On Leading Well

Author: Ken

  • Why Campus Crusade changed its name

    The big news, as you may have now heard, is that Campus Crusade for Christ has changed its name to Cru for our US ministries. This name change comes as we are celebrating God’s good hand on this ministry for 60 incredible years. The two-year process of seeking the Lord for a new name engaged the majority of our U.S. Staff members, many key partners and alumni, students currently involved with us, and most importantly, followers of Jesus who have never heard of us but long to make a difference with their lives.

    You may have already seen some of the very positive or somewhat negative media coverage regarding this change. As a staff member who was intimately involved in this process for the past nine months, I want to let you know some of the reasoning behind this change.

    1. The problematic words in the name were Campus and Crusade. The term “Campus” has not represented the full scope of our mission for many years. We have a few dozen sub-ministries under our umbrella, and many of them don’t involve ministry on a campus.  There is a family ministry, a humanitarian ministry, a ministry to professional athletes, a workplace ministry, a military ministry and many others.  The word “Crusade” has drawn negative attention in parts of the world and among groups who associate it with Christians who forcefully push their faith on others (as in the middle-ages).  In changing the name, we didn’t set out to remove the word Christ.
    2. As an organization we have not wavered in our commitment to Jesus Christ or raising up his name – the only name that ultimately matters – among every tongue, tribe, people and nation.
    3. The majority of Christian missions organizations and most local churches do not have the name Jesus or Christ in their name. This doesn’t lessen their devotion to Christ or their effectiveness. The media bashing we have received has been accusing us of kowtowing to political correctness by dropping the name “Christ.” Let me assure you, this is completely ungrounded.
    4. Our mission remains the same: To help fulfill the Great Commission by winning, building and sending Christ-centered multiplying disciples and to give every person a chance to say YES to Jesus. It’s the same mission that God gave to Bill and Vonette Bright in 1951.
    5. We are not backing away from Jesus but rather moving toward those who need to hear the gospel, more effectively in Jesus name.

    I pray it helps you to know this.  You can find much more information on our Cru FAQ site here.

    Some have asked “What does Cru mean?” Well, it will mean what our volunteers, alumni and staff members live out and thus fill the meaning with. After all, what did Apple, Nike, Starbucks and Google mean before they began living out their names? Here is an excellent video that demonstrates “The Power of Words” to reshape perspective and invite engagement.

    httpv://youtu.be/Hzgzim5m7oU

     

  • Do you trust me?

    This is the third post in a series on Distance/Virtual Leadership. Read the first two posts here and here.

    “Can I trust you?”

    It’s a question that rumbles around inside our minds each time we as leaders are faced with a conflict or a fresh opportunity. But how often do we ask ourselves, “Can you trust me?”

    The Link between Trust and Collaboration
    Trust is listed at or near the top of the list of team-building essentials in every book and journal article I surveyed on the topic of distance/virtual teams.

    What is trust? Marquardt and Horvath offer this definition: trust is the team members’ reliance on one another to protect their joint endeavor.[1] Fourteen of 28 chapters in the very helpful Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams deal with the topic of trust. The lending and earning of trust is particularly crucial to distributed teams.

    Why is trust so crucial? Because trust is the cornerstone of genuine collaboration. In their most recent work, Kouzes and Posner identify ten truths about leadership based on more than two million responses to their Leadership Practices Inventory from over 70 countries in the past two years. “Credibility is the foundation of leadership” is the second truth; “Trust rules” is the sixth.[2] Rath and Conchie answer the question “What will people follow in organizational leaders?” with four clear research-based responses: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.[3] If we define leadership as influence, trust leads the way.

    For team member A to trust team member B, member A must be able to see and experience specific behaviors and non-verbal clues in member B. Pat MacMillan categorizes these core issues as Competence (Can you deliver?), Character (Are you trustworthy?) and Concern (Do you care about me and my stuff?).[4] Clark, Clark and Crossley identify the same critical three issues respectively as Ability, Integrity and Benevolence.[5]

    It is helpful to examine the origins of the term “virtual,” which comes from Latin virtus meaning valor or moral excellence. Virtual doesn’t mean invisible or not really there. Taken this way, virtual means that I can trust you, and you can trust me, because of our mutual commitment to excellence, ability, and mutual concern.

    Finally, a distributed team must develop “swift trust,” which is where each team member acts as if trust is present from the beginning. It’s like offering everyone a hundred dollars in a “trust account” that they are allowed to make a few withdrawals on, rather than starting everyone at zero where the first misstep in communication results in negative balance of suspicion or distrust. This prevents the first offense from instantly blocking future productive interactions. I have found it helpful to explicitly ask a freshly forming virtual team to loan trust and grace to one another.

