Helping Churches Make Vision Real

Leadership Summit 2016: Bill Hybels

Sunday, August 14, 2016

If you missed the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit this year, no worries I’ve got you covered. I’ll be posting my notes and thoughts from each presenter over the next couple of days.

If you’re unfamiliar with Leadership Summit, more than 300,000 leaders participated in this world-class experience designed to help people to grow in their leadership capacity and effectiveness. Global Leadership Summit is a two-day event telecast LIVE in HD from Willow’s campus near Chicago every August to hundreds of locations in North America. Throughout the fall, Summit events take place at an additional 675+ sites in 125 countries and 59 languages.

Willow Creek Community Church Founder and Senior Pastor Bill Hybels opened the Summit addressing The 4 Lenses of Leadership. The following are leadership quotes and lessons from this incredible session.

Everybody wins when a leader gets better
Armed with enough humility leaders can learn from anyone

The 4 lenses of leadership

#1 Passion Lens

What fills your passion bucket?
It’s the leaders job to fill their own passion bucket
Your team wants their soul to be stirred by passion of their leader
How full is your passion bucket?
Passion comes from the heights of a beautiful dream or the depths of something that has gone terribly wrong in the world
What matters most to people (more than generous compensation packages & healthy team cultures) is to work with and around a passion filled leader
A motivated worker will outperform an unmotivated worker by 40%
Passion is like protein for the team, it energizes them along the way
It’s not just presiding over something or pontificating
Leadership is simply taking people on a journey from “here” to “there”

#2 People Lens

Most people grew up in a fear based, performance oriented work culture
Most people have never experienced a high trust, high functioning team culture
It doesn’t matter where you start, you can build a healthy culture
An organization will only ever be as healthy as the top leader wants it to be
You can change the culture of your team if you want to
God treasures one thing in this vast cosmos above everything else…people
Transnational Noise: water-cooler conversation and chatter takes a toll on the moral of the entire organization
Talent Observation: our problem is we’re increasingly distant from people in the organization and have no exposure to them.

#3 Performance Lens

Leaders have to get stuff done and have to set the pace
Speed of the leader – speed of the team
Goal setting and performance measurements
Goalaholism will hurt the spirit of your team
To move forward it will take constant readjusting of your leadership goals
Thriving = taking ground
Health = holding ground
Under-performing = losing ground
Everyone wants to know how they’re doing
It is cruel and unusual punishment to employ someone and for them to not know how they’re doing
Do you drive your organization so hard that it has to misbehave or so loosely that it’s floundering?

#4 Legacy Lens

The legacy lens of ministry: what people remember about you once you’re gone
Are you proud of what you’re going to be remembered for?
Leadership is not fundamentally about time it’s about energy, what are you investing your energy in?
There aren’t do-overs but there are make-overs
Leadership can become a drug that other parts of your life have a hard time competing with
Legacy can be made different in a moment (positive or negative)
Leadership matters and it matters disproportionately

Posted in Leadership

The Art of Execution

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

August kicks off a new ministry year at Sun Valley, the church I have the privilege of serving at, and that means it’s time to get the team in the room and talk about the new year. Through out the ministry year we get the entire staff team from all campuses together once a month to worship together, celebrate wins, communicate stuff that everyone needs to know and provide leadership training. This month Chad Moore, who serves as the Lead Pastor at Sun Valley, shared about bridging the gap between vision and reality. The art of execution. Here are some of the best highlights.

Leadership is one of the most talked about and least understood spiritual gifts in the Bible.
David submitted to the vision God had for his life not the vision he had for his life (the calling on David’s life wasn’t to build the temple, but to defeat the enemies of God).
Solomon didn’t dream up the idea he executed the idea and the idea wasn’t general or generic it was VERY VERY VERY specific.
Vision isn’t mystical it’s specific, it’s a dream with a deadline “build the temple.”
Define reality, Dream a preferred future, and Design a pathway to get there.
Any time you are serving God it is going to involve serving people.
Inspiration and motivation don’t actually make anything happen, discipline does.
People who actually do the least get celebrated the most (public figures).
You make touchdowns yard by yard, down by down as you move down the field.
Discipline is the missing art of leadership.
The only way to hike the Grand Canyon is to go do the bleachers again, and again, and again.
You don’t follow Jesus in the spotlight but in the everyday mundane stuff that nobody sees.
The more specific the plan the better the plan.
The “science side” of the plan = what is written down, budget, etc.
You have to “embrace the stupid” if you’re going to learn and grow…i.e. “I don’t want to look stupid to do something new I’ve never done or learned before.”
Effort = “Work as hard as we can”
Excellence = “Work as well as we can”

Posted in Leadership

Why People Volunteer at some Churches but not at others

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Ever notice that a lot of churches feel like a spectator sport? You know, the kind of place where people sit around watching the paid staff do everything. The average church in America engages around 45% of their average adult and student attendance in some kind of volunteer role (check out the Unstuck Group Health Assessment for more info like this). But there are those churches that are above average. The top 10% of churches somehow seem to break all the normal statistics and engage more than 70% of their average adult and student attendance in some kind of volunteer role. Here are a couple of things they do different.

