The LeadFirst Briefing

Embrace Constraints from Defeat to Victory

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Tue, 07 May 2024 15:48:32 GMT

A Journey Through Trials

In business, tales of triumph often stem from the crucible of adversity. Such is the narrative of one CEO, whose journey from the brink of bankruptcy to industry transformation is etched with the profound lesson of embracing constraints.

Years ago, amidst the tumult of a fledgling career, I found myself ensnared in the clutches of a project, a beacon of hope I believed would propel us to greatness. But as fate would have it, my unwavering determination metamorphosed into a blind obsession, steering the company perilously close to financial ruin.

The Mirage of Innovation

The project once hailed as a beacon of innovation, had become an albatross around our necks, draining resources and eroding morale. With a heavy heart and depleted coffers, I finally acquiesced to the inevitable: we had to cut our losses and sever ties with the project. The aftermath was a maelstrom of anguish and restructuring. Friends became casualties of circumstance, casualties of my flawed vision. Yet, amidst the rubble of shattered dreams, a seed of opportunity took root.

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, the winds of change were blowing, heralding a shift from character-based to graphical user interfaces. Bereft of resources and reeling from setbacks, we faced a daunting challenge: how to innovate with limited means?

Catalysts for Creativity

With only a handful of dedicated souls at our disposal, we embarked on a Herculean task: to birth a next-generation product within the confines of two years. What ensued was nothing short of miraculous.

Instead of lamenting our constraints, we embraced them as catalysts for creativity. Our small, but determined team, eschewing convention, charted a new course. Leveraging off-the-shelf components and a spirit of ingenuity, we birthed a product that defied expectations. Within two years, our creation hit the market, catalyzing a seismic shift in our fortunes and the industry at large.

Embracing Limitations

The lesson learned was profound: constraints need not be the harbingers of despair; they can be the crucible of innovation. In a world awash with limitations, it is not the absence of resources, but the presence of resilience that determines success.

So, I implore you, dear reader, to ponder the constraints that shackle you. Are they insurmountable barriers or the seeds of opportunity? As the apostle Paul once learned, it is in our weakness that true strength is revealed. When we relinquish control and embrace our limitations, we tap into a wellspring of power beyond measure.

Conclusion

In the tapestry of life, adversity is but a thread, weaving a narrative of resilience and redemption. Embrace the constraints that bind you, for therein lies the path to true liberation.

Caring for Others Requires Caring For Yourself

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 12:29:44 GMT

Introduction

As leaders, it's easy to get caught up in the job's demands and remember the importance of self-care. However, taking care of oneself is critical to being an effective leader. Let us explore some biblical insights from Jesus that can help us understand why self-care is so important in leadership.

Love the Lord, Your God, with All Your Heart

Jesus said:
'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
Matthew 37-39

The most important thing a leader can do is to be aligned with God. Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. When we are in a relationship with God and aligned with his purposes, we can better manage our lives and be effective leaders.

Investing in Your Own Centeredness

Investing in your spiritual calling is essential to being a healthy and effective leader. Ask yourself, "Why am I here?" and "What am I here for?" When you are clear on your purpose and aligned with God's purposes, you will have a stable life and be better able to manage your finances, health, and relationships.

Love Your Neighbor as You Love Yourself

Jesus said that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. This means that you must take care of yourself so that you can love others. God guides how to take care of yourself, your body, your mind, your soul, your family, and your children. By taking care of yourself, you will be better able to take care of others.

The Essence of Leadership

A production manager once said that at the end of the day, he wants his people to have a smile on their faces. This encapsulates the essence of leadership: getting purpose right and making sure your people are experiencing meaning, fulfillment, and joy. As a leader, you must provide care, nurturing, and mentorship to your people. But you can only do this if your own life is stable and healthy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, self-care is critical to being an effective leader. By aligning yourself with God's purposes, investing in your centeredness, and taking care of yourself, you will be better able to love your neighbor and be an effective leader. Remember that the most important thing you can do as a leader is to take care of yourself. (i.e. Whole Person Care Strategy)

Transformation: Outside In or Inside Out?

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 10:22:42 GMT

Introduction

Transformation is a topic that fascinates us, whether personal or organizational change. Recently, I was reminded of the significance of this topic when I met a young woman who had just been released from prison. Drugs and the harsh realities of the world around her had consumed her life. She was shaped by her surroundings, but her time in prison led to a chance encounter that would change her life forever.

“Love your neighbor as you love yourself"
Mark 12:31

A group of people reached out to her and established a relationship, showing her the love and kindness that the Bible calls for us to show to our neighbors. They spent time with her and introduced her to a new way of thinking, explaining that there were other options in life. As we spoke, she smiled and cried, reflecting on how she was changing from being shaped by the world to being transformed from the inside out.

“And be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”
Romans 12:2

This transformational concept is reflected in the book of Romans, which it says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." It's about changing the way you think and moving away from being shaped by the world's expectations to becoming your force for change.

The gospel of Jesus Christ offers this idea that the life of God can come inside of us and change our future and destiny. When we renew our minds and understand that we are created in the image of God and loved by Him, we can forgive our past and become a force that changes the world.

Power of Transformation

The power of transformation is that it compounds, and it changes not only us but those around us as well. It changes who we marry, our children, our family life, and even our grandchildren. It's a transformative force that takes place inside of us through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There is hope for everyone to break the hold that the past has on us and shape the world around us instead of being shaped by it. The power of transformation is real, and it all starts with renewing your mind and believing in a better future.

Role of Desire in Unraveling the Chaos in Leadership

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 06:55:33 GMT

Introduction

You will be a better leader if you understand the power and presence of desire in everyone you interact with. Engaging the hearts and minds of those around you depends on helping people fulfill these needs. This applies to all of life, not just paid employment. For example, have you ever noticed a grandmother’s passion for preparing Thanksgiving dinner?
This is a supreme example of bringing order out of chaos, and you better not get in her way. Think of the passion of a father protecting a child, a musician performing, or a gardener gardening. We know immediately when we see someone “on a mission.” But what happens when a strong desire is denied? Let’s explore a few insights from the Bible.

Desire Denied

Much of the chaos we face in leadership roles originates in the “illogical” things we and others do. This is not a new idea. One example is God confronting people with their illogical by speaking through the prophet Isaiah. In this situation, some people have a strong desire to worship something. It is so strong that God points out the insanity of how they pursue that desire. They take wood and use half of it for cooking their meal and the other half to make an idol that they bow down to and worship as God.

Over the half he eats meat; he roasts it and is satisfied. Also
he warms himself and says, “Aha, I am warm, I have seen
the fire!”
And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls
down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, “Deliver
me, for you are my god! ”
Isaiah 44

Reading this passage makes me smile because I see how much easier it is to see the insanity of other people’s actions than in my own. As a leader, when trying to sort out the chaos of human interactions, we are more effective when we try to get to the root of what motivates people. Often, the people involved benefit from bringing their underlying desires to the surface because sometimes they (we) are unaware of their effect on our actions. It is good to be alert for issues of the “heart.” Desire can drive us to lose all reason. The Bible warns of several such expressions.

Anger

The first example in scripture is Cain killing his brother, Abel, because God considered Abel’s offering better than Cain’s. Cain desired God’s approval and acceptance and didn’t get it. His reaction was anger, which resulted in him murdering Abel. Why? Because Abel had what Cain wanted, the approval by God of his offering.

In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering
of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn
of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had
regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering
he had no regard.
So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to
Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you
do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin
is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule
over it.” Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. And when they were in
the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.
Genesis 4:3

This is another example of how desire overcomes reason. How does killing Abel get Cain what he wants, which is God’s approval? Cain offends God even more by killing Abel, which is the opposite of what he wants. We have other reactions besides anger, however. Sometimes we become afraid.