    What have you encountered that builds or breaks trust on a virtual team?

    Sources:

    [1] Marquardt, Michael J., and Lisa Horvath. Global Teams: How Top Multinationals Span Boundaries and Cultures with High-Speed Teamwork. 1st ed. Palo Alto, Calif.: Davies-Black Pub., 2001.

    [2] James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Truth About Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know, 1st, Kindle ed. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), location 273 of 2465.

    [3] Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Strengths Based Leadership (New York: Gallup Press, 2008), 79-83.

    [4] MacMillan, Pat. The Performance Factor: Unlocking the Secrets of Teamwork. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2001.

    [5] Randy Clark, Leigh Anne Clark, and Katie Crossley, “Developing Multidimensional Trust without Touch in Virtual Teams,” Marketing Management Journal 20, no. 1 (2010).

  • When did my team become virtual?

    So, you’re getting work done with a group of people. If you’re communicating using a private Facebook group or sharing numbers on a Google Docs spreadsheet, you may have just wandered into virtual territory.

    When does a conventional team become a distributed virtual team?

    Twitter has become the new watercooler. Four decades of research by MIT professor Tom Allen indicate that geographic separation begins to significantly influence member-to-member interactions with distances as small as 50 feet.[1] The idea of conventional, colocated team members who sit within shouting distance of one another for 8 hours each day is rapidly going the way of the hard-wired telephone and the CD-ROM. Also, many core business processes demand involvement from people working in different parts of the organization. Rarely do all these people report to the same boss, yet these virtual teams are expected to deliver real work. In a global work environment, it is not uncommon for an employee to participate on two or more distributed teams or workgroups simultaneously. Teammates based in different countries often know more current personal information about each other via social networking sites than they do about their co-workers in a department one floor above them.

    Cultural differences also play a significant role in the complexity of distributed teams. These differences are frequently overlooked, as discussions tend to focus on the technology rather than on value differences and cross-cultural barriers. These pressures exert extra weight in Christian missions because of our assumptions that we share the same core values and because we expect everyone to “be nice.” Due to space limitations we cannot explore all the cultural implications here, but will simply reflect some counsel from James Plueddemann:

    For God’s people to work together effectively, implicit assumptions about leadership need to be made explicit. They must be evaluated in light of sound social science research and biblical principles. The church in the North and South, the East and West acts out of unconscious and often confusing assumptions about leadership. We must appreciate the differences and challenge some of the misconceptions in order to work together as the worldwide body of Christ.[2]

    Virtual teams seeking long-term effectiveness will learn how to manage cultural diversity by explicitly talking about differences such as high and low power-distance cultures, high and low context cultures, individualistic and collectivist cultures, linear and holistic cultures, and whether we prefer sushi or Subway for lunch.

    Differences Between Conventional, Virtual and Global Teams[3]

    Type of Team Spatial Distance Communications Member Cultures Leader Challenge
    Conventional Colocated Face-to-face Similar High
    Virtual Scattered Mediated Similar or Different Higher
    Global Widely scattered Mediated Very Different Very High (!)

     

    Virtual teams can amplify the normal problems most colocated teams face. For instance, 600 professionals who manage or work on virtual teams reported that common problems such as not following through on commitments, questioning team decisions, backbiting and avoidance of conflict occur far more frequently on virtual teams.[4]

    Distributed virtual teaming supports the trend in institutions and organizations seeking to become more responsive to today’s social media environment. In a June 2011 blog post, John Kotter highlights the creative tension necessary for today’s organization to maintain a good balance between hierarchy (whose strengths are standardization, stability, maintenance and optimization) and network (whose strengths are seizing opportunity, rapid knowledge and expertise acquisition, and adaptability).

    If you’re serving on a virtual or global team, how are you making it easier for your team leader to lead well? 

    Sources:

    [1] Lipnack, Jessica, and Jeffrey Stamps. Virtual Teams: People Working across Boundaries with Technology. 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 2000) 19-21.

    [2] Jim Plueddemann, Leading across Cultures: Effective Ministry and Mission in the Global Church (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2009), 21.

    [3] Table adapted from Daft, Richard L., and Patricia Lane. The Leadership Experience. Vol. 4th. Mason, Ohio: Thomson/South-Western, 2008, 309.

    [4] Joseph Grenny, “Virtual Teams Keep People Connected,” Leadership Excellence, May 2010.