Category: Leading

Yesterday I advocated a “mind my own business” mentality as opposed to a “working for the man” mentality.  I’ve seen this demonstrated so vividly in the way Nashvillians have dealt with our flood.  I haven’t seen one house or one neighborhood sit around waiting for the government to take care of them.  What I have seen is literally hundreds of men, women, and children doing the back-breaking, nasty, repulsive work of cleaning out the sewage and the muck that a flood always leaves behind.

I’ve seen hard-working people get in and take initiative.  And that makes all the difference.

So let’s apply this same “mind my own business” mentality to starting a business. My question to you is, “Why would you ever work for someone else?”

I know that there are some that should; hospitals, other kinds of organizations that need systems and people to fill them.  But still, even then, you are working for yourself.

There are three things people think you absolutely have to have in order to start something.  And they would be wrong.  Here they are:

1. If you’re going to start a business, you need cash.  I heard a guy just the other day say that he was going to start the business of his dreams and he was going to have to borrow a million dollars.  I thought, “Oh, what a prescription for disaster.”  You don’t need a million dollars.  You don’t even need two dollars.  Cash is way overrated.  Most people have cash and burn through it because they don’t have any business sense.
2. You don’t need connections. I’ll be the first to admit that connections are important.  The mission statement of the church I serve today is to “help people connect to God and each other.”  But that having been said, you don’t have to have a lot of connections to start out with.  Who does?  You build them over time.
3. Some people believe in order to start something big, they need control. They need control of market shares or sources of production; they need to be able to somehow have superior knowledge that’s not available to others.  And they would be wrong.

How many times have I heard people give excuses as to why they can’t do something only because they don’t have the cash, they don’t have the connections, or they don’t have the control?  These things are nice and they come with time.  But no one starts out with them, unless of course you’re a Vanderbilt, a Getty, or a Carnegie.

One of the things I am learning as I get older is that people can fit into two very distinct categories.  I’ve seen them evident during the recent flood in our city.  It’s the “work-for-the-man” mentality, and the “mind-your-own-business” mentality.

I was raised with the “work-for-the-man” mentality which basically says you show up, you put in time, and people pay you whatever they think you’re worth.

So the worth of your life, the worth of your work was set by the market forces outside of you. Most of the people with the “work-for-the-man” mentality think they are underpaid.  And sometimes they are.  But oftentimes they are not because they just show up without the desire to produce anything, create anything, or generate any wealth.

There’s another mentality that says that I should mind my own business. And I don’t mean just to not meddle in someone else’s affairs, but that I work for myself.  As a person of faith of course I believe I work for and serve God.  But that having been said, I work for myself.  That’s why as a young pastor I’ve never been good at working for deacon boards and other out of date committee structures.  And that’s why when threatened to conform or be fired, I of course chose to be fired.

Having gone through the ups and downs of being in business for myself, I’ll tell you that I will choose being in business over working for someone else. It’s the exhilaration that comes from knowing that you get up every day and add value, that you help people, or you die.

I think more Christians should adopt a mind-my-own-business mentality. That is to start something important and significant, to meet big needs, to create companies that hire people and pay taxes and help lift society.

It’s not the preachers in the pulpits or the singers in the band; it’s the business men and women motivated for the right reasons: to build something of their lives, to make something of themselves that will save our world.

Tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM we will launch our Gathering 4 Guys.  The mission is to help good guys grow great.

Beginning with the first words of his best-selling book, “Good to Great,” Jim Collins says this:  “The reason that there are few things that are great is because there are so many things that are good.”  And what he means is that we have settled for good. And we do have, in America, a lot of good guys, nice guys, guys that are trying to do the right thing and hoping everything turns out OK.

But where are the guys who are aspiring to greatness; I mean true greatness, the kind of greatness that was wired into us by our Creator?  Well, beginning tomorrow morning at 7:00 at The Factory in Franklin, Tennessee, a bunch of us guys are going to begin a journey together learning how we can truly grow our lives to be great: great for God, great for our families, and great for the world that needs good, strong man-up men to show up.