Fear

Israelites were on a major road trip from Egypt to their homeland. They were almost there and sent spies into a land God had promised them. They hoped to be done traveling. However, the spies returned to report that the land was extraordinary (filled with milk and honey), but powerful people lived there (giants). They would have to fight for what they wanted. The Bible records that their “hearts melted.” They lost the will to go forward.

Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not
able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we
are.” So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of
the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through
which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its
inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great
height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak,
who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves
like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
Numbers 13

Fear ultimately led to that generation losing the opportunity to enter its homeland. A different response from fear is discouragement. This is what the Bible refers to as “heart sick.”

Heart-Sick

This could lead to a desire for a different type of work, to start a business, or to end their loneliness. Despair can be difficult to detect since it can grow slowly over an extended time, and people mask it. Taken to an extreme, discouragement can evolve to escape into alcohol, drugs, or even suicide.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12

Whereas those who are heart sick are often quiet, there is also an opposite reaction: a variation of anger.

Disruption and Discord

This leads to striking out at others. Typical behaviors include outbursts, uncooperativeness, and doing things that make it difficult for people to work together, all of which lead to chaos. These people appear unhappy and work at making everyone else unhappy, too. The Apostle James found this behavior in the church as well. Wherever there are people, there are clashes of desire.

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it
not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire
and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain,
so you fight and quarrel.
James 4

To illustrate, I consulted on a situation in a nonprofit with several hundred people employed. One individual started disrupting an entire department after years of good work. It took digging, but the cause was that his wife told him that someone in the group had made a suggestive remark to her.

He told no one; he just took out his frustration and anger on everyone else. I arranged a conversation between this man and the alleged offender, and the other party denied it. Their interaction damaged their relationship beyond repair and affected the entire team. Resolution did not occur until one party left the organization for another job.

My first reaction when I see someone behaving like this is to get angry at them. But a more constructive thing to do is find out the reasons behind the emotion. Then we can work on the root problem rather than adding to the problem with our own unpredictable reactions.

Envy

Envy is resentment toward someone who has what you want. This can grow into the extreme of not only wanting something for yourself but also not wanting someone else to have it. (Think Cain.) Scripture illustrates this principle with a story where King Solomon had to discern between two women who claimed the same baby as their own. Solomon said to bring a sword to cut the baby in two, so each woman could have half.

As a wise leader, he understood the actual mother desired life for her baby ahead of not wanting someone else to have it. The false mother, in contrast, revealed herself because of her envious response. She was willing to see the baby die rather than allow the other woman to have it.

Envy is another extreme example that leads to a word of caution. Desire is like nitroglycerin. Handle with care. We all have had our desires trample our reason. As leaders, we need to be better at helping people trapped in this situation. We should be more understanding since we’ve all been there.

The Bible makes clear why desire is so strong in us; we need it to overcome chaos and have dominion. Let’s move on to how our minds interact with our desires.

The Three Innate Desires of Human

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:50:42 GMT

Introduction

In biblical language the heart is in the center of our bodies and represents where desire originates deep within us. In this narrative, God points to the heart where the problems start. It says: “The intentions of the thoughts of the heart were only evil always.” The heart is one of the most frequently referenced topics in the Bible, with over 800 references. The samplings below show how critical the heart is in God’s design for humankind.

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23).
“You say, ‘How I hated discipline, and my heart despised reproof (correction)!’” (Proverbs 5:12).
“The wise of heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to ruin” (Proverbs 10:8).
“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad” (Proverbs 12:25).
“A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot” (Proverbs 14:30).

A theme repeated throughout this book is that being an effective leader requires being a student of desire. Deep down, what is it you want? Those around you want?

After decades of observing my behavior and that of others and studying biblical principles, I believe God has given us powerful desire in three broad areas. They are all good and necessary to have dominion, but they are so strong that we often lose control and use them for purposes beyond the designer’s intent.

The Three Broad Categories Are:

Power

The ability to make the things we want to happen. Skill, wealth, authority, strength, connections, and influence are all examples of power.

Reproduction

It is broader than sex. It includes family, belonging, and community. We all know how strong this desire can be.

Identity

Knowing who I am, why I am here, and where I came from. This is necessary to determine our purpose. Without purpose we cannot overcome chaos. This desire exists to lead us into a relationship with the Creator.

The problem with the word desire is that it is not strong enough. These drives go beyond wants; they are “needs” built into our design. They shape our lives and have expression in what we do in ways and times we don’t expect.

For example, have you ever noticed a grandmother’s passion for preparing Thanksgiving dinner? This is a supreme example of bringing order out of chaos, and you better not get in her way. Think of the passion of a father protecting a child, a musician performing, or a gardener gardening. We know immediately when we see someone “on a mission.”

Conclusion

The Five Essential Habits for Engaging People

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:26:28 GMT

Introduction

Engaging people effectively is a critical aspect of building successful teams and organizations. There are five essential habits that leaders must cultivate to engage people well. These are caring about people, building openness and honesty in relationships, building oneness, taking ownership as a team, and mastering mentoring.

1. Caring For People

The first and foundational habit of engaging people is caring about them . A value, mindset, and chemistry hold the relationship in place. When leaders genuinely care about their team members, it changes how they think about them and their ability to relate to them. Leaders should be interested in their team members' lives outside of work and demonstrate their interest in the individual, not just what they can do for the organization.

2. Being Honest & Open

The second habit of engaging people is being honest and open . It builds on the first habit of caring about people. Honest and open communication is critical for building relationships and organizations that can achieve their potential. Leaders must build trust with their team members before they can be fully honest with them.

3. Building Oneness

The third habit of engaging people is building oneness . This habit is a higher standard than teamwork and means making something whole or complete. Leaders must form a team with a shared purpose to build a unit that functions as one. Building oneness is dependent on the first two habits, caring about people and being honest and open.

4. Taking Ownership

The fourth habit of engaging people is taking ownership as a team. This habit comes out of having formed a common vision for what the team is trying to achieve, and the group is committed to it. People have to work toward that goal and their behaviors have to demonstrate ownership. They have to subject their priorities to the group's priorities and think as a team.

5. Mastering Mentoring

The fifth habit of engaging people is mastering mentoring . Leaders must transfer expertise, knowledge, and skills to the next person in line. In a growing organization, new people are always coming in, and leaders must master mentoring to ensure that the organization does not outgrow its ability to execute. Leaders should mentor their team members on the other four skills of engaging people.

Conclusion

In conclusion, leaders must cultivate these five habits to engage people effectively. These habits are interdependent and build upon each other. When leaders care about their team members, are honest and open, build oneness, take ownership as a team, and master mentoring, they can build successful teams and organizations that can achieve their potential.

The Skills Deception - Five Leadership Roles

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:32:17 GMT

Introduction

One of the interesting things about a growing business is that the roles of leadership change, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, and it can turn into a sort of deception. Five leadership roles exist, and I say roles, not job titles because we end up having to fulfill multiple of these roles, depending on the size of the organization. Also, remember that if you're a one-person organization and you start out creating a new business, you end up doing all five of these roles then you add a person and there becomes more specialization over time.

1. Self Leadership

The first role is self-leadership. What comes to mind is what goes on inside of you. Are your desires, your reason, your mind, and your actions all aligned? Is there integrity to what you say is important to you? Is a person centered on who they are? This results in an individual you can interact with, depend on, and build trust. They can fit into an organization and deliver what they promise. That's self-leadership.

2. Functional Leadership

Functional leadership on the other hand is when an organization grows to the point that you end up having a group of people focused on one particular function, sales or marketing, or sales and marketing and the leader of that group now has a mission. That's a sub-component of the whole organization. The keys to functional leadership are clarity of purpose, and building a team of people that have the right capabilities. To deliver on that purpose and the ability to care for those people and build and sustain teamwork, unity, and oneness.

