On Leading Well

Tag: Leadership

  • 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.

     

     

  • Tools Can Make the Difference

    The longer I live the more I appreciate the value of having the right tool for the job at hand.

    This morning Omar is tiling our master bathroom. In less than 90 minutes he removed our old toilet, stripped off two ancient layers of linoleum, pulled up all the baseboards and cleared away all the old glue.

    When we tackled the first two bathrooms in DIY projects it took us the better part of a day on each one to accomplish the same results.

    Omar has been doing this for 17 years. He has just a few tools, but they are the right ones. It’s amazing how quickly a job can get done when one has the right tools.

    I’ve experienced this in my hobbies of cycling and music. Pulling the bottom bracket on my Cannondale road bike or smoothing out the worn frets on my Taylor guitar would take forever without the right wrench or luthier’s fret file. Trying to do the job with the wrong tool would probably result in stripped threads or a scratched fretboard. I’ve discovered it’s worth the money to invest in the right tools. Avoiding those kinds of problems also makes it a lot easier to walk in the Spirit.

    The same is true at work. When I continually get stopped by not having the right tool or knowledge of how to use that tool, I have one of two good options. The first is to schedule some time in the calendar to become proficient in the tool (such as Excel or Twitter or a new phone’s OS). Eventually I can ignore the tool and focus on what I want to do. The second option is to support and follow a team member’s lead in letting them do what I cannot do or choose not to learn (such as our complicated financial reporting software) so we can get on with the mission.

    I guess a third option would be to continue being inefficient, frustrated, unproductive or irrelevant.

    Thanks, Omar, for the great life lesson today.