#1 High Challenge

They don’t just make an announcement, they don’t just ask, they don’t simply provide the opportunity to serve, these churches challenge people to serve. What comes natural to us is ourselves and these churches combat self-oriented thinking with a high challenge to put faith into action by serving others. They know that you can not serve God without serving people.

#2 Flexibility

Ever notice that people are busy? Most people don’t have hours and hours per week to volunteer at your church. Churches that engage the most volunteers understand this and they are flexible. They don’t’ require volunteers to be involved in everything, instead they invite them to be involved in what they can be.

#3 Fewer Paid Staff

These churches actually have fewer staff, not more staff. Instead of paying people to do ministry they pay staff to lead volunteers. Churches that get stuck loading up on staff end up dealing with the unintended consequences of having staff doing everything and church attenders watching them instead of joining them.

#4 Say Thank You

It’s so simple to say thank you, but so few churches actually do it. I’m not talking about saying thank you from the stage (although that’s not a bad start), but in a personal face-to-face conversation, a handwritten note, or even walking through the kids ministry area during service and popping your head into each kids ministry classroom and saying thank you in the moment.

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation, Volunteers

3 New Leadership Coaching Networks for Church Leaders!

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

“The only way to get different results is to engage different systems.”

The Unstuck Group’s Coaching Networks will challenge you to take your next steps to grow your leadership gift.

This fall, we’re inviting you to discover the shifts that need to happen in your strategies and systems to lead at the next level.

Are you trying to break a growth barrier?
Are considering launching your first campus?
Are you currently leading a multisite church and looking to learn best practices?

My friend Tony Morgan, along with a few other members of The Unstuck Group’s team, will host three new leadership coaching networks that bring like-minded church leaders together to learn about best practices in growing, healthy churches and challenge each other to get unstuck in leadership and ministry impact.

We’ll take a look at best practices in growing, healthy churches.
We’ll press into tough conversations to help you get unstuck in your leadership and ministry impact.
We’ll help you discover the shifts that need to happen in your strategies and systems.

Here are the network topics:

Reaching 1,000 & Beyond (Atlanta)

Reaching 2,000 & Beyond (Dallas)

Multisite Leadership (Atlanta)

Each of these networks is a nine-month, collaborative coaching experience comprised of three in-person gatherings and six live, virtual meetings. >> Get more details

Learn more about the network content, dates and cost by following this link.

If you want to be a part of this, apply asap. Those spaces are already going fast. (In fact, as of this morning, 3 churches have already secured their spaces in the Multisite Leadership network.)

Posted in Leadership

Leading with Authority without Abusing Authority

Sunday, July 31, 2016

You don’t have to look very hard in society to find examples of people in authority abusing their authority. Unfortunately in the church where you’d expect things to be different it seems like it rarely is. In a recent conversation with a church leader they asked me if they really had to be a jerk to get things done and be a successful leader in a church? I don’t think they do and I don’t think you do either. It’s possible to lead with authority without abusing authority.

#1 Positional Authority

We follow people who have positional authority in our lives because we have to. They’re in a position of authority in our lives such as a parent, teacher, boss, or ranking officer. We follow these people because if we don’t there are unpleasant consequences that we’re forced to deal with.

#2 Expert Authority

We follow people with expert authority because of the wealth of experience or knowledge that they have. These people have something that we don’t and are recognized as experts in their field, which naturally places them in an authority role. We listen to them because they have something that we want.

#3 Moral Authority

We follow people with moral authority because we want to. These people don’t ask anyone to do anything that they’re not willing to do themselves. They know it’s not wise for them to do every job in the organization while understanding that no job in the organization is beneath them. They serve the organization instead of having the organization serve them. They lead out of who they are and allow people close enough to them to see that they are who they are all the time and in every setting.

Jesus could have led with positional authority after all He is God in the flesh. But He didn’t. Jesus could have led with expert authority after all He created everything that exists and is pretty much the expert on…well everything. But He didn’t. Instead Jesus led with moral authority. He submitted to His Father in the garden saying, “not my will but yours be done.” He said, “If you want to be first you have to be last,” and He put our needs in front of His own. He said, “Take up your cross and follow Me,” and He went to the cross first.

Posted in Leadership, Staffing