If you haven’t noticed lately, we’re in the midst of what I call the “buffoonication” of the American male.  I mean watch TV and what do you see?  Men are stupid, slow, unfaithful, narcissistic, and unwilling to commit.

I think that’s a lie.  I think there are a lot of good men who just need some help to truly grow great. And that’s what we’re going to do for the next six weeks.

This is our way of changing the world.  What are you doing?

A couple days ago, while out on a training run, I did a video on “Get Some Guts and Take the Lead” in preparation for our “Making Marriage Fun Again” Live Event.

As I thought about it, I’ve come to understand that as the father and husband in my home, I have a role of leadership.  It’s my responsibility to take the lead. But that’s a bit different than trying to take control.

Men, if you’re trying to control your wife, I guarantee you’re miserable, because she can’t be controlled.  She cannot be dominated without being damaged.  Guys, if you’re trying to control your children, you’re miserable.  Your children can’t be dominated without being damaged.  My advice is, stop trying to get control of your family and start getting control of yourself.  After all, you are the only one over whom you have all the power.  Think about it.

None of us can choose our circumstances, what happens from day to day, or how other people will react.  But we are always in control of how we will respond.  We can be proactive to life, or reactive. Control is what we do to ourselves.  Leading is what we do for others.

To take the lead simply means that I take responsibility, that I live up to my commitments; that I live the life that will inspire my wife and my children by my example.  The only power a leader truly has over those who follow him is influence.  And the only way to gain influence is to inspire.

Men, let’s inspire greatness in our marriages, let’s inspire greatness in our children; not by trying to control them, but by taking control of our own lives and being an inspiration.  Then we’ll be an influence. And only then can we take the lead.

In that video, I encouraged men everywhere to take the lead in attending our first Live Event on April 30th.  Don’t wait for your wife to register or talk you into it. Take the lead. Take initiative.  Be the person in your family who is the first to do the right thing; to get the training, the help, and the encouragement your family is always going to need to go from good to great.

Over the years of dealing with families, family issues, parenting, and the challenges that come with it, I’ve noticed a trend developing.It was true in my home, and it’s true in so many others.  Here it is: Fathers who are either passive, afraid, or just totally disengaged in the parenting process.

Now let me be honest.  I have three daughters.  And when they were infants I felt pretty useless.  But as they grew, particularly from girlhood to womanhood, I had a deep interest in the outcome.  I always had four goals that I wanted to see as my girls grew up to be young women.  I prayed constantly for these four realities to be displayed in their character.  Here they are:

• That they would be smart so that they wouldn’t have to depend on boys to tell them how things work.
• I wanted them to be strong so they wouldn’t give in to the pressure of some guy in the back of a car, or some lie or manipulation.
• I wanted them to be good in that they lived their lives to honor God and seek truth.
• And I wanted them to be caring; not cold, distant, arrogant, or aloof.

In my case, God has answered that prayer.  Erin, Lindsey, and Paige are smart, strong, good, and caring.  I wanted them to be marry-able; not just date-able.

So here’s my letter to fathers with boys.  I have never fathered a boy, though I’ve been a boy, and not been fathered.  Men, we’re raising  a generation of  boys who are not marry-able. Here’s what I mean.  They don’t know how to take responsibility.  They have  no clue what to do with their lives even though they have private school and college degrees.  They have loads of debt.  Many of them still live at home.  They are passive, display little initiative, and want to sit around and drink coffee and discuss the deeper things of life.

I’m calling out all you men out there raising boys.  Your sons need you; not just your money, not just your  presents, but your presence.  We are raising a generation of young boys who are experience-rich and relationship-poor.  By that I mean they’ve been given a ton of things: trips, privileges, advantages, experiences that maybe you didn’t have.  But what they don’t have is the engagement, influence, wisdom, and input of their dads.