So there's a continuous ongoing nature to a functional leadership role. It's the most important role in terms of employee engagement and satisfaction. It's who that person looks to understand. How they connect to the purpose of the organization and define what success means for them. So the functional leader emerges again, as the organization grows and you start to have departments

3. Change Leadership

The third type of leadership is change leadership. What's interesting about change is that when you start a company, everything is changed. So there's no such distinction between function and change. You're trying to build something. You're trying to deploy something, or you're going from a state where nothing exists to something exists.

So it's all change , but as organizations grow and become profitable and have ongoing activities to run the business, change gets harder because there's more momentum entrenched in running the business. so change leadership gets to be more critical and it is cross-functional. If you want to bring change to an organization, you have to change the way things work across many functions.

So change leadership has to be good at getting multiple functions to work together. Change leadership usually is temporary. It's rooted in project management and clear outcomes with a set of objectives. When those objectives are met, the change initiative is over. Another dimension of change leadership is making sure that when the change is implemented, it is sustained and becomes embedded into the day-to-day operations.

4. Process Leadership

The fourth is process leadership. Functional linkage of a value add chain that delivers something important to clients could be an internal or an external client. Process leadership is like project leadership in that it has to get multiple functions working together, but it's different than a project in that it is ongoing.

The process remains in place as long as it's useful to the organization. Process leadership is all about measurement, improvement, and focus on making that process very predictable delivering high-quality results every time process leadership emerges as a counter force to the functional silos that develop as an organization grows.

5. Strategy Leadership

The last kind of leadership - we call strategy leadership. It isn't just reserved for the top of the organization. The key difference in strategy leadership is the time horizon and the scope of thinking. So if you're at the top of the organization, you're thinking about the whole organization and what emerges over time, over five, 10 years, thinking ahead of what are we trying to become and what are the moves we need to make to become that strategy.

On a smaller scale, they can think about their whole set of functions going on in that division or department, and they can think ahead 5 years and say, we need to build this capability this year. So we can build on it next year. Strategy leadership is the idea of stepping out of the day-to-day operations and thinking longer-term and holistically about how to get the organization where you want to go.

Conclusion

To recap, these leadership roles are not job titles. They are different aspects of what it means to lead at different points in an organization. Everyone is a self-leader, and at various times you may be also part of project leadership process leadership, or functional leadership. It just depends on the stage of your career in the stage of the organization.

The Six Requirements for a Faith-Driven Leadership Operating System

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:04:42 GMT

Introduction

A faith-driven leadership operating system equips leaders to integrate faith, business management, and leadership development. It comes alongside leaders to help them pursue God’s purpose for their business and for the people whose lives they touch.

What it should do

Build leadership continuously and faster than the organization is growing.

Growing organizations change rapidly. Their complexity changes much faster than their headcount. For example, growing from 3 people to 24 people is an 8-fold increase in headcount but 117-fold increase in potential different interactions. Unless the organization is constantly developing its leadership capability and doing so faster than the organization is growing, it will eventually outgrow its own ability to execute. It stalls into a firefighting, chaotic environment and growth stops until control is re-established, or it dies a slow, painful death.

A leadership operating system should inject constant learning, just-in-time, so application of learning is immediate. It should also reinforce past teachings, so they become a habit.

Use biblical principles to build a culture of human caring.

Everyone talks about caring for people, but we are not very good at it. A faith-driven leadership platform should instill a biblical standard of honesty, integrity and caring for people. It does not mean going soft on accountability, but it does mean seeking to know people, what’s important to them and taking an interest in them at work and at home. It takes time and intentional leadership focus, but it is a skill that can be developed. It is mandatory ideal to pursue in a God-honoring company. Whether you believe in God, everyone wants to be cared for. Caring for people is a pre-requisite for building a high-trust culture, and the foundation of teamwork.

Organize the way people interact so the organization can scale and maintain order.

God is not the ‘author’ of confusion, and our businesses should not be either. Our brains are about 2-3% of our body mass and yet it uses more than 20% of our energy. The brain constantly seeks to conserve energy by taking repeating patterns and moving them into habit management, which is a semi-conscious activity that takes much less thought. Think about how much easier it is to drive a car now than the first time you tried. Driving has become habit. An organization that builds strong habits for how people set priorities, communicate, and coordinate with each other will free up the precious thought capacity of your organization to focus on the latest surprises that occur. Without some of order, the complexity becomes overwhelming. It is like having to learn to drive all over again every day. There is no cumulative organization learning about how the functions.

Leverage metrics, not bureaucracy, to facilitate alignment and learning.

Most human governance systems become bureaucratic and attempt to control behavior instead of outcomes. Initially, such systems may work but, in an attempt to manage human behavior, they become overly burdensome. A better approach, not foolproof, but better is to focus on the outcomes you are seeking. Measure those and allow more freedom for people to innovate in how those outcomes are achieved. This is not a perfect answer. Sometimes, you don’t want a lot of innovation such as in the emergency room. Sometimes you want rigor, precision, and predictability.

Your leadership system should strive to use the minimum control necessary to keep people coordinated. That requires starting with measuring outcomes and judiciously adding the control necessary to achieve the outcomes. The end requirement is that your leadership system needs to have business intelligence thinking built in at the foundational level, so it informs the management of outcomes and accelerates learnin g.

Foster mentoring as the primary mode of development.

Jesus turned the world upside down by mentoring a tiny group of people –12 to be exact. And He primarily focused on just three. Mentoring has multiple advantages. First, we all learn faster when we have to teach others, and it instills deeper understanding. Second, mentoring is done ‘as you go’ – it applies to real situations and in real-time, which is proven to also increase effectiveness.

Mentoring is relational. The most daunting challenge in leadership is not gaining technical knowledge, it is developing relational skills. Mentoring takes time and is highly tailored to and enriched by relationships. What makes organizations thrive over the long-term is their purpose and values and those are more caught than taught.

Facilitate constructive accountability that unlocks human potential.

The greatest strength of the human mind is its creativity. But in that strength lies a weakness, the constant threat of getting distracted or confused by too much stimulus. I come into my day with a few set priorities and then life happens, and I have a cascading set of unexpected conversations, insights, etc. And many of them are highly useful. But collectively, in an entire organization, the only way to avoid descending into chaos is to keep priorities in front of people and hold them accountable. We need this discipline, especially if we are coordinating our work with others. If you are an individual who truly works alone, then the consequences of changing your priorities are self-contained, but in an organization, there is a cascading effect of change. Your operating system should not prevent change. But it should facilitate rapid identification of potential change and equally rapid assessment of the impact of change. Without these ‘habits’ as mentioned earlier, as the organization grows, it drowns in its own self-induced complexity.

7 Things I Wish I Knew

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 14:09:21 GMT

Integration is better than balance.

For far too long I thought of life as a balancing act. So much time for my family, some for me, some for God, and a big chunk for work. God’s approach is different - He is the ultimate integrator. He takes separate things and makes them one.

In the physical realm, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom become a single molecule of water. A husband and wife become one couple and eventually one family. The whole Bible is one big explanation of how He is making us one with Him. So how does this integration of faith, work, and family work? You will see more examples in the items below.

Work is holy.

‘Holy‘ is one of those words that we reserve for special use like at church, but it is an everyday idea. Something is “holy” when it fulfills the purpose of its creator. The Bible teaches that furniture, clothing, and many other things are ‘holy’ because they serve a particular purpose of God.

God created ‘work’ at the beginning, not as punishment, but as provision. God designed people to accomplish things, so all whole-hearted, quality work aligns with His purpose. It is the ultimate integration of faith and work. You are worshiping God by doing good work. Praying for wisdom, strength, and faith can help you overcome challenges in your work. And you can experience the joy of doing what God created you to do. Businesses are a place for holy activity.

Ugly behavior is just a symptom.

God designed people to ‘win’ (‘overcome’ and have ‘dominion’ ) . Said more plainly, people don’t just want to win, they need to win. When you experience people who continually show destructive, ill-mannered behavior, it is a symptom of something deeper. They may not understand this deeper cause themselves. When you feel you are not winning, it shows up in everything you do - sometimes consciously and sometimes not.

