could not go to sleep, so I lay awake and looked; and I saw, as it seemed, this:
That I stood on a grassy patch, and at my feet a ravine broke straight down into infinite space. I looked, but saw no bottom; only cloud shapes, black and furiously coiled, and great shadow-shrouded hollows, and unfathomable depths. Back I drew, dizzy at the depth.
Then I saw forms of people moving toward the edge. There was a woman with a baby in her arms and another little child holding on to her dress. She was on the very edge. She lifted her foot for the next step… Then, to my horror, I saw that she was blind. Before I could say anything she was over, and the children with her. Their cries pierced the air as they fell into the inky blackness of the ravine!
Then I saw more streams of people flowing from all quarters. All were blind, stone blind; all walked straight toward the edge. There were shrieks as they suddenly knew themselves falling, and a tossing up of helpless arms, catching, clutching at empty air. But some went over quietly, and fell without a sound.
Then I wondered, with a wonder that was sheer agony, why no one stopped them at the edge. I could not. I was glued to the ground, and I couldn’t even yell; though I strained and tried, only a whisper would come out.
Then I saw that along the edge there were sentries set at intervals.
But the intervals were too large; there were wide, unguarded gaps between. And over these gaps the people fell in their blindness, unwarned; and the green grass seemed blood-red to me, and the ravine yawned like the mouth of hell.
Then I saw, like a little picture of peace, a group of people under some trees with their backs turned towards the ravine. They were making daisy chains. Sometimes when a piercing shriek cut the quiet air and reached them, it disturbed them and they thought it was a rather crude noise. And if one of their group started up and wanted to go and do something to help, then all the others would pull that one down. “Why should you get so excited about it? You must wait for a definite call to go! You haven’t finished your daisy chain yet. It would be really selfish,” they said, “to leave us to finish the work alone.”
There was another group. It was made up of people whose great desire was to get more sentries out; but they found that very few wanted to go, and sometimes there were no sentries for miles and miles along the edge.
Once a girl stood alone in her place, waving the people back; but her mother and other relations called, and reminded her that her furlough was due; she must not break the rules. And being tired and needing a change, she had to go and rest for awhile; but no one was sent to guard her gap, and over and over the people fell, like a waterfall of souls. Once a child grabbed at a tuft of grass that grew at the very edge of the ravine; it clung convulsively, and it called – but nobody seemed to hear. Then the roots of the grass gave way, and with a cry the child went over, its two little hands still holding tight to the torn-off bunch of grass. And the girl who longed to be back in her gap thought she heard the little one cry, and she sprang up and wanted to go; at which her friends reproved her, reminding her that no one is necessary anywhere; “The gap would be well taken care of!”, they said. And then they sang a hymn.
Then through the hymn came another sound like the pain of a million broken hearts wrung out in one full drop, one sob. And a horror of great darkness was upon me, for I knew that it was “The Cry of the Blood”.
Then a voice thundered. It was the voice of the Lord, and He said, “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”
The tom-toms still beat heavily, the darkness still shuddered and shivered about me; I heard the yells of the devil-dancers and weird, wild shrieks of the devil-possessed just outside the gate.
What does it matter, after all? It has gone on for years; it will go on for years. Why make such a fuss about it? God forgive us! God arouse us! Shame us out of our callousness! Shame us out of our sin!
Four Questions Every Christian Should Answer
Posted by: | CommentsAs Christians, often we think about our relationship with God being just about us, but it isn’t. Each of us is like a fountain. God 
is the water that flows through us and out. Every one of us has many people – family, friends and co-workers – that come to drink out of our pool. We can’t pretend like our walk with God only belongs to us anymore, because it doesn’t. It impacts a lot of other people (even if we don’t want it to). Some questions worth answering:
- What’s the quality of the water in my pool? If we are thriving in our relationship with God, our pool will be filled with fresh, life-giving water. But if we are experiencing relational stagnation with God, that’s what others will drink from our pool – stagnate water. Or if sin is permeating our life, those contaminants will seep into the waters and spread to others who drink.
- Who drinks from my pool? Each of us influences lots of others. I’d bet that the list is considerably larger than you might imagine. Here’s a great exercise. Go through the last week of your life, day by day. Make a list of everybody who interacted with you in any way. That person drank from your pool, whether you wanted them to or not. Include all your cyberfriends – those who read your posts, updates, and tweets. All those people are drinking from your pool.