Fathers, raise your boys to be men; not buffoons, not weak, feminine boys, but men – strong, virile, good, man-up men who know how to treat women with respect and honor; who know what it means to work hard and sacrifice; who are willing to work to go to school rather than financing it by Sallie Mae and paying for it with their future wives’ income.

I really am fed up with the boy-men that I see.  Where are the real man-up men? I’m not talking about mean and nasty.  You don’t even have to own a gun or play golf.  I’m talking about real, strong, good, virile men who know what it means to wow, woo, and win a woman’s heart.

The last few years have been an amazing time of transition for me, Paula, and our family.  It is the greatest gift that God has ever given me in my adult life.  I’ve been able to sit back, watch, and observe.  Yes, I’ve blogged, I’ve written, I’ve spoken, I’ve married a lot of people, and counseled even more.  I’ve been busy.  But more than anything I’ve been observing.  And this is what I’m discovering: too much of the church leadership – pastors, staff, and all the organizations that have grown up on the web – are more interested in using people than building people.

If you haven’t noticed, people are the most important thing on the planet. They’re not a strategy, they’re not your staff, they are not an asset; they are the reason you exist in your business or organization.  And yet, too much of today’s leadership, particularly in the church (because that’s where I’ve been observing most) is in love with leadership as an end in itself, as well as its own voice about the subject.

The endless blogs, twitters, and other cutesy ways pseudo-leaders find to advance themselves, all sound the same: clamoring to be noticed, clamoring to be supported, clamoring to be serviced, to be published, to be enlisted, and to be booked for your next event.  And while that in and of itself is not bad, the message is what, in my mind, is not worth the effort.

Get this straight.  If I’ve learned anything in 37 years of building organizations and leading people, people don’t want to be used. They want to be blessed. The truth of the matter is, my goal (my job) is to build people: to bless them, to encourage them, to lift them up; helping them to build relationships, marriages, be great parents, be men and women of God; to be great citizens, to engage their world.  My job is not to build organizations or buildings.  The vision of The Gathering is not how can we build another building and house a few more chairs.  The goal 24/7/365 every day, every week of our life is how are we honoring God, how are we serving His agenda in the three R’s – redemption, reconciliation, and restoration, all the core powers and objectives of building people.

And don’t think this is just true for churches and non-profits.  If you haven’t noticed, people don’t work for money anymore. They don’t like being treated like an extra chair or table that can be put out in the hallway when not in use.  People are power.  Loving them, blessing them, helping them become who they have the potential to be is your highest calling.

If you’re going to be a leader, be a leader in love with building people; not a leader in love with building your own organization and reputation.

For all of us, we play two essential roles in life: those of leader, and follower.  In some environments you’re a leader, and in other environments you’re a follower.  Let me suggest one environment in which you are always responsible to take the lead; and that is, in your own life.

You are the president of your own private nation.  You’re the leader.  You’re the one who has to take initiative.  There are things that you must do for yourself that no one else can do; not even God.  Here are five of them:

1.    You must take accountability for your own choices. I call it developing response-ability.  You can’t control where you were born, what your natural talents or assets are, or your family tree.  But you are accountable at all times for the choices you make no matter what circumstances you face.  Once you give up that accountability, you give up leadership.  You drift, and ultimately you die.

2.    You alone are responsible for the stewardship of your life. God has given you time, resources, relationships and a brain.  You are responsible for managing and for stewarding each of those resources.  You are your own life-manager.  You decide where the time goes, what you read, how you exercise your brain, how you stimulate your choices, and make connections.

3.    You are responsible for your own health and well-being. God has given you a billion dollar body and a trillion dollar brain.  This body is inextricably connected to your spirit and to your soul: body, mind, spirit.  Call it what you will, we are a trinity created in the image of a Trinitarian God, and only you alone can take care of your body.  Exercise it.  Feed it the right things.  When it breaks down, there will be no other body issued to you.

