On Leading Well

Year: 2011

  • Why Leaders Use Social Media

    Leaders speak.

    It’s our job. We use words …

    • to create and express a compelling vision of the future
    • to inspire and encourage people around us
    • to speak God’s Word to various audiences
    • to engage others with questions and observations
    • to “write the vision and make it plain … so that he may run who reads it” (Habakkuk 2:2)
    • to empathize, respond and express love
    • in countless other ways to move people on to God’s agenda
    Leaders in the 21st century use social media to convey those words. I’ve just returned from the fantastic MinistryNet 2011 conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Last week 170 people from 32 countries gathered to discuss how to more rapidly advance the church’s mission of making disciples through the use of social media and digital technologies.
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    Key Insights
    1. The gospel has always spread most rapidly through existing social networks. In my opening keynote, I highlighted Paul’s ministry to the church at Rome. He names 27 friends in chapter 16 who were influential members of the Roman church — yet Paul had never visited Rome! He was exerting influence through key relationships in his social networks to help make his message stick. These networks included families (Acts 16), friends and acquaintances (Acts 16 & John 4:28-30), religious groups (Acts 17) and the marketplace (Acts 17). Today almost everyone has significant relationships in at least three of these networks.
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    2. Missions has always been about going to where people are and meeting them on their turf — that means we must be present online. Over half of the 800 million Facebook users log in to check their accounts daily. The average user has 130 friends. If you say you don’t have time to engage in social media it’s probably because you don’t understand it. It’s not just about letting people know what you had for breakfast (no one cares, btw). It’s about sharing, listening, speaking, learning and influencing others. We must humble ourselves and learn the tools of the new trade or be left way behind.
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    3. We must become good stewards of this communication avenue for good purposes and for good news. Here are some great resources from participants at MinistryNet and their friends on how to jump into social media:
       Brian Barela’s blog – Social Media Strategy for Ministries – @brianbarela
       Toni Birdsong’s blog – @StickyJesus – an equipping hub for online outreach – @tonibirdsong
       Brian Russell of LifeChurch.tv – resources here
       Steve Raquel’s blog – Lots of How To posts on using social media more effectively
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    What are you waiting for? You already have social networks. What’s keeping you from using them for good and for God?

  • What’s Your Failure Tolerance?

    Success, said Thomas Alva Edison, is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

    This week at MinistryNet 2011 in Bangkok is making me more aware of this axiom. Yesterday nearly 200 participants broke into workgroups of 5-8 people. Each group was tasked with working a specific problem from an innovation or collaboration angle. It’s not easy. I visited three groups and observed lots of starting, stopping, reframing, challenging and offering. It’s a healthy process that our organization desperately needs in order to stay near the cutting edges of social media ministry.

    Janakan Arulkumarasan, CEO of Onoko, is here with us. His company writes Facebook apps. They keep the focus tight, only allowing 10 days from start to finish for a new app. Their philosophy: Just get it out there, then polish it later. Their teams create about 150 apps per year, only one of which might be popular and go to 30 or 4o million downloads. The other 149 are scrap.

    This got me thinking. Am I willing to endure that rate of innovation failure in order to achieve success? I do it in some areas of my life, for instance, when I’m learning an 8-bar guitar solo. Picking out all the notes and getting the timing just right can require dozens of practice reps until it sounds right. But sometimes in ministry I naturally feel that if I’ve prayed about something and attempt to try it, God should make it work just right the first time. That’s flawed thinking. And bad theology.

    What’s helped increase your tolerance for failure en route to success?

  • Guest post: Bring it!

    Guest blogger Andrea Buczynski is a teammate, friend, and VP of Leadership Development and Human Resources for CCCi. I invited her to share a recent ‘aha’ in her own leadership development.

    When I was growing up as a young leader, it was common to look to the leaders above you for answers, resources, and different approaches. They had a broader view. They were exposed to other leaders, and I was not. So they were my conduit to more knowledge and different ways of doing things.

    For many years this paradigm has framed my view of leadership and the critical role of coach as a resource distributor. A simple question someone asked me a few weeks ago made me ponder this in new way.

    “How has the advance of technology affected leaders?”

    I found myself talking before I even knew what I was saying. I shared my own experience and then said this, “That is no longer true. People don’t need their leaders to resource them in the same way that I experienced in the past. Even now, I will Google something I don’t know about before I do anything else. Information is available so widely. No one would depend on his or her leader for information. In many cases, people that I work with are way more knowledgeable about what is going on in certain areas than I am.”

    Have you ever just said something and been surprised by it?  I was.

    And then I started thinking.

    If that is true, then the need for a leader to engage with team members, whether distributed or local, actually increases. Self-resourcing people can get into mission drift relatively quickly. There are thousands of sources of ideas. New ideas multiply and grab attention in ways that conventional means do not. And they can take you places that you can’t see ahead of time.

    If you’re the kind of leader who assumes that “no news is good news” or that people will call me when they need me, you’re making a bad assumption. Because things can be all quiet and you can be thinking that things are going well when drift is happening.

    If leaders are no longer the primary resource sharers or generators, then what do they bring to the people they lead? I have to think that it’s the interaction, affirmation, correction, encouragement and clarity that people are looking for that is the essence of the leader/follower relationship. Are we accomplishing what we are called to accomplish?

    What do the people you lead really need you to bring? Are you bringing it?

    Follow Andrea on Twitter or Facebook.