Wise leaders are cautious about attacking symptoms. They invest time to build relationships to understand what winning means to those around them. And then they help people make the connection between their behaviors and getting what they want. Attacking the symptoms has the opposite effect --it reinforces people's destructive behavior and creates a feeling of being bigger losers.

If a leader wants to understand someone and their motivations, they will take an interest in their whole life, not just work. For all of us, not winning at home spills over onto work and vice versa. Wise leaders look at people holistically —which is another example of taking an integrated view of life.

Organizations outgrow their ability to execute.

Healthy organizations grow. But growth changes what is required of leaders. A simple illustration: an organization of 3 people only has 3 potential interactions, but if you grow the headcount to 24 that is an 8-fold increase in headcount but a 117-fold increase in potential interactions.

Headcount increases are visible, but complexity increases are not. Failure to understand this dynamic leads to failure in training and equipping leaders. The result is a breakdown in communication, increasing chaos, and poor performance. I witnessed this cycle several times before I understood what was happening to me.

Jesus can do things I can’t.

As a new Christian, there was a lot of emphases (rightly so) on caring for other people — “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. It is the basic rule of human relationships. And failure to practice it causes a huge percentage of our chaos.

However, as you study the words and actions of Jesus, you realize that there are some things that only Jesus can do (and I cannot). Jesus can fix whatever is broken inside of a person, forgive, restore, and give them a new life and identity.

I realize I need to feed the poor and care for the sick, but I also need to express the ultimate love by introducing Jesus to those who are interested, so they have the opportunity to experience what only He can do.

What leadership really is.

A leader’s first responsibility is to determine purpose. For the business owner, that means for the whole organization. For the front-line supervisor, it means the mission of the department. At whatever level you can’t make up for a bad purpose by working harder. You must get it right. Admittedly, the purpose needs to be revisited as our life changes at home (marriage, children) or work (promotions, transfers). But it is important to do it well.

A leader’s second responsibility is to accomplish the purpose. To do that you have to get people to work together. This is an irony that God built into the universe. We are created to overcome, but we can’t do it alone, and working together is not something we are good at.

Getting and keeping people on the same page is challenging because people are all different in terms of skills and personality. Electromagnetism holds atoms together in the physical realm. In organizations, it is shared purpose and loving relationships hold people together. Leaders need to be experts at facilitating good human relationships among the team all aimed at a shared purpose.

The unique role of ownership.

It is common in the faith community to refer to ‘stewarding’ our resources on behalf of God. It is a biblical concept and helps us serve with the right attitude. But the Bible also emphasizes that God sees us as “owners” of certain things. It is an important distinction because He wants us to be generous, but you can’t ‘give’ something that you don’t own. In God’s realm, ownership is also closely tied to responsibility.

In a business, the owner is responsible for defining the purpose of the business and its values. Only the owner has the authority to build an organization that lives by those priorities. The Bible advocates getting lots of input, but getting input from others does not diminish your responsibility.

The Garden of Eden story is a pointed example where Eve tried to blame the Tempter for her actions. And Adam tried to blame Eve for his actions. God was having none of their excuses. They were each responsible for their own decisions regardless of input. In the end, as business owners, God will hold us responsible for the way ‘our’ businesses operate. No excuses do.

The Difference Between Ownership and Stewardship

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 11:53:18 GMT

Stewarding On Behalf of Someone Else

Have you ever thought about, as a leader, whether you're trying to build into the people you're leading the principle of stewardship or the principle of ownership? What is the difference? Stewardship in the Bible is someone taking responsibility for something on behalf of someone else. That ‘something’ is owned by someone else.

The motive behind stewardship is rooted in the relationship with the owner. You are motivated to do what is right for the owner. And the definition of your responsibility comes from the owner. These are all good things to instill in other people and in yourself. That's why stewardship is referred to so frequently in the biblical view of leadership.

Ownership Involves an Internal Sense of Possession

But there is another view, which is ownership. And it's throughout scripture. One example is in the 10 commandments. They say, do not steal. Don't take something that belongs to someone else. Implied in that commandment is that the other person owns that ‘something’ you are taking it from them. They possess it.

You Must Own Something to Give it Away

Another illustration in scripture of the significance of ownership is ‘giving’. You cannot give something that you don't own. And so, you instill in people that ‘this is your property; you have the choice of what you do with it’. Giving is rooted in the idea of ownership, not stewardship.

Developing a Sense of Responsibility

When you are ‘building into’ the people in your organization and trying to lead people around a shared purpose, think about the difference between ownership and stewardship. For me, I want people to have a sense that this is their area —they own it. I'm giving them that ownership. If it isn't fulfilled, there's a sense of loss to them personally.

In the Bible is the story of Adam and Eve. The serpent tempted Eve to do something that was against God's will. And she yielded to it. She brought Adam into this process, told him about it, and he yielded to that same temptation. When God figured this all out and talked to them, Eve blamed the serpent and Adam blamed Eve. God was having none of it.

His statement to Adam is very revealing. He said, why did you listen to Eve instead of listening to me? That's the concept of ownership. ‘Adam, I put you in charge here and there's no excuse for not delivering what you own’

Build Ownership in Your Leaders

As you think about leadership and developing leadership in others, promote the idea of ownership, ‘no excuses, this is yours.’ You give them the freedom and the responsibility that goes with it.

Order is Easier to Create Than Keep

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Order is Easier to Create Than Keep

One of the most challenging lessons I've ever learned is that order is easier to create than keep.

Not understanding this leads to some of the biggest problems and chaos in organizations I've seen in my 40-plus-year career as a CEO. It's such a big topic that I devoted a whole chapter to it in my book, Built to Beat Chaos .

When we were a young married couple, my wife and I dreamed about building a house out in the woods and finally found a place to do so. We saved and began building our home. We pushed hard and dreamed about what this would all look like.

We finally got it built. But little did we realize that building it was just the beginning.

Now that we built it, we had to heat it. We had to landscape. Eventually, we had to put a new roof on it and paint it. You realize you'll spend more time and energy maintaining something you've built over your lifetime than building it.

Practical Business Examples About Keeping Order

When I was in startup mode with some other friends, we built a whole accounting system fairly quickly, with four people doing the design and engineering. As a new CEO starting up a business and as an engineer, you think most of the work is about building a product.

As the years went by, those three or four people turned into a hundred doing maintenance on that same piece of software and hundreds more doing support, customer service, and marketing. In the end, we ended up with at least four to five times as many people working on supporting the thing that we had built in the first place

What are the consequences of getting this wrong?

We frequently see larger organizations initiate some kind of project to change something, fix something, build a new product line, or begin a change initiative. They put energy into making the change but must realize that once they've created this thing, it will take energy to maintain it without realizing the amount of energy it takes to maintain.

It means that they start something else. What it feels like down in the organization's bowels is chaos because something has been launched and handed off to them to begin to learn, use, and apply. Then something else new is being created right on top of it. Leaders frequently attempt to start too many things and don't allocate the resources to finish, sustain, and integrate them into the organization and its culture.

What Can You Do About Creating and Keeping Order?

The biblical wisdom is that when you undertake something, count the cost. Figure out why it is that you're doing it.
Don’t just figure out the costs of doing it; involve the people who know what it will take to maintain it. Make that thing you have just built well-maintained and successful.

It could be a building, a new plant, or a new product. Get people involved who understand the downstream impact of the thing you created. If you don't do that, you'll start other ventures and overlay them on top of the first, destroying both of them. Neither one of them will get executed.

Watch for the Symptoms

The symptoms are: too much is going on, nothing is getting executed, and everybody's in firefighting mode.

When you see these kinds of symptoms, the root cause is often the failure to understand the cost of maintaining and sustaining change. It leads to putting too many things into the pipeline, and none are finished well.

Three Types of Chaos in Business

garyharpst@leadfirst.ai (Gary Harpst) — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 11:00:00 GMT

The journey to overcoming chaos starts with understanding.