- From whose pool do I drink? Made in God’s image, we were created to be people of community. God designed us to do life together, and that includes drinking from each others’ pool. God uses our relationships to bless us, to refresh and renew us. Technology is making it easier than ever to drink from others’ pool, through vehicles such as Facebook, Twitter, blogging, podcasts and videos. The good news is that each of us get to choose from whose pool we drink.
- Is God calling me to make changes? Maybe God is using your answers to the previous questions to stir you to change. Perhaps He’s calling you to improve the quality of the water in your pool. Or perhaps He’s calling you to increase your pool’s reach. Or possibly He’s prompting you to use a greater degree of intentionality in your choice of where you’re going to drink.
Doing More with Less (Part 5)
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The never-ending deluge of email creates stress for many of us. Like many folks, I get a ton of email every day. It is one of those parts of my job that I can’t control. People can send two minutes writing an email with a few open-ended questions that could take 30 minutes to answer. An accumulation of 25 emails might take me 1o minutes to process, or several hours. That’s what I mean about not being able to control it. But not being able to control it doesn’t mean that I can’t manage it.
Here are some steps that anyone can take to reduce the stress created by our email:
- Deal with each email in turn. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to take care of emails that I address quickly. This shrinks the list and gives me the impression of productivity, but often leaves me with the more daunting ones that I tend to procrastinate with. That results in a backlog of waiting emails, ones that I’m trying to avoid anyway. Instead, as you go through each email, take one of the following actions:
- Delete it. If no further action is required, then delete it. Don’t leave it in your inbox. Some of us want to do that in case we ever need to refer back to it at a later date, but most email software, such as Outlook or Entourage, keep a copy of anything you delete in a folder.
- Delegate it. If the required action is someone else’s to take, forward the email. Keep your remarks to the minimum needed.
- Do it. If the required action is yours to take, determine if that action can be accomplished in two minutes or less. If so, git ‘er done.
- Put it into your @Action folder – If the required task is yours to take, but that task will take you more than two minutes, save it off in this folder to address later. This is the folder that you will go through in your Weekly Review, which I discussed in a post earlier in the week.
- Put time in your schedule – Set up time to work your email, much as you would make time for any other important task. Acting like we can absorb all that email management work is delusional. And there’s something deep inside us that knows that we really can’t do that. Instead, that part of us knows that we’re going to spend time tonight after we get the kids in bed trying to catch up. I am setting up two times per day to check and process my email – once in the morning and another time before I head home.
- Turn off your notifier – All those great notifiers (on our Outlook or Entourage or iPhone) that tell us when we have new emails are terribly distracting. They draw us away from whatever we were concentrating on. I turned them off and leave all my email for my scheduled email times. I felt immediate relief from the stress of the mounting pile. What good does it do me to think and fret about the growing mound of emails that have come in? All that doesn’t help me one bit. It only gives me that familiar sinking feeling. I didn’t need that, and neither do you.
- Limit your responses – There’s a school of thought that recommends that you limit your responses to no more than five sentences. While I’m not a big fan of arbitrary rules or guidelines, I do think that most of us could be more concise and use less words in our email correspondence. It also saves us precious time.
Don’t let your email run your life. You can get your inbox down to zero, and you’ll experience less stress
Doing More with Less (Part 4)
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In my last post, I referred several times to my ‘to-do manager.’ This is the tool I use to keep track of ALL my tasks. This could be as low-tech as a pad of paper, but most people depend upon some type of software or web service. I have tried many different tools and have found one that meets all my to-do needs. I’ll say up front that it has the stupidest name I’ve ever heard. It was almost bad enough to keep me from giving it a try. I use a web service called, “Toodledo.” I picked this product for several reasons:
- Flexibility - The vast majority of products, both paper and technology based, are designed around the organizational beliefs, practices and preferences of the product designer. This is great if you agree with that designer, but I often found solutions either over or under engineered. How each person manages their to-do’s is a very personal thing, so flexibility is very important, at least to me. Toodledo provides a robust set of features with maximum customization. You can configure it to work the way you do. I have a folder set up for each key initiative (or project) in my world, and then tasks are listed within folder. As my needs change, the system is easily tweaked to meet them. Some times I want to view my tasks in due date order. Other times I want to see them listed by folder. Toodledo provides complete control over what you see and how the product will work.
