As some of you know, I traveled (by car) to Anderson, SC last week as I was invited by Tony Morgan from Newspring Church to be part of a coaching network for Executive Pastors and other guys in that tier of leadership in their churches. It was a great experience. It was the first of 6 trips down there for mentoring, accountability, and mutual learning from some really smart and very amazing guys. You can check out some pics of Newspring at my flickr site. Thought I'd post some leadership takeaways from the event - some general and some personal.
- The church across this country is in good hands judging by these guys I was with - they are smart, humble, hungry for God, and ready to lay everything on the line to do church right.
- I have to be more disciplined in blocking my time for effectiveness. I need to do a better job in achieving a good flow to my week between tasks and people.
- Aside from things that only I can do -every other task that comes to me I should be asking, "who can I empower to do this?"
- One's area of greatest strength is usually also their area of greatest vulnerability.
- Leading Up: what are some things that I can do to help my boss be more effective?
- Leading Laterally: I should always be putting myself in a position that will bring out the best in my peers.
- When it comes to creating and executing new ministries - everything is an experiment.
- Leadership often involves letting people make their own mistakes even if you can foresee problems ahead. Parents do this with their children all the time.
- Any inter-relational issues within a staff are only compounded when a church decides to go multi-site.
- A great question to ask staff members regularly is, "what are you doing this week that you shouldn't be doing?"
- As close as I am to him, there are some things that a Senior Pastor goes through that I simply can't relate to from my current chair. I will never know the burdens that he carries until I've sat in that chair.
- Books I need to read soon: Death by Meetings; What Got You Here Won't Get You There; Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It; Execution: The Art of Getting Things Done (this is a re-read)
2 comments:
Death By Meetings is a great read....The one thing it got me doing was:
Become very sensitive to the amount of $$ sitting around the room for meeting in general(wanting to make every dollar count) and times when I would have the heads of all stores together for an 8 hour meeting - when a special speaker came in that dissappointed me, I would just add the dollars of money wasted. Flipside, when we would take them paintballing or to an activity a like, I would think of how these were $$ well spent for team building and mind rest.
Note: None of this was in the book, just what I think of now after having read it.
Currently reading the Here/There book and working on my "to stop" list...and intentionally focusing on sarcasm and being late. No success yet, but it's coming, I know it.
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