4.    You are responsible for your own rest and renewal.  You can wear your body out and die too soon.  You can go through life being miserable.  Or you can rest and renew.  God has put into life a rhythm of 6 and 1.  Six days we work; one day we rest.  And during that resting day, we go through a period of renewal as we gather with other believers; believers in God, believers in life, believers in good, believers in each other.  They inspire us and motivate us.  I call it the E-I-E-I-O principle: we are Encouraged, we get Insight, we gain Enthusiasm, and Inspiration to go out and live an Outrageous life.

5.    You alone are responsible for your enthusiasm; yes I mean enthusiasm. It’s an internal energy that comes from knowing you were created for a purpose, that you live in a good world with a good God; that you have faith that gives you hope and therefore you have everything you need to succeed in the real world.  You believe that God has put you at this place in this time.  You get up every day knowing that you are doing what you were born to do; kind of like every day is Christmas for you.

Bottom line, you alone are responsible to lead your own life.  You can’t delegate that responsibility to anyone.  And if your life sucks, you can change it today by taking control of these five areas.

As a leader, I’m always looking for leadership lessons.  I’m trying to soak up the experiences that I see in the headlines each and every day.  This week with Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, coming out and crucifying his former coach, it was a great opportunity to learn an important lesson.

I’ll be the first to admit that what you own you should be able to control. But even that principle has its limits.  Here are the five things I take away from this bizarre news story:

1.    Anytime you isolate yourself into a little world of your own mind and way of thinking, you can justify doing anything; even things that are incredibly bizarre.  So be careful about talking yourself into believing certain things.

2.    It comes out of number one, and that’s the whole concept of group think.  Once you begin to isolate yourself and talk to yourself, everyone around you who depends on you for their livelihood or certain benefits begin to agree with you without challenge.  It’s called group think.  That’s why a bunch of people can behave in bizarre ways when they simply just close off all communication with other outside counselors.

3.    A bizarre behavior of unhealthy decisions over time destroys your credibility. Here’s what we can learn from this: be careful how many times you choose the nuclear option when dealing with conflict.  You do it too often and you are the one who becomes suspect, no matter how right you may be.

4.    Lane Kiffin, like him or not, is a person. He has family members.  Trying to destroy a person you disagree with only backfires on you.  Remember, no matter how violent the disagreement, we are people.  And people matter more than anything else.  Without people you don’t have a football team, an organization, a church, or even a family.

5.    The most important observation is that though Mr. Davis owns the Oakland Raiders, he owns it for the public good. It exists by the benevolence, the goodwill, and the willingness of the Oakland fans and other people around the country to see them play.  You can’t simply thumb your nose and say, “I own it and I’ll do what I want,” and expect people to continue to support you over time.  The Oakland Raiders would be absolutely nothing without the NFL, and without her fans.  And when you depend on other people for your livelihood, you have to learn how to play nice.

These are my take-aways from this experience.  What are some of yours?

One of the most important things for you to remember is that your success is dependent almost solely on other people. By that I mean, you can work hard, invest, prepare, plan, and even be educated, but unless other people come to the table, you’re simply going to be spinning your wheels. How do you get other people to help you with your agenda, your passion, your plans? You do it by creating goodwill ahead of time.

One of the subtle aspects of life is that we don’t seem to feel like we need other people when things are going well. But when things fall apart, we reach out to people and we wonder why they move away from us. It’s because we haven’t created goodwill ahead of time.

So in this Dave Rave, let’s talk about the 7 ways we create goodwill ahead of time, before we need it.

1. Be kind. It may sound like a cliché, but it is still the truth. Be kind to people. Understand that people have feelings. They are not there just to fulfill your needs, or to adopt your agenda and to help you be successful. Be kind to people in the way you treat them, the way you respond, the words you use, the emotional energy that you create.

2. Be gracious. I’ve learned that if you’ll be gracious with people when they’re down and you’re up, they’ll be gracious with you when you’re down and they’re up. Be gracious. Don’t hold grudges. Don’t remind people of the ways in which they’ve failed you. It doesn’t make them better and doesn’t make them more faithful. Be gracious.