- Web-Based – I prefer web-based services over having to buy, download and maintain software on my laptop. The Toodledo service is well-maintained and all that is transparent to me. Yes, it’s true that I can’t get to it if I don’t have an internet connection, but that is rarely a reality for me. Of course, it’s password protected to provide the necessary security. You also don’t have to worry about backing up your data. They do it for you.
- Price – The web service is free to use (www.toodledo.com). You can upgrade to a premium version if you want advanced features, but I’ve not found that to be necessary. The free version is full-bodied (rather than lite).
- Portable – There is a sweet Toodledo app for the iPhone that syncs up nicely with the web service. It’ll cost you $2.99, but it is well worth it. The most heavily used online features are available within the app.
If you’re looking for a tool to help you manage all the tasks in your life, give it a try.
I’ll wrap up this series of posts next time by talking about managing the never-ending avalanche of email.
Doing More with Less (Part 3)
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One of the most valuable things I do each week is my Weekly Review. This is one of the best takeaways from “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, which I covered last time. It is such a simple idea, yet so powerful. The big idea is to set aside some time each week to get my head empty once again. If you remember from my last post, having things that we know we need to do bouncing around inside our head is the thing that increases stress and decreases productivity. So clearing my head once a week of all those to-do’s and getting myself organized helps me in a multitude of ways.
While there are a lot of different ways to approach a Weekly Review, here’s what I do each week:
- Purge my email inbox – I empty my inbox (I’m going to cover email management in a separate post later this week), and make sure that I capture all to-do’s into my to-do manager.
- Purge my @action folder – This is the email folder where I’ve stored all my emails that needed additional action. I process each one in turn, identifying additional to-do’s and entering them into my to-do manager.
- Purge my paper inbox – This contains any paper correspondence, plus any papers that I’ve accumulated throughout the week that identify things that I didn’t want to forget. Sometimes they’re things that need to be filed, other times there are things that I want to capture. For instance, there might be a note I wrote myself to pick up a book I heard about that someone had read that was transformational. Any to-do’s get added to my to-do manager.
- Review my calendar – I look at my calendar over the next three weeks to see if any of my meetings require special preparation, the kind I can’t do 24 hours before the meeting. For instance, if I have a meeting with senior leadership to discuss a proposal, I have to prepare that proposal. I capture all to-do’s into my to-do’s manager.
- Evaluate previous week’s progress – I look at every major project on my Personal Ministry Plan, plus initiatives I’m working on at home. I celebrate the progress and thank God for His favor.
- Plan the upcoming week’s objectives - Again, looking at all the major initiatives at both work and home, I ask God to show me what He wants me to accomplish in the upcoming week. I do this project by project. It is important to maintain momentum, even if progress is sometimes slower than I would like. During this step, it’s also important to look at how much discretionary time I have in the upcoming week to work on these objectives.
- Adjust due dates of the to-do’s – I modify the due dates in my to-do manager to align with the upcoming week’s objectives. I then look at all to-do’s in due date order for a sanity check, to see if it’s reasonable to expect that I can get all of that accomplished. I adjust the dates if need be.
Once I’ve done this, my head is empty and I feel organized to meet the week. I know this looks like a daunting process, but it only takes me about 60 – 90 minutes. This investment of time pays remarkable dividends in peace and productivity. I simply cannot go without doing my Weekly Review. It’s that powerful.
Next post is on the to-do manager, which is a vital component of the strategy to remain organized.
Doing More with Less (Part 2)
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the most impacting things I’ve done to help manage the insane demands on my time, energy and attention is to read a 
book that was recommended by a friend. I’m not into endorsing a lot of products, but this book changed the way I approach my life. The name of the book is ‘Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” by David Allen. Before I purchased it, I did a little research and found that it had an almost cult-like following. People who had read the book made all sorts of unbelievable claims about what it had done for them. I was intrigued enough to purchase and read the book.
