Linkfest 4 – Everybody’s Workin’ for the Weekend

Check out USA Today’s story on America’s RQ (Religion Quotient). It turns out that 50% of High School Seniors polled believe that Sodom and Gomorrah… were married. Hmm… it just got awkward.

How much should I weigh? Find out here

So you want to cancel your Cell Phone Service? Man, I wish I had seen this before I paid for the last two months of service.

Free Starbucks? Yup. Thursday, March 15th. Be there. Be ready to stand in line.

DriveConference ‘06 @ NorthPoint videos are available — for free — and you don’t stand in line. Videos here.

Life Cycle of a Church. Interesting. Taking healthy risks is a critical component of keeping the church alive and out of management mode.

If you’re looking to relocate to Metro Toledo (and who isn’t?), we’ve already got the perfect place for you to live.

BookSlice

From time to time, I’ll post a little diddy about a book I’m reading (not Jack and Diane). It won’t be the whole book but rather a BookSlice, kind of like when someone offers you a whole pizza (I’m thinking of college students) and you say “just a slice”. The same could apply to, say, Strawberry Rhubarb pie. And I hope it does. A review. A highlight. A BookSlice:

Leading Change by John P. Kotter (1996, Harvard Business School Press)

If you’ve recently read anything about changing an organization, you already know the buzzphrases: “Change or die”, “Paradigm Shift”, “Global Marketplace” are plentiful in organizational development literature. Refreshingly Kotter doesn’t add to the abyss of terminology, since most authors end up creating a new word to describe an old problem. Instead of a new term (“Strategery”) he sets up a system that takes all the loose ends and ties them into a brilliant mosaic, illustrating eight steps to bringing lasting change to an organization. Since RadBlog is an equipping place for church leaders, let me just say that although this book may look like another business book that you have to pole vault to adapt to leadership in the church, it’s not. Check out Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process of change (with annotation)

Establishing a Sense of Urgency :: The first step is to set up the conflict so that people long for a resolution. It’s not that we’re creating conflict, just naming it. It’s amazing that the highest IQ’s of the world can have the lowest action-quotient. People need a good reason to enter the change process.

Creating the Guiding Coalition :: Step two is forming a team of like-minded people who all dig change and know the vision. If you were around and aware during the “church growth” campaigns, you may remember thinking that all it takes is a charismatic Senior Pastor/leader to make a comeback (the Lee Iacocca Factor). Having a larger-than-life leader at the helm of the ship is no good if the crew doesn’t know how to row. In this phase, you’re trying to get the right people on board — those that bring expertese, flexibility, leadership and credibility. In a church setting, this might be a board, a ministry team or (sigh) a Committee.

Developing a Vision and Strategy :: Part three is where, with your team, you’re developing a picture of the preffered future as well as a way to get there. Two important points to consider, here. 1. You’re doing this with a team (not alone). 2. You’re coming up with vision first and strategy second. This is an important order of operations to strive for in the church. I’m not sure why, but we tend to come up with strategies first and then build visions around them. May the Lord help us to see the Kingdom of God as our ultimate vision and the building of the Kingdom as a strategy.

Communcating the Change Vision :: Talk, print, video, banners, brocures, complimentary visors. Your people need time to process, critique and then envision themselves in this new reality that you’re painting. Talk the change vision until it bleeds from every pore. Listen to every question.

Empowering Employees for Broad-Based Action :: This is where the rubber meets the road. You’ve unveiled the concept car, now it’s time to let your people drive. As pastors we tend to want to keep a tight hold on our ideas, not letting other people run with them because they might get into a wreck. This is true for me, at least! Unless your volunteers, staff, and teams can be empowered (given the keys) to start changing their specific parts of the organization to match the new vision, it’ll never fly.

Generating Short-Term Wins :: Since big change takes time and energy, it’s important to have little celebrations along the way that keep people motivated and prove that yes, we can get this right! Let’s say hypothetically that you’re tired of black and white TV and it’s your team’s job to invent full-color high-def. In this scenario, it may take years to get it right, much to the shagrin of your people. Instead, you could celebrate little milestones along the way (this month, we figured out how to get “green” to show up on the screen! Yay!). Little wins are important and should be from meeting sub-goals of the overarching vision.

Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change :: With a few wins under your belt, it’s time to ride that wave of credibility and continue the change process. This time it may be bigger, more sweeping or difficult for the organization. But you have shown yourself to be an effective change agent. Celebrate the wins, eat the cake, and keep moving.

Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture :: How sad would it be to make all of these changes, only for them to not stick? At this point, you commit to what you’ve aimed for all these days/months/years. I have seen situations where leaders were frustrated or discouraged — worn out from the uphill movement of change — and have let it all crumble. This would be like doing surgery but not sewing the patient back up. Gross. ‘Nuff said.

Kotter’s work is less like a book and more like a conversation in your living room with this Harvard professor. Although he goes into much detail on why change is important (since he’s writing to a 1996 audience) it’s still a refreshing, quick, useful read for church leaders who are called to bring healthy change to their organization.

BookSlice Score: with 10 being “Memorize the Whole Thing” and 1 being “Glance at it as it hits the trash pile” I give it an

8

.

Check it out at Amazon

iPhone

Apple announced the iPhone today which will be available in June. Can I wait that long? Can I swing the $499 price tag? Do I dare buy the first generation? Anyway, these are exciting times — a handheld device that runs Mac OSX. If you’re in the music/video/artsy/solid computer business, then Mac OSX is your bag.

Links:CNN iPhone story
Apple’s press

Albert Einstein quote of the day (updated monthly)

Albert Einstein is known as one of history’s greatest thinkers. How does this quote apply to revolutionary thinking?

“The kind of thinking that will solve the world’s problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place.”

These are the words of a paradigm shifter. Not nearly as big of a deal as Jesus, but still plenty true.

The Servant Leader vs. the Pragmatist Leader

Our internal thesaurus usally equates the title “leader” with “boss”, “numero uno” or “a monkey could do their job”. We’ve all been in scenarios where…

The leader knows how to get things done, yet in the process doesn’t know how to treat their people

The leader doesn’t know how to get things done, yet things come together amidst chaos (we’ll call this the Michael Scott syndrome.

If John Maxwell were to have a Simpson’s-like catch phrase, it would be “Leadership is influence”. Rick Warren is often heard to say (beyond other things) “Leaders are readers”. Both of these statements are true, at least in my experience, and have been a catalyst in equipping church leaders and pastors for the past 15 years. (By the way — I think I’ve heard every one of John Maxwell’s Injoy Life Club tapes — I found a giant batch of them in my home church basement). I know the 21 laws. I’ve seen Purpose Driven in many vehicles. These have made a difference, no doubt.

But now I’m learning about the leader as a servant. The writings of Robert K. Greenleaf are what fill one of my textbooks for my MA program. Let me tell you that this is not just another textbook. Greenleaf is the founder of the Servant Leadership movement. I’m not suggesting that John Maxwell et al don’t write from the perspective of servanthood. But their philosophical perspective on leadrship is that of pragmatism, meaning that success is measured by consequence. While the goal of leadership/management is to bring positive consequences, it can be devistating to focus only on results. Greenleaf focuses on the importance of developing the person, both the leader and the follower, and that positive results will naturally follow.

Greenleaf suggests that a servant leader is a servant first, which means that the desire to lead is secondary to the desire to serve. Go ahead and read that again. It’s important.

Servant leaders…

make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served

knows that the greatest aim is for the served to grow

communication with those you serve is a two-way street; it’s not what the leader says but rather what is heard by the follower that truly matters

This way of thinking about leadreship is less about pragmatism (results-oriented) and more about morality (people-oriented), which assumes that organizations that are being served and strengthened by servant-leaders will naturally bring about positive results. This is the aim of pragmatism. Both may bring the same results but do so by starting from almost opposite perspectives. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

Application for the local church:

Is the health of a team measured by their end result or their process? Specifically — is a Worship Team better off by producing great music or by being developed as worshippers? Okay, so it’s both/and. But is it equal? What do I find myself focusing on as a leader? Chances are it will be what I’m good at, which raises another question: do I need to develop my servant-leader skills or my pragmatist-ledaer skills?

What are the responsibilites that I have as a pastor/leader to my people? The Apsotle Paul had a sweet balance of pragmatism (be sanctified!) with servanthood (encouraging, comforting) as seen in his letters. Am I spending enough moments in introspection to know where my people are at? Where I’m at?

Where’s the pressure? What are the expectations? Why is it easy to ignore servanthood in lieu of pragmatism?

May the Lord help us to serve our people as we aim together for meaningful results!