Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

I recently finished reading The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Leniconi. It’s a quick, compact, and actionable read that I’d recommend to anyone who serves on a Sr. Management Team.

There is no way for me to share everything I underlined, highlighted and the personal notes I wrote in the margins. So I shared my top 15 favorite quotes and ideas from the book that stuck with me.

1. “An organization demonstrates that it is smart by developing intelligent strategies, marketing plans, product features, and financial models that lead to competitive advantage over its rivals. It demonstrates that it is healthy by eliminating politics and confusion, which leads to higher morale, lower turnover, and higher productivity.”

2. “No one but the head of an organization can make it healthy.”

3. “Culture lives in the way things get done.”

4. “Politics is the result of unresolved issues at the highest level of an organization.”

5. “…blindness occurs because what executives believe are small disconnects between themselves and their peers actually look like major rifts to people deeper in the organization.”

6. “Quite simply, cohesiveness at the executive level is the single greatest indicator of future success that any organization can achieve.”

Posted in Leadership

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Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

I recently finished reading The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Leniconi. I can already tell you that this is going to be on my top 5 reads from 2013. I deeply resonated with the concepts in this book. You see in many ways this book describes why I do what I do. I love to see all the facets of the Church work together to build an aligned and integrated culture that actually makes vision real!

There is no way for me to share everything I underlined, highlighted and the personal notes I wrote in the margins. So I shared with you my top 20 favorite quotes and ideas from the book that stuck with me.

1. The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it.

2. An organization has integrity – is healthy – when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when it’s management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.

3. If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy.

4. Contrary to popular wisdom and behavior, conflict is not a bad thing for a team. In fact, the fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems.

5. When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer.

6. Nowhere does this tendency towards artificial harmony show itself more than in mission-driven nonprofit organizations, most notably churches. People who work in those organizations tend to have a misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another.

Posted in Leadership

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4 steps to effective vision casting

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

An old Japanese proverb says, “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” Many churches are stuck not because they don’t have a dream or a vision, but rather because they don’t know how to break that dream down into tangible implementable steps that build culture and drive the church towards a preferred future. Then when stuckness begins to settle in, the leaders in the room start doing what they are wired to do, they lead. But when there is no clearly articulated unifying vision all of those leaders leading the direction that they think is best turns into a nightmare in a hurry. Below are 4 steps you can take to be more effective in casting vision and avoid that nightmare scenario:

Posted in Leadership

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How to say no to ministry

Monday, June 27, 2011

One of the more difficult tasks to accomplish in leadership is to relentlessly guard the vision of the organization. As they grow organizations, including churches, naturally drift towards complexity. People have good ideas that require action, development, project management, resource allocation, and organization that at surface level seem to enhance and strengthen the organization. These structures, while well meaning, often times actually slow down, detract from, and often prevent the organization from moving forward. I’m not saying that systems are the enemy, however the worship of systems. Remember systems aren’t the vision, the vision is the vision, and effective systems simply become the pathway for the organization to easily move along towards the vision. The single greatest word you can ever use to relentlessly guard the vision is to learn to say no to what detracts from it.

Below are 5 evaluative questions designed to help you narrow the focus and say no to opportunities that will cause you to subtly drift away from the vision.