Let me just say that I was not disappointed. While I have yet to achieve “stress-free productivity,” I was impressed by the author’s understanding of how I think. Within the first 50 pages, he demonstrated that he understood that all of these reminders bouncing around my head at the most inopportune times was both useless and stress-producing. This is not your typical ’system’ approach to time management. I used the Day-Timer system back in the day, and it was good for tracking and prioritizing my schedule, but that was then and this is now. (A Day-Timer calendar page couldn’t even fit all the tasks that are part of a typical day at this point in my life.) Getting Things Done (GTD) first talks about what causes stress and points out how those same things limit our productivity. So many times I found myself saying, “Oh, that’s totally me!”
But the book doesn’t stop at presenting theory. It moves quickly into concrete steps that we can take to set ourselves up for greater productivity with less stress. Chapter 4 is called, “Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space and Tools,” and it tells you how to do that. The chapters that follow continue to lay out both the principles and action steps to better personal organization. If you’re one of those people who like to customize everything to your own taste, you can modify the approach as you wish.
I read this book about three years ago and I can’t believe how much it has helped. I am still employing most of the key takeaways, and they continue to help both relieve some of my stress and help me be more productive.
If you’re a busy person who has a ton of responsibilities at work and at home, then I strongly recommend that you give it a read.
Next time I’ll be discussing how I use one of the major concepts in the book – the weekly review.
Doing More with Less (Part 1)
Posted by: | CommentsIt seems as though we’re all being asked and expected to do more and more. This is as true at home as it is at work. Just when we can’t imagine things getting any more busy, they get more busy. Not just a little, but a lot. It’s nuts. And at the same time this is happening, we seem to have less resources to meet the demands. We have less margin in regards to time, energy, money and even relational capacity.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. When Jesus said that he came so that we have life and live it to the full, I don’t think this was the kind of abundance He meant. I don’t think Jesus spread His arms and died on a Roman cross so that we could have the abundance of stress that most of us experience daily. Sometimes I’ll ask myself if others around me would want my life? When the first thing people say when they see me is, “I know how busy you are…” I know that I’m sending a message that I don’t want to send – the message that I’m too busy to enjoy my life.
At the same time, we have to remember that, as Christians, we’re engaged in the battle that wages between this world and God’s Kingdom. It isn’t all about our comfort. We’re going to be inconvenienced and stretched and sometimes even wounded.
How do we reconcile these two positions? I’m not sure there’s a perfect answer, but I think God wants us to be fully committed to what He wants us to do. Far too often we’re fully committed to what we want to do, often even thinking that we’re doing what He would want us to. I believe with all my heart that God will not ask us to blow up our life in order to do His will – His good and perfect will. If we’re finding ourselves constantly stressed out, we have to ask ourselves if that is God’s plan. Is it possible that God’s intention is to have us teetering on the brink of burnout a lot of the time? I have a hard time reconciling that with the God I know.
Anyway, I don’t have all the answers. I’m not even sure I have any answers. But there are a few things that I’m finding to be really valuable in helping me to manage all the things – things that I believe God has put on my plate. Over the next several days, I’m going to be sharing those things and explaining how they work to make my life a bit more manageable.
I’d love this to become a dialog and a sharing of ideas that can bless a lot of folks, so please comment back throughout the week with what is working for you.
Blind Spots
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Have you ever had that experience of driving down the highway and lazily thinking about making a lane change, only to be surprised and alarmed that a car you hadn’t known was there was already occupying that lane? Blind spots can be so dangerous because we can’t easily and immediately see what’s in that space (that’s why they’re called ‘blind’ – I’ve got a gift for recognizing the obvious). It takes extra effort to check if anything is there. I think the most dangerous aspect comes in often assuming that there is nothing residing in our blind spot, and proceeding without actually looking.
What’s true while I’m driving on the highway is also true in the rest of life. We all have blind spots, in our character, attitude and behavior. These are areas that we can’t easily and immediately see ourselves. They take intentional effort to check periodically, to see if anything dangerous resides there.
Yesterday, a brother in Christ and fellow staff member made me aware of something dangerous in my blind spot. He shared that he and a couple of others have experienced me, in my frenetic pace to get things done or get from one place to another, as being disinterested in engaging with them relationally. I was giving an impression that they were not important in my world of priorities. A part of me was shocked, because by nature I’m a highly relational person. But another part of me was not surprised. This was not the first time I had received similar feedback over the years. And I’ve worked hard to slow down and be a human being (rather than just a human doing). I thought that I had conquered the beast, but it crept back into my blind spot. I assumed there was nothing there, and I’ve been proceeding without actually looking. I have been grieved by the impact it has had on those around me. That certainly isn’t how Jesus was, or who He calls me to be. I thank God that I live and work with godly people who are forgiving.