I think of chaos in three categories:

Natural chaos includes what you see in the contracts with insurance companies when they talk about acts of God, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Natural chaos is things that are entirely outside of our control.
Social chaos has to do with the relationships among us and between us.
Internal chaos. It's hard to have stability and order between people when there's chaos within us.

What do we do with chaos?

About all we can do with natural chaos is decide how much preparation we want to make in advance for it. It costs us something to make those kinds of preparations.

Most of us have smoke detectors in our homes. That's a slight preparation for what could be a natural disaster. But other things are so costly that we can't afford to do any preparation, such as a meteorite hitting the earth. What can we do about that as a civilization?

The second kind of chaos is in the news daily. This chaos among us is pervasive. You're confronted with this daily if you're running and managing an organization, an enterprise, or a department within the enterprise.

New people coming into your organization have different expectations. There could be misalignments in the skill sets of people you thought had a particular skill but who do not. Chaos is an everyday thing we see. We sense the amount of chaos more than we ever have in the past.

If you study history, you could argue that there isn't more chaos now than ever, but there's certainly more awareness of the chaos. As a leader, one of your greatest challenges is dealing with the chaos between and among us.

The third area is the chaos within. It's like the organic chemistry of society. It's hard to have stability and order between people when there's chaos within us.

What is chaos within?

You can read psychology. You could read lots of sources. I think the Bible has some of the greatest insight into how we're constructed and the source of chaos. The Bible says there's four main elements to our architecture:

Desire
The heart
The mind which thinks and interprets desires.
Imagination is the formation of the first creation that comes out of our thinking and triggers action. For example, we imagine the house we want to build or the business we want to build, and then we take action.

But a problem occurs when those four things are not aligned and it feels chaotic. For example, if I want to build a business or build a house and I undertake the effort to do that, only to find out I need more resources. That creates chaos and tension in me, and I start doing things to get more resources – or I don't have the skills – and I become frustrated in the attempt to do something I don't know how to do.

We see that in young people all the time. Youngsters trying to be in their first ball game get frustrated because they can't hit the ball.

When you see behaviors in your organizations where people are having the equivalent of a child's tantrum, there's some misalignment deep down. There's something that they're seeking and wanting that they are not getting. I'm not saying that what they want is right. That can be a source of chaos to wanting the wrong things.

The alignment of when we get – when we want the right things – when we have the wisdom to know how to pursue those right things. When we imagine the right course of action and the skills to pursue that course of action, it creates an internal kind of peace.

We must ask what the root causes of all the chaos among us are in today's world. Much of that root cause has to do with the chaos within us.

Chaos is Not the Enemy

I want to point out that chaos itself is not the enemy. Chaos is a source of raw materials from which to move to another level of order. Don’t feel like you're a victim of chaos, but understand that it's a natural state for humans.

God created the heavens and the earth, and they were void and without form, and then he began to bring order out of it. Chaos is the confrontation of your desire to bring order out of things. The chaos is the state or the raw material from which you bring that order – whether it's raising a family, cooking a meal, or building a business. It's all the same idea: a desire to bring order, create something, and the skills needed.

Three Steps to Better Organizational Communications

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Three Steps to Improve Organizational Communications

It seems like communication is one of those topics everyone complains about – like the weather – but no one does anything about it.

In the surveys we do with clients, communication is always at the top of the list of things that need to be improved.

Here are three steps that will help you overcome organizational communication problems.

1. Be Clear About Organizational Purpose

The first step is to be clear about the purpose of the organization. Communication will only help if you have a clear direction set, answering the basic things about why the organization exists, who it serves, what kind of products or services it will deliver, and the values the organization has.

In the Bible, God illustrated this principle in the creation narrative. He said everything was void and without form. It was chaos!

And then he began to bring order by declaring, “Let there be light” or “Let there be animals,” et cetera. Expressing organizational purpose is the beginning of controlling communication problems.

2. Integrate an Operating System

The second recommendation is that you have some kind of operating system. Some call it a business operating system . A business operating system is a way to work on the organization as it grows and changes.

I like to use a diagram called the execution paradox that illustrates why you must have a system to anticipate growth problems. On the horizontal axis, you see the number of employees. In this simple example, it goes from one to 25.

On the vertical axis, you see the permutations – the number of potential interactions – between employees. If the headcount goes from three people to 25, that's an eightfold increase in head count, but it's a 117 fold increase in the potential complexities and interactions among people.

How do organizations attack this paradox?

Organizations create departments and processes like an air traffic control system. At a minimum, these departments and processes describe who's going where, when they're going to arrive, what the destination is, and more.

We see the same thing, this same systematic approach to attacking chaos in everything in life.

3. Care for People

The third thing is to care for people. All the systems, processes, and purposes will only matter if you have an environment where every single leader and person is held accountable for an attitude of caring toward other people through words and actions.

The reason is that care creates trust, which is an essential component of communication.

You really can't communicate openly with other people. Words are very intimate. They come from your heart, and you don't speak clearly to people you don't trust.

Three Principles for Improving Organizational Communication

To summarize

Be clear about the purpose. Make sure everybody understands it.
Put a business operating system and framework in place. A business operating system helps you scale the organization and keep leaders on track to communicate the organization's purpose and manage the execution.
Build a culture where people care for each other because care leads to trust, and trust leads to openness and better communication.

Stewarding your Business for God

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 21:00:02 GMT

Stewarding your Business for God

I was looking at a Pew research study the other day that showed that 53% of Americans say that religion is very important to them. Another 24% said that it's somewhat important. Religion is a topic that somewhere between 53% and 77% of Americans have on their mind.

Today I’m thinking about those leaders and business owners who see their relationship with God in a way that they see the business itself as a stewardship they are managing on behalf of God. There's a motivation to do it in a way that honors him.

So the question becomes, how do you do manage your business as a stewardship for God?

Three Ways to Think About Your Business as Stewardship

1. Define and Align Purpose

First is the ability to define and align purpose. In my view, the number one responsibility of a leader is the ability to define purpose. But it does require alignment. It's not as simple as declaring a purpose for the whole organization.

Defining purpose in a way that allows people to work together requires a purpose to be aligned with other purposes:

How does your business align with the purposes of your target market?
How does the purpose of each family and your organization align with the people you have hired?
How does one department's purpose align with other departments?

There's a lot involved. If you're going to build a business that honors God and works well, you have to align and define purpose. It’s a tall order!

2. Collaborate and Communicate

The second thing you have to be able to do as a leader is to collaborate. Collaboration is the ability to get your team to work together, to communicate well enough to figure out who's doing what, and to overcome all the barriers to execution that occur each and every day. It's one of the primary skillsets that a leader needs. Collaboration involves planning and running meetings, dealing with conflict, one-on-one conversations, doing performance feedback, developing people, and more.

3. Caring for People

The third area after defining purpose and aligning it, and the skill to get your team to collaborate, is caring for people. Organizations are not like the world of science where materials are held together by physical properties Organizations are held together by caring for each other.

Authentically caring for the people in their group is a most-do capability of a leader. Caring opens up the ability to trust each other. Trust leads to more open communication required to collaborate with each other, and builds unity and oneness. Caring is a foundational capability.

If you're going to build a business that honors God you look at the person as a whole person — someone of infinite value — because they're created in God's image. Leaders need to learn how to demonstrate that they care for people by their actions. The number one indicator of caring is the time you spend with people one-on-one.

Stepping back to where we started: How is it that you can build a business that honors God and steward that resource on behalf of him?

Three things are involved:

Defining and aligning purpose.
Building teams that know how to collaborate and communicate, and last of all
Building leaders who know how to care for the whole person.

Achieve More with Self-Leadership

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 20:00:00 GMT

We've all heard the phrase, “You can't lead others unless you can lead yourself.”

What does that mean? What is self-leadership? How does it work?

