Leaders, Pay the “Upfront” Cost!

On Fox News Sunday, Sarah Palin noted President Obama doesn’t have “the cojones” to effectively address the issue of illegal immigration. Here’s the story: Palin Says Brewer Has Something Obama Lacks: ‘Cojones’. History will define whether or not she is on target. The word “cogones”  is a borrowed work from Hispanic roots. It basically means [...]

Be True to Your Vision – Inspire the Best Team

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true were really true, there would be little hope of advance. – Orville Wright I just watched the unveiling of the new Apple iPhone 4 and am amazed at the leap forward in technology and features. It really resonates with me that Steve [...]

Demanding Leader Vs. Nurturing Leader

Leading and Not Bossing There is a wonderful framing of true leadership skills in the blog post at The Practice of Leadership titled Are You a Leader or Just a Boss? (http://dld.bz/cPbx). Here’s a quote from the post: Just having a title does not make you a leader, leaderships is about influence. Title only buys you time to exercise true leadership, [...]

Are You Authentic in Your Leadership?

Authenticity is Great Leadership As I interviewed Jim Hart for the May 10, 2010 edition of Monday Morning Email (http://dld.bz/cNKu) I really resonated with his perspective on leadership in the church. This newsletter is for those who plan and lead worship ministries. Jim served the church for many years and now is President of the [...]

Oops – I Goofed!

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. – Abraham Lincoln Look in the mirror. Would you be inspired by you? It has been said that we are the result of the 5 people we hang around the most. Who do you want to influence you? How do you want to influence [...]

Listening is a Top Leadership Skill

Doug Lawrence has written a blog titled 7 Questions for your worship point person… at Church Central (http://www.churchcentral.com/blog/7-Questions-for-your-worship-point-person…- ) While reading the post I realized that it is of paramount importance. Of all the leadership skills important to the Transformational Leader, listening is certainly on the top of that list! This is not passive, uninvolved [...]

Community

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. – Henry Ford In reading a blog post by Jeffry Harlow in Unpacking Ideas, I was motivated by this comment, “In short, the heart of transformational leadership is that everyone involved in our organization has confidence that our leadership team believes in, clings [...]

Apathy

How will you transform yourself and those whom you lead today?

Relationships

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. 

 – Henry Ford

Leadership skills you employ in this area are important to the transformation of staff or volunteers into workers, critics into advocates, and detractors into supporters. Learn to define, recruit, delegate, support, nurture, and facilitate. The Transformational Leadership model enables leaders to get the right people, tell them what is needed, let people complete their tasks, and celebrate the results. After all, professional leaders lead. If we did everything, we would be called professional doers. Leaders lead. This means getting out of the way.

TIP: If you have lots of staff or volunteers, then learn to limit your time with those who are not as productive and give more to those who produce. Here’s a chance to use the 80/20 rule. Spend 80% of your volunteer support time with the 20% of the people who produce 80% of the results. Gather the remaining 80% of the volunteers who produce 20% of the results into groups. Support them as a group, not individually. This will give you a major bounce on your results and free up enormous amounts of time. (This is the “Pareto Principle” named after the nineteenth-century economist who developed the 80/20 rule for business.)

2. Hire The Best

The meeting of two personalities
is like the contact of two chemical substances: 
if there is any reaction, 
both are transformed. 
 – Carl Jung We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.
 – Ben Sweetland When a choral conductor spends months on rehearsing music with a choir, they don’t want [...]