Tweet All of us make mistakes and occasionally need someone to help us become better at what we do. This should always be the end goal of correction. Avoiding the…
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Tweet I have been part of several organizations experiencing either exponential growth or tremendous change. In business and with a few churches, we had times of explosive growth, but also…
Tweet As leaders, we all want to limit the risk in the hard decisions we make. Personally, whenever we are about to make a major change or launch some new…
I love organizational leadership and I am happy to serve on a healthy team. It’s amazing how many church leaders I know that say their team is not healthy. Recently I started wondering why it is that I claim our team is healthy and it led me to this post. Here, in my opinion, are 10 elements of a healthy organization:
Tweet In John Maxwell’s book “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently”. Maxwell claims, “Connectors live what they communicate”. The people who learn to connect with…
Tweet This post – posted several years ago – prompted a book. A publishing friend, who had been encouraging me to write a book for years, read this post and…
Tweet I remember talking with a young hurting pastor just after he resigned from his church. For several years he had attempted to restore a dying church into a healthy…
I was helping someone think strategically recently. We were looking at this person’s ministry, trying to design a system, which would allow for continual growth and improvement. The ministry has grown rapidly and the leader barely feels she can keep up with the current demands. She recognizes the need to delegate, grow new leaders, and spread out responsibility and ownership, but she can’t seem to get past the current demands of details to develop a plan to do so.
Have you ever been there?
I was talking with someone the other day about my experience with church planting. As I told my personal story, I kept using words such as “our” and “we”. Towards the middle of the conversation the person stopped me and asked, “Who’s ‘we’?” I was talking about me the whole time, but I confused him with my verbiage. I wasn’t trying to be confusing. It’s just a habit I’ve formed. I love teams and team-building and I’ve learned that developing a team vocabulary is a large part of encouraging healthy teams.
I cringe when I hear leaders use the words “I”, “me, and “my” when referring to their team, their church or organization. To me it always sounds so controlling, prideful, and arrogant. As an example, Ben Reed is our small groups pastor at Grace Community Church. He’s an amazing leader. I would give anything to have been where he is at his age when I was that same age. When I refer to him, I don’t say “He’s my small groups guy”. He’s not! He’s our small groups guy. I don’t want to portray to him or others that I control him. I would be limiting his potential if I refer to him in a possessive sense.
I understand it’s just semantics, but to me it’s an important one for leaders to think through. If we truly want to create a team environment, then we must have team vocabularies.
There are a few times when I use the personal words, such as:
Tweet Are you more of a leader or a manager? This may be one of the most important questions we have to answer as our careers take us to new…