There's an ancient story in the Bible that explains that the makeup of humankind consists of four parts:

The first is our heart , the source of desire, the things we want.
The second is our mind , which is the source of reason, applying what we've learned to our desires so we're not just guided by our unfiltered desires.
The third is imagination . At the end of our thinking, we have created a plan — of a job, spouse, or career — or something else we want.
The fourth part is our actions , which pursue what we're imagining.

To be a leader, it's really helpful to understand how those four parts work in you and, ultimately, how they work in other people.

A Self Leader Invests in Thinking About Thinking

Self-leadership is the idea that you aren't conformed or shaped by this world, but your actions come from the inside out . They come from who you are, what you believe, desire, and reason and wisdom.

Your actions are not a reaction to what other people do. Victor Frankel referred to this as the last freedom:

“The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make.

Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity...”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

The Bible says it this way:

“Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

A self-leader is someone who invests in thinking about their thinking and understanding what it is they want at the deepest level. A self-leader has the reason, the experience, and the training to think correctly about the outcomes of that desire and develop the skills to pursue it.

How Can You Put Self-Leadership into Practice?

Let me give you a very personal example. The material I'm covering today in these briefings is really important to me. I've spent decades learning the depth of truth the hard way, I see other people who are much better presenters or speakers than I am. It frustrates me that I am not better at conveying these important things.

That reaction, tension and anger —if you want to call it that — or frustration that I may have on some issue can redirect me to spending my time in a pity party, focusing on, ”I'm not as good as other people at this.”

But if I go back and think about my desires —to communicate truth to people that will help them — how do I best go about that?

It's not by spending my energy comparing myself to others. Instead, I learn from them. This redirects me to think properly about self-leadership. “If I want this — if I want to communicate better — how do I do it?” I must go back and work on my skills that translate to action. It helps me win in an area of a deep desire to communicate better.

Quit Reacting, Start Acting

So this may be a silly example to you, but we spend so much of our time and energy in our life reacting to what's going on around us rather than being centered on

What is it I am after?
What are the steps I need to take?
Quit reacting to those around us.

We’re not alone in this. Reacting is human nature. Wars and all our troubles and divisions are rooted in this core principle. A person of faith has an extra advantage. We believe there's a Creator behind us, and He gave us certain guidelines about who we should be inside.

We should be truthful. We should be honest. We should seek to work hard to get what we want and not take it from other people. This is a set of principles that help us grow in the inner core of who we are, making us less reactive to the world.

Not everybody shares the same faith, but I have found this way of thinking has accelerated my journey: having a set of beliefs that I can study and meditate on that shape who I am and what I want.

What's the bottom line?

It's back to that truth that says, “If you want to change in this area, don't be conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

What you are putting in your mind each and every day reshapes who you are .

How to Measure Organizational Effectiveness

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 12:12:00 GMT

How should an organization measure its effectiveness?

Should it be measured by revenue? Net promoter scores? Stock price? Executive bonuses (ha!)?

The truth is, it completely depends on your strategic plan. The only way to answer the question “How should I measure excellence” in your organization is to first determine both long-term and short-term targets, because organizational excellence or effectiveness must be measured relative to these.

In this post, we will cover a few tips for setting these targets. We will also cover how to choose the indicators that will help show whether your organization is effective in relation to its own goals.

Being “The Best” is Not a Strategy

We often hear firms stating that they simply want to be “the best” company in their industry. This is a laudable goal, but it is too vague to take concrete steps towards achievement. It’s great for a company pep rally, but you cannot produce a strategic plan and measure organizational effectiveness against it. The solution is to clearly spell out what you want to achieve in a measurable way.

So, the first step in being “the best” is to set a goal. One way to do this is to define what your target market is and which needs you will try to fill.

Answer the following questions:

What will make us different?
What can we be best at?
What do we have a passion for?

This doesn’t have to be a long, drawn out process. It could be summed up in a simple goal statement. For example, a business machines firm might come up with: “Our goal is to deliver the best copier solutions to the 10,000 small and mid-sized businesses in our greater metropolitan area and be number one in sales.”

This gives the business a narrower focus than, “We want to be the best business machines company in the area.” Now they can assess their current position in the small and mid-sized business market and develop a Change Management Plan for how they are going to get to number one in sales figures.

The Change Management Plan for any business is the road-map for long-term change, and lists the broad targets and expected completion dates. From this plan, departments and divisions align their actions and smaller sub-projects are devised to accomplish steps in the broader plan in the short term.

Now that you have both your long-term and short term goals, it is time to measure organizational effectiveness against those goals. There are really two types of indicators used to do this.

Lagging Indicators

Lagging indicators CONFIRM performance, or lack of . They measure the result of past actions.

Some firms focus solely on profit. While profit or return on capital is an indicator of how well the resources of the organization have been allocated, it does not measure what you are doing right now. The problem with relying solely on this indicator to measure effectiveness is that it is influenced by decisions which may have been made years earlier – even by earlier management.

Other lagging indicators:

Revenue
Inventory turnover
Cash on hand
Stock price
Projects/targets accomplished (could also be a leading indicator, see next)

These are important to track, but they only show the results of the past, not where you are going. For that, you need the next set of indicators.

Leading Indicators

Leading indicators PREDICT performance. They measure actions which will affect future organizational effectiveness .

As an example, to keep existing customers satisfied, you need to perform account management functions in the present which might not reflect in a high net promoter score or a sale for many weeks or months. These activities, such as customer service surveys, birthday postcards and special discount offers, should be tracked nonetheless – even if just to ensure they are performed.

And by measuring them, you can predict future excellence – or lack of. When the numbers are low for the leading indicators, you can be assured that your lagging indicators will follow down in the near future.

While lagging indicators can be pretty general (everyone tracks revenue, for instance), leading indicators are usually tailored to your specific role. Examples of specific leading metrics for a sales team might be

Opening calls made
Appointments set
Pitches presented
Dollar value of deals proposed
Referral letters sent

By measuring these leading indicators, and knowing how they correlate with future performance (more calls equals higher future sales and revenue) a sales manager will have a pretty good idea of how effective an organization will be in the upcoming weeks or months, and can take actions to remedy if warranted.

Some measurements fall under both categories. For example, “number of leads” might be an effectiveness measure for one department, a lagging indicator that is produced as a result of past social media efforts or SEO strategies. However, number of leads is a leading indicator of sales volume. So in this case, the metric fits both categories.

Same with “projects/targets accomplished,” which we listed as a lagging indicator in the section before this one. Future effectiveness can be gauged by whether many targets and projects were completed or not.

As you can see, to measure effectiveness you must understand the relative context of the function being measured. Organizations that perform well consistently learn to use effectiveness measures that are a combination of leading and lagging indicators relevant to the scope of a particular person, department or an entire company. A well designed performance management system should serve as a continuous learning process for setting and managing leading and lagging indicators.

Measures and plans are important but their real purpose is engaging people

Stating the obvious, but measures and plans mean nothing without people to use them. The real purpose of measures is to engage people in the innovation required to improve them. AND to say no to the things that are less important. Your performance management processes should encourage the formation of well thought out plans and measures that communicate what is important and what is not. Organizational effectiveness is rooted in people both knowing and doing the right things each and every day.

How Workplace Leaders Overcome Evil with Good

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 16:22:57 GMT

The Story of an Unfortunate Day

I had breakfast the other day with a friend. I asked how his weekend went, and he said, "Not so good.”

He and his family went skiing in another state, and one of his younger sons got in a scuffle with somebody in the ski lift line, and they started pushing each other back and forth.

The older brother came to his younger brother's rescue, became a little more aggressive, and ended up in a fight in the line.

My friend and his wife were very embarrassed, and the older son was upset that he'd upset his mother.

The whole day was overcast with this shadow of how one thing escalated into another. It reminds me of a principle that's talked about in Scripture.

In all organizations – wherever there are people, families, churches, or your business – as a leader, there's a fundamental skill in overcoming evil with good.

