Tag Archives: management

Meetings!? Better way to handle things

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This is an article in Inc Magazine. Meetings in corporations, churches are just so often about posing, raising questions that really shouldn’t take everyone’s time and often create more problems than they solve. When I worked for Motorola, my cube was right next to a meeting room. That meeting room was used all day, everyday. Then the company said before there were any meetings, there had to be a summary as to why it was necessary, what would be discussed, justify those who would be present and what the hoped for outcome would be. All of a sudden a lot of people decided they didn’t need anymore meetings. I think that goes for most cases. So much could be taken care of outside of meetings and if it’s necessary to get a consensus, have your ducks lined up before hand instead of making everyone try to invent the wheel. If there is a flaw, sure bring it up, but don’t belabor most of what is necessary and obvious.

Kate Rockwood writes in June 2017 Inc Magazine p 40: “Imagine spending two full days each week just sitting in meetings. Oh, wait – you already do. And a Bain & Company study found, most leaders rate more than half of these get-togethers as ineffective. [Quel surprise, right?] Yet the calendar creep continues: ‘The percentage of time an organization collectively spends in meetings has increased every year since 2008,” says Michael Mankins, a partner at Bain and co-author of Time, Talent, Energy. When Mankins and his partners dove deep into this issue, they found the average manager spends just 6.5 hours a week on real work. [Again Quel Surpise!] ‘But when leaders treat time as a scarce resource,’ he explains, ‘they can liberate as much as 40 percent of unproductive time for executives and employees.'”

A lot of organizations should take a serious look at this and not treat meetings as some kind of pro forma way to conduct business and then wonder why little is actually getting done, or it’s causing more problems than it solves.

Tough love, ya even Christians need to show tough love, but with the love of Jesus

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I really think this article in Inc Magazine is very pertinent for everyone, but should be readily understandable by managers who are Christians. We’ve all heard the phrase “tough love”, but Issie Lapowsky points out that maybe we should be aware that there should be a balance between tough and love: “…research shows that tough love can be an effective form of leadership provided one strikes the proper balance between “tough” and “love”.  (Feb 2014 pp 46-47)

Lapowsky points out what we as Christians should be striving for: “The challenge is to set high demands while still being supportive. ‘When you build a relationship on trust, then the majority of people are OK with tough love,’ says Christine Porath, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. ‘They’ll rise to the occasion; some thrive on it.’

Frank Poore the founder of CommerceHub,… talks about how he will push his employees, but wants them to push back, he challenges them and wants them to defend their positions. But he also points out that he never makes it about them personally.

I agree, I want people to take a position, I want to find where people are. Ya, I guess it’s not playing into the kissy-kissy type of mindset that we have in society, but I think relationships grow with candor. I’m not trying to challenge, so much as I’m trying to engage, show how much I’m interested, because I’m pretty much always interested. In addition to challenging, anyone in leadership should be curious about pretty much everything. I don’t want to pry, but I do want people to feel comfortable confiding, I do want people to think that I’m someone who is interested and a good listener.

Too often I’ve seen managers/supervisors belittling a subordinate. OK, if necessary, you go back into a private space and candidly, but again not personally discuss what the problems are. If someone takes that personally, well, can’t do much with that. Frankly there are too many people who think that anything short of unqualified praise is a personal attack. Those people are going to have bigger problems than anything I’m going to be able to deal with, other than in a pastoral context. Even then too many people think of pastors as feel-good generators, sometimes you should even when they are wrong, but tough-love is as valid for pastors then anyone.

We all, ya pastors included, don’t like rudeness, respond to it poorly and are much less productive. That should be pretty obvious, but to too many people it’s not. Are we being critical because we are truly concerned, because we want to help? Or are we being critical just to benefit our ego? Jesus pushed on those around Him to strive to be best and often He had to show tough love, let’s learn from Him and try to emulate Him in the workplace and in every part of our life.

We still take some time during the workweek at the Green Bean Coffee shop corner of Beaver St and W King St Wednesday 10am, park right behind the church 140 W King. Look forward to meeting you or hearing from you. God bless.

Leadership skills always need work, refinement and study. Ministers are no exception

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I spent twenty years in corporate finance, I spent 29 years in the Coast Guard Reserve, 4 active duty during the War On Terror, four years as a pastor and a modest amount of sports participation. I certainly don’t speak on leadership as an expert. But I certainly do try to keep growing and learning and trusting that God will put me where He wants me and equips me to be the leader I should be.

So maybe when I go back to a good article that I see on leadership, it is to share something that both of us need to continually remind ourselves of and work on. All the areas that I’ve participated in require meaningful leadership. I’ve seen real live examples of good, sometimes great leadership and likewise really poor. While most people don’t think of pastoral ministry as an area of leadership, there’s no doubt in my mind that ministry requires leadership skills. The challenges to ministry require many skills and in an era that sees more challenges and antagonism then ever to Christianity, ministers must be better leaders then ever. The church has done enough damage to itself as the result of weak, vacillating and accomodating ministry, now more than ever pastors need to stand up as leaders for Christ and for those who trust them with ministry.

“Inc Magazine” is a great source of managerial and leadership information and an article by Peter Economy is a great reminder of the skills necessary for successful leadership (http:///www.inc.com/peter-economy/leadership-how-to-get-from-good    Mar 14, 2014). In summary  lots of effort, relentless pursuit of knowledge, constant practice and willingness to accept failure. Having had three different careers, the need for continual study, read, go to seminars and further education are a requirement, it doesn’t take much to fall off the beam.