I also praise God that I live and work with people who love me enough to tell me what’s in my blind spot. It takes real love, real courage to share things you know people don’t want to hear.
Do you have godly people in your life who love you enough to tell you when something dangerous is lurking in your blind spot?
When Accountability Breaks Down
Posted by: | CommentsMy son, Matthew, was home from college recently to attend a family wedding. We had decided to use his car to drive down to
the wedding and I had asked him to clean out his car (which barely resembled a car on the inside anymore). After he came back in the house too quickly, I went to check it out. I don’t need to go into the heated argument that ensued, only that he seemed clueless about why I didn’t think it was suitably clean to take his mom and sister. After about a half hour of angry silence between us, he approached me and calmly told me that he didn’t know what I wanted, that the car was already “college clean.” He also told me that my repeated attempts to tell him, “Just look at it, you’ll figure it out!” had not helped him gain any clarity whatsoever. He gently assured me that he was not trying to be obstinate, but just didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Wow, schooled quite appropriately by my 22-year old son. That’s humbling.
I had violated the most basic rules of delegation. And my repeated lame attempts at accountability had obviously failed. Accountability is something that many of us wrestle with on a daily basis. We’ve asked someone to carry out a task and time and time again they have failed to do so. I’ve found that there are usually one of three reasons why people fail to do what we have asked:
- They don’t know they are supposed to do something. It amazes me how often people didn’t realize that a particular task has been assigned to them. This happens a lot in meetings, when we fail to recap the meeting and make sure that every resulting task has an owner. It’s hard for someone to do something they don’t know they are supposed to do. This happens far more often than we think.
- They don’t know how to do it. Often a person freezes up on starting a task because they don’t know how to do what they’ve been asked to do. Their fear of failure keeps them from tackling the job.
- They have prioritized it differently than you. When a person is left to determine where a particular task falls into their other priorities, we are rolling the dice. (Then, of course, there are just some who don’t think that what you ask them to do is as important as what they prefer to do.)
If someone is failing to complete an assignment, perhaps we can best help them get moving by asking some questions to determine why they aren’t making progress. That’s a great reactive approach.
Better yet, maybe we can proactively ensure the removal of these obstacles when giving the assignment in the first place. That’s good for business, and good for the family, too.
Life is a Team Sport
Posted by: | CommentsI play on a lot of different teams, both at work and at home. We hear a lot these days about being a good team player, but most of what I hear talks about communication, cooperation and compromise. All those things are great and necessary for good team play. But they’re also all behavioral rather than cognitive, and we all know that our behavior flows out of our thoughts. In other words, as our thinking goes, so goes our behavior. Nowhere is this more evident than in how teammates interact with one another.
It seems to me that there is one aspect of our thinking that has a massive impact upon how we interact with others on the team. It has been true for me personally and I’ve seen it consistently in others. I don’t have a great term for it, but the moniker isn’t 
really important. It all has to do with where we individually believe we should set the bar regarding the nature of our relationship with other team members.
The lowest setting of the bar is intolerance. That’s where we might view others as wrong simply because they do not hold our view. We discount what they say, what they need, and even their potential contribution. Needless to say, this is not consistent with teamwork (or friendship, marriage or any other type of important relationship).
Up from there is tolerance. That’s where we can accept that others have views, perspectives and contributions that are very different than our own. We still aren’t crazy about that fact, but we’ve learned to live with it and at least pretend that we like it. Our primary view is still toward us and our needs. Teamwork can exist, but it’s hard to maintain any kind of cohesion and unity.
The next setting of the bar is respect. This begins to mature our relationship with our teammates by helping us look outwards, towards others on the team. We value their personalities, gifting, contributions and needs. This makes every aspect of teamwork more fun, effective and rewarding.
The highest setting is advocacy. This is where we actively look out for the best interests of our teammates. “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness (Phil 2:4-7).” Relationships and teamwork can get crazy good under that kind of selflessness. How many ways could God bless the teams we’re on, both at home and at work, if we lived with this kind of intentionality?
I’m going to spend some time praying about where I’ve got that bar set, on my home and work teams, and I invite you to do the same.