Let's Define Evil From the Bible

Let's define terms. “Evil” in the Bible sounds like a church word. It’s the concept that when you have a good purpose – and something erodes – executing that purpose is called evil.

So you have a good business plan, a good team with a good mission, clear purpose, and behaviors going on in the group that reduces the team's effectiveness to achieve its goals.

That's just the idea of evil. We often don't label things that way in today's world.

A better way to say it is, “It may not be constructive.”

“Overcome unconstructive things with constructive things” may be how to reword the idea of overcoming evil with good.

Constructive Group Dynamics

As a leader, do you see this in your groups? We all have bad days. We get in a meeting and talk about something and say, “That was a stupid idea.”

The body language and tone of voice conveyed more than was necessary. It insults someone else. It reduces openness.

The question is, how do you keep this from spiraling out of control? That's what leadership is all about.

Whether it's self-leadership or team leadership, what do you do when something like that happens? What do you do at a crossroads where it creates a reaction that degenerates into more and more trouble?

It eventually becomes a culture if you don't manage this well as a team. Instead of just a bad day skiing with his family – if it keeps going on and people overreact to each other – pretty soon you have a culture that guarantees everything is an overreaction.

How to Create a Constructive Culture?

As a team leader, how can you create an environment where we all recognize we have bad days and the potential to say unconstructive things? How do you nip that behavior in the bud so it doesn't spiral out of control?

As you spot this, you must stop and ask the individual, “Did you really mean to say that your colleague is stupid?” Of course, the individual will say they didn't mean that.

You diffuse it. You call individuals out for saying what they said in the way they said it. You take the onus of counter-responding off the attacked individual and avoid escalating the situation.

If you're one-on-one with the individual, you try not to react to the person, especially if you know them.

Redirect Instead of Responding

Instead, you think about “What's my purpose here?”

I want to help this person.
I want to get to the team's goals.

You redirect your behavior to purpose instead of directing your behavior to reacting to the people around you.

That's why the definition of good and evil is so important:

Actions that contribute to good purpose are constructive.
Actions that reduce the ability to achieve a good purpose are destructive.

This fundamental skill is one of the most challenging principles in leadership. One is to ensure you have a good purpose, and the second is to facilitate how your team interacts with each other and not destroy the purpose.

Is it practical to integrate faith and work?

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 15:10:18 GMT

What are the biggest challenges for building a Kingdom Impact business?

Let’s talk CEO-to-CEO.

Do you struggle to manage the business, care for people, and make an impact?

Kingdom-minded business owners face the everyday challenges of building a healthy, growing business. They also have a calling to care for employees and families while being intentional about introducing interested people to the gospel.

The problem is that they don’t have an integrated strategy for using their business for Kingdom Impact or creating a Kingdom Impact Business.

In this 30-minute webinar, LeadFirst CEO Gary Harpst will show you three ways to gain confidence to use your business for kingdom building and know how to get your leadership team and organization on board, even if they have different perspectives on mixing faith and work.

If you’re a small to mid-sized business owner and you sense you do not have the kind of stewardship God wants you to, this webinar is for you.

If you’re experiencing tension, it means you are not experiencing the fullness of life — and business — that God intended.

Register to learn the three steps to building a Kingdom Impact Business and the six principles that engage your team and improve business performance.

Register for this LeadFirst Webinar

As a Christian CEO, presenter Gary Harpst spent over four decades building businesses, making mistakes, and learning to be true to his faith during the journey.

Under Gary’s leadership from 1980 through 2000, Solomon Software grew to more than 400 employees, servicing over 40,000 clients worldwide, and was sold to Great Plains Software in 2000.

Gary is recognized as one of the Top 100 of the nation's top thought leaders in management and leadership by Leadership Excellence magazine.

#013 Order is Easier to Create Than Keep – the Skill Deception

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:17:00 GMT

As organizations grow, the requirements for a job can outgrow the skills of the person in the job. Like any deception, these changes occur in nonobvious ways. Organization complexity grows much faster than headcount. We can see the headcount; we don’t always see the complexity that comes with it.

Let’s illustrate. On average, effective leaders can manage about seven to ten people. (This varies depending on the type of work, but for this discussion, let’s use ten.)

At about ten people, a start‐up organization adds its first leader of a department. A second layer begins. An organization of one hundred people will have about ten to twelve group leaders. At one thousand people, there are going to be about one hundred group leaders, which means three to four layers in the organization.

Because the organization is changing, the skills required to manage it also change. Five roles have to be filled in all organizations. In a start‐up, these roles are not formally defined and are fulfilled by a few people handling multiple roles. The five roles are different categories of leadership—self, functional, process, change, and strategy. Roles are not the same as a job title. Most people serve in multiple roles. And each of these roles has different skill requirements.

Principle

Growth subtly changes the skill requirements of organization leaders faster than is realized. Organization skill development has to occur faster than growth demands. If that doesn’t occur the organization outgrows its own ability to execute and chaos ensues until organization development catches up.

#012 Order is Easier to Create Than Keep — The Perception Deception

Mon, 22 May 2023 15:52:00 GMT

Another reason leaders have more trouble sustaining success after the creation phase is rooted in the way the human mind functions. Because the brain needs a lot of energy (20% of our body’s total consumption), it is designed to conserve energy. Dr Gregory Berns, in his book Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, performs experiments that show that the brain processes information differently based on how many other people agree with it.

For example, if you are in a room with 10 people and 9 other people interpret facts a certain way, you brain gives weight to the group consensus on the result and reduces normal processing to save time.

When the Asch experiment which was originally performed in the 60’s, it concluded that people that falsely agreed with the group were doing it out of peer pressure. Berns recently repeated the experiment using MRI imaging and was able to determine that in most cases it was not peer pressure that affected the result.

Instead, it was that the brain actually stopped image processing early and simply reported it was the same actual result as the others reported assuming the other brains had already figured this out.

Principle:

This provides important insight on decision making. First, group think can absolutely lead to bad decisions and second, when people are overworked and trying to move fast and conserve time and energy, people are much more susceptible to errors in thinking. Once businesses are up and running, the faster they grow the more likely decision errors will creep in making it more difficult to sustain their success.

#011 Order is Easier to Create Than Keep — The Time Deception

Wed, 10 May 2023 13:18:00 GMT

Continuing in the series as to why it is more difficult to maintain a heathy organization than it is to create it, we move on to reason #2. The time deception is captured in an ancient proverb in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 8: “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.” What this proverb means is that the longer the delay between action and consequence the greater the risk we do wrong things.

Humans learn by doing and seeing what happens. A child puts things in its mouth and finds out what is good and what is not. Putting a lemon in gets an immediate reaction, putting in candy is pleasant, so you put more in. It’s not until later that you figure too much candy is not good.

One of the reasons it is difficult to sustain organization success is that as it grows there are more and more decisions being made that are dependent upon each other, but the consequences of those decisions is not fully understood yet. So, there is a compounding of potential error and subsequent chaos.

Principle

In periods of high-risk decision making sometimes it is better to slow down and see how one decision works out before making the next. This is the principle that the agile management model in software engineering is based upon –build something small and see how it works and then move to the next step.

#010 – Order Is Easier to Create than Keep – The Growth Deception

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 00:41:00 GMT

Experience teaches that it is much more difficult to maintain something you have built than to build it in the first place. Especially organizations. Those early start-up years seem amazingly difficult and yet once by the survival stage the real challenges start. Hiring, leadership development, keeping people on the same page, competitors, economics, pandemics — the battle is constant and unending.

There are 5 deceptions that contribute to this surprise. The first is the “growth deception” stated as: ‘headcount increases linearly, but communication‐related challenges grow geometrically.”

Most leaders do not understand that as they grow their headcount 8 times from 8 to 25, that the complexity of communication paths (potential interactions) has grown 117 times. What this means is that adding resources requires the leader to manage differently. Growth requires much more time and energy be devoted to working on the business instead of in it

Principle

Growth changes leadership requirements. If leaders don’t adjust their approach, eventually the organization outgrows its own ability to execute. It happens to all types organizations eventually whether for profit, not-for-profit, churches, governments, etc.