Vision – Christian ministry should be an obvious area of having a vision, come on, God gave us His revelation in the Bible. If you can’t work from there for vision, you may want to reconsider ministry as a career. Now obviously ministry takes place in different environments, so your vision has to take into account facility, neighborhood, resources, but always has to be to the glory of God and to make disciples of those in your parish.

Communication – Ministry is teaching me over and over you have to use every means of communication available, you have to repeat your message over and over, even when people are begging you to stop and when your sick of hearing your own voice, you repeat your message again.

Collaboration – I’ve had a few opportunities at collaboration with people who aren’t in my church and in areas that you’d think might exclude the church. Despite what an antagonistic media and other aspects of the culture try to propagandize, business, education, government, sports almost anything you can think of benefits from leadership in ministry. Too often those in the church are easily intimidated and chased away from the arena. Pastors have constitutional rights too and there is nothing to exclude them from any aspect of society and with a scarcity of talent and resources anyone who tries to exclude them should themselves be removed from authority. The stakes are too high, while there is a lot of phoniness and lack of preparation by people who just hang out a shingle claiming to be a pastor, there are many, yea like me, who have extensive training and experience and it would border on negligence to exclude anyone with that background from other areas of society.

Decisiveness – There has to be a high level of decisiveness in ministry as much as any areas of leadership. While all leaders have serious barriers to overcome, those in the ministry have to endure a lot of challenges in probably a lot more respects. The public sector is probably the worst offender. While it is the “public” sector there is an element that seems to feel that their area in the “public” sector is their private domain. That has to be challenged by leaders in the corporate areas, religious areas and other parts of society. Religious leaders have to learn to confront those who loosely throw around nonsense that they don’t even understand. Too many seem to think that they only have to know slogans and cliches, and little substance. These people have to be decisively confronted and overcome. They do not own their office, if they do not function in that office for the public good and the church is as much the public as any group or individual, those people have to be removed and frankly prosecuted, they are undermining public administration, education and public safety.

Integrity – Ministers are held to a higher standard of integrity than anyone. Sure there are those who fail, but by far, I would compare ministers to ANYONE in ANY walk of life, by far. The world will continue to treat Ministers as mascots and with lightly veiled contempt, we have to push back, with integrity and often function under difficult circumstances with dignity and integrity.

Inspiration – Napoleon said “A leader is a dealer in hope.” The one thing that the world lacks most of all is hope. Oh the church has had its failures and has been less than inspiring in the last few generations, with many notable exceptions, but ministers have to start to assert the truth in Jesus Christ. The only hope of anyone, anywhere is in Christ. We’ve seen massive, almost cataclysmic failures in government, corporations, education, science, medicine, none are immune to failure and many of these sectors edge closer to a time that they need to either radically redo how they do business or be overturned and rebuilt. Christian ministry should provide inspiration, not just in terms of the Resurrection, but in terms of Christ being the only hope for the world in the here and now. More and more man tries to compose fraudulent codes of conduct and ethics, all of which they try to exclude themselves from or justify why they are special exceptions. Christian ministry has one mission, to faithfully proclaim the hope, promise and Lordship of Jesus Christ, that can take many forms, but the only thing that truly inspires is in Christ and we must be the faithful proclaimers of same.

Discipling leadership, not management

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That heavy breathing you’re hearing is me putting down my Kindle and rushing back to my laptop keyboard to share these notes from Mike Breen.

Yea, these are observations that I have intuitively felt since I became a pastor. My Bachelor’s degree is in Business Management, I worked in corporate finance for twenty years. I’m certainly not averse to applying management principles, but every time it came up in discussions in church, I resisted 5-year plans, church-growth, mission statements. These have their place but as Breen observes:

“The Church is crying out for leaders who model a life worth imitating. Dan Kimball puts it this way: “Leadership in the emerging church is no longer about focusing on strategies, core values, mission statements, or church-growth principles. It is about leaders first becoming disciples of Jesus with prayerful, missional hearts that are broken for the emerging culture. All the rest will flow from this, not the other way around.” (Mike Breen Building a Discipling Culture on Kindle) Ya! Amen and Amen. As a pastor I have learned you do not “manage” church. Sure there are times when you have to apply the principles, but if you are busy “managing” and not open to the moving of the Holy Spirit, well frankly, you are in the wrong “business”.

“We need leaders who will step out of “managing church” and make discipling others their primary objective. The time has come to humbly acknowledge before God that we have failed to train men and women to lead in the style of Jesus. Whether through ignorance or fear, we have taken the safe option, training pastors to be theologically sound and effective managers of institutions rather than equipping them with the tools they need to disciple others.”

Yea, as Breen points out, we are being “managed” to death. I haven’t seen anyone in any sector of society who would disagree. No doubt we have different reasons, but we need leadership and we certainly need it in the church, which for too long has been a spiritual enabler versus, a spiritual leader. A  working understanding of discipleship will make any church a place that will be used by the Holy Spirit.

A further amen to the following: “the Church is the best place to offer a genuine model of leadership. We have Jesus’ example to learn from and to share with the rest of the world. When we take on the lifestyle of Jesus as a leader, those outside the Church will see and respond. This is not just a message to senior pastors— Jesus calls us all to be leaders. The commission to go and make disciples is a call for leaders—you are leading when you are making a disciple.” Yea, I know Jesus ain’t a Type A Wall St type. I think we would all agree that is a good thing. Why would we then “lead” His church, by those kind of principles and the answer is of course, NO.

Our “business” is to be “fishers of men” and then to go and make disciples. Anything that interferes with that is not of God and is not about helping us to live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and salvation in Him.