3. Be thoughtful. Remember things like birthdays and important dates to other people. Send “thank you” cards. Use “snail mail.” It’s still there and it makes an impact that email can never make. Think of ways that you can create good memories by being thoughtful to other people.

4. Be generous. Don’t hold to the letter of the law. Give people a large berth to make mistakes. Don’t just give them what you owe them; be generous. Overwhelm them with your big-heartedness. It will pay off.

5. Deposit before withdrawal. In every relationship that you form, you’re going to need to make a withdrawal in the future. The only way to do that is to make small deposits along the way. Do for others what you hope they’ll do for you, but you do it first and ahead of time. You make a deposit just like a savings account. That’s exactly the purpose, isn’t it? To make small deposits along the way so that when you need a large withdrawal, you have the capital. Same thing is true of relational and emotional capital.

6. Under promise; over deliver. This can’t be emphasized too much. Most of us are in danger of becoming cynics because we just simply have had too many experiences where we can’t trust people to keep their word. It’s a delight when we run across people who under promise but over-deliver. If you do that, you’ll create goodwill that is worth more than any monetary price you can put on it. So make sure that you “wow” people by the fact that you give them more than they expected. Better under-promise on the front end and over-deliver on the back end. That’s how you get repeat customers.

7. In order to create goodwill over time you have to remember that everything is connected. For example, you may be dealing with someone who is mowing your yard. You pay them a set fee. And they don’t do a job that suits you. You decide because they are just a “lawn-mowing person,” you can treat them in a rough, discourteous way. What you may find out is their brother or their cousin, their mother, or their father – someone they’re related to – runs a vendor or a business that you desperately need in order to complete a deal. Then you learn that you didn’t get their help or the contract because they’ve been talking to their son-in-law who mows your yard, and he’s convinced them that you’re a jerk. Remember, act everyday as though everything is connected. Act as though the waiter at the restaurant, the person at the gas station, the person who reads your electric meter; every person you think doesn’t have any power is connected or related to other people. And everything is connected.

Remember, you need goodwill. It will determine your success over time. Create goodwill. Remember these seven ways and you’ll be glad you did.

Like many of you I have been a student of leadership all my adult life. I’ve read probably 100 or more definitions of it. It’s an elusive quality. And when it’s present amazing things happen.

In the providence of God, He has made His church heavily leadership-reliant. At the head of every church that is growing and impacting its community and culture, there is a leader. Anointed, called, equipped with God’s favor, that leader is leading boldly forward. WHile this list is not exhaustive, I’ve found there are at least three essentials that every leader brings to every great church, business, organization, or family:

Essential #1: A clear and compelling vision. Leaders do vision. They see the future and the present. They observe things and images appear in their minds: things that aren’t but should be and could be if all the right things came together.

Leaders with clear and compelling visions can reduce them to a sentence, even a word; can tell them convincingly to a group, or one-on-one. They can transfer that vision to the hearts of many people. And when that happens, really amazing things are created.

Essential #2: Ideas. Every great leader brings compelling ideas to the table. They are not just great vision guys, they are also “what if” guys. They can ask the question, “What if?” and expose a great idea hiding right there in the potential of the vision, Leaders deal in ideas, not petty power maneuvers or personality conflicts. When people say it’s not personal, it’s business, what they’re really saying is it’s all about the idea, not the person behind it.

Essential #3: Great leaders bring energy to their group or organization. Great leaders are happy, enthusiastic, passionate. That passion can often be misunderstood as anger. And sometimes when their vision and ideas aren’t moving forward at the pace they had hoped (when do they ever actually?) a leader can become frustrated. The energy can go sideways and become counter-productive. Good or bad, a leader brings energy into every organization. If you make sure that energy is aligned and moving down the field toward the goal, it’s an infectious thing; something great to behold.

Those are my three essentials: Vision, Ideas, and Energy. What are yours?