#009 – “Being” is a higher standard than “doing.”

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 21:49:00 GMT

“Being” is a higher standard than “doing.” I can paint pictures (doing) and not be an artist. So it is with leadership. We can give you the system and checklists and you can do those things and still not be a leader.

…humans are creatures of desire. Our actions flow from our desires. Yes, we need process and technology to attain new heights, but the upside and downside of sustainable human progress is most often based on our attitudes and interpersonal behavior.

— Gary Harpst. Built to Beat Chaos (p. 206). Wiley, Kindle Edition.

Principle

The Biblical premise is that desire drives action and repeated action determines what we become. Another word for what we become is identity.

#008 – Built to Beat Chaos – Biblical Wisdom for Leading Yourself and Others

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 17:44:00 GMT

Built to Beat Chaos–Biblical Wisdom for Leading Yourself and Others. One premise of the Bible is that you were created to ‘win” – overcome, build, create and master your part of the world. This is what God revealed as I wrote this book and reflected on 4 decades in business.

#007 – The Greatest Human Weakness

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 14:29:00 GMT

Wise leaders study the unique strengths and weaknesses of themselves and others. Even though we have a great variety of both, there is one weakness that I would nominate as universal to all of us. C.S. Lewis says it this way “First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it.

These facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.”

Stated plainly there is something broken inside each of that says we want one thing, but our actions deny that we really want it. Think fitness or humility or extraordinary skills or spiritual growth. There seem to be a variety of reasons. The Bible mentions that our desires are often more powerful than our reason. An illustration is our need for acceptance by others. It can cause us to do things we later regret. A proverb points out that the time delay between action and consequences can be so far apart that we give in to the short-term reward, e.g., I will sleep in instead of study to develop myself.

Regardless of reason, an honest leader has to face the fact that none of us wants and does what is right all the time. And leadership has to plan for this reality.

Principle

The most challenging aspect of leadership is dealing with the internal chaos that occurs when our desires do not align with the truth. Another proverb states that the purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but the one who has insight draws them out.

#006 – Parsing Purpose – A Leader’s Superpower

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:03:00 GMT

In previous posts we have discussed that chaos is overcome with 1) clear purpose 2) great processes for achieving purpose and 3) people skills for working together. Let’s drill down on the purpose competency.

ORDERS OF PURPOSE

We talk about purpose in vague terms which is part of our problem in mastering it. There is not one purpose for an organization or a person. There are multiple orders or levels of purpose. My wife got a call yesterday that a friend has cancer and needs some help. When I asked what she is doing today, she tells me she has several meetings for her work and “has to go to the grocery”. I walk away thinking that is one of her purposes for the day to get groceries. It is true. But the grocery run is a second order purpose to her 1st order purpose of helping her friend by fixing a meal. You could argue that there is even a higher-level purpose when you explore why you want to help a friend.

BUILDING ONENESS

Effective leaders learn to draw out and understand the network of purposes that are affecting their team’s purpose. The simple example above shows that most of our purposes are part of a bigger purpose. So, team unity requires understanding individual purposes (career goals, family goals) and requires understanding company purposes, department purposes and the purposes of individuals in the department.

The best leaders will become students of purpose and their relationships and constantly monitor the fit. I say constantly because, all the sudden the organization may have a crisis that requires adjustment, or a team member may have a family member in crisis. All of these things affect our collective ability to maintain order in a very chaotic world. There is a spectrum of responses by leaders to the changing purposes of others– on one extreme, isolation– “that’s your problem take care of it”. On the other extreme taking ownership of issues that they shouldn’t. The middle ground is intelligent awareness which requires caring about people enough to know what is going on in their lives and the wisdom to know how to adjust or help.

PRINCIPLE

Chemists studies the principles that hold matter together. Leaders study how to how teams together. The bible refers to this as building ‘oneness’ and it is the only way humanity can fulfill its potential. Understanding the 1st and 2nd and other orders purposes in our lives is the key to conquering chaos. This is why leading yourself and others is the most important work there is.

#005 The Dark Side of Prioritization

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:53:00 GMT

When facilitating planning meetings, a favorite item that people react to with anticipation is “what can we stop?”. Overworked and overwhelmed people like the idea of prioritization and stopping some things. But frequently when they get to that agenda item it does not go as they expected.

THE UGLY TRUTH

By our behaviors we show we don’t really like bringing our actions in line with our priorities. It confronts us with the dichotomy of what we say we want and what we really want. In our personal lives, we say we want to “learn to play the guitar” but we don’t want to make the time by saying no to something else. In the business world, we say we want to be “provide the best round widgets in the world”, but we don’t want to give up short term revenue from the few people who want “square widgets”. The square widgets are siphoning off precious resource that could be used to create better round widgets, but most organizations can’t stop unless forced.

THE JOY OF STOPPING

I remember one management team, faced with extreme economic downturn, made the difficult decision to trim all its low or no profit products AND its low or no profit customers. Many account they had worked with for decades. Although the decision was very difficult, the result, in their words, was “freeing”. Their lives became must more focused, they executed better, and in a downturn, they grew their business 50% with no increase in headcount. At the same time the construction industry they were in was down 30%.

THE PRINCIPLE

When you are in some chaotic situation where things are not going the way you want, step back and see if there is misalignment between what you say you want and what you are actually doing. Jesus makes this point about our inner turmoil when He says, “seek the truth and the truth will make you free”. The cure for chaos is purpose and foundation for purpose is truth.

You Don’t Have Strategy Until You Answer These 2 Questions

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 10:29:00 GMT

Leadership teams love getting together to lay out a strategy. But…

The big “but” is that it easy to get the vague big picture decisions agreed to but it is difficult to lay out a strategy in enough detail that the rest of the organization is guided by it. It is true that strategy should not micromanage – it should not and cannot possibly answer every question. But it must layout the big cross functional kinds of changes required to achieve the vision and a time-based scenario for getting there. It is a given that this scenario won’t be right. But its value is not in its accuracy it is in getting better understanding the of the cross functional coordination required to get there.

One exercise we advocate for surfacing huge misalignment issues in strategy is answering these two questions.

1. How Big Do We Want to Be in 10 Years?

This first questions puts a number on vague language. It forces the team to think about things like industry growth, inflation, market share, etc. This is a revealing kind of question that teams like discussing. The answer of course is not a plan it just a quantified element of visioning. Of course, it takes a completely different plan to grow from $10m to $25m verses $10m to $250m. The most important part of the first question is the way that it sets up the second question.

2. Where will that growth come from?

Break the answer down into four sub-categories.

Products/services
Markets (demographic)
Distribution channels
Geographic Territories

And for each sub-category list what sales are today and what you want them to be 10 years from now at the next level of detail. For example: If Product A has sales of $5m today and Product B has sales of $5 today. Then list that you expect in 10 years Product A will be $6m in sales, Product B will be $20m and Product C will be $24m. This brings clarity to a strategic growth scenario. “A” is no growth, “B” is strong growth and “C” is a new product that currently doesn’t exist and is going to account for half the business in 10 years.

Repeat this same discussion for channels of distribution, demographic markets and geographic markets and your leadership team will have a dramatically different understanding of what the strategy is calling for.

Of course, there are thousands of other questions that have to be worked in the tactics to pursue this plan, but by asking these two questions, you engage the leadership team at a completely different level of envisioning how to move forward. There is almost no chance things will work according to this scenario, but building out the scenario forces a level of understanding in the coordination needed to get the organization to think about what it’s going to take to get there.

Principle

An ancient biblical parable states that “without vision the people perish”. The deeper meaning is that for people to work together effectively, to align around purpose, requires clarity. The larger an organization is, the more difficult it is to bring clarity to the frontlines. Useful strategies need to be detailed enough to provide cross-functