Thursday, April 30, 2009

Bombs away

Your only hope to offer leadership- connecting yourself to others and to a cause and connecting others that care about that cause to each other-- may be to drop concerns and directives that are intended for one or two people in the group into a meeting of 12 or 14 people in a meeting.

This may be because it gives you leverage and an appropriate stage.  A bully pulpit sometimes is what you need to make positive change.

Or: in love you might take the one or two aside and engage in a difficult conversation with them about the concerns and hopes you have for them and the cause.

Which one do you find more effective?

More faithful?

I've found an open hand is more powerful than bombs.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Discipleship or passing the buck?

Once you put a stick in the ground and pin your cause and go steady with your purpose as an individual or as a part of an organization or movement, the cynics show up.  This, I guess, is a good thing.  My wife's boss went to "one of those silly leadership things".  The company is trying to brainwash him apparently about the importance of being a part of something greater than himself.  Silly said the cynic.

If you are a leader in discipleship, your ground, cause and purpose is discipleship.  I was in a meeting recently when a church staff member allowed a church member to do something the staff member normally does.  I'm taking a discipleship opportunity, the staff member said.  Oh, your passing the buck said the cynic.  

So empowering others to do as we do and do as Christ can become passing the buck I guess.

How do you tell the difference?

Sunday, April 26, 2009

To Do? Have Done.

I note pad a ran across in a hotel has made vision casting, goals setting, and even objective planning come more into focus for me.

It was a have done note pad.  

Have Done instead of  To Do.

Because, the title read, it's more satisfying.

It has even made the thought of job description writing and the job evaluation process easier.

Job description: what you will do if you take this job.

Job Done list: what have you done now that you have the job?

Performance Evaluation: How do you rate as far as what you are doing.

Evaluation of what you have done: what have you done and how is that working out for you?

So.  How do you determine what you have done?


Monday, April 6, 2009

John Wesley and ABCD

From the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.  P. 172:

"In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Methodist Movement became epidemic in England and North America, tipping from 20,000 to 90,000 followers in the U.S. in the space of five or six years in the 1780's.  But Methodism's founder, John Wesley, was by no means the most charismatic preacher of his era... His genius was organizational.  Wesley would travel around England and North America delivering open-air sermons to thousands of people.  But he didn't just preach.  He also stayed long enough in each town to form the most enthusiastic of his converts into religious societies, which in turn he subdivided into smaller classes of a dozen or so people.  Converts were required to attend weekly meetings and to adhere to a strict code of conduct.  If they failed to live up to Methodist standards, they were expelled from the group.  This was a group, in other words, that stood for something. Over the course of his life, Wesley traveled ceaselessly among these groups, covering as much as four thousand miles a year by horseback, reinforcing the tenets of Methodist belief.  He was a super Paul Revere.  The difference is, though, that he wasn't one person with ties to many other people.  He was one person with ties to many groups, which is a small but critical distinction.  Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured."

So, how are we creating communities?
Does being a member of these communities "stand for something"?
How are we connected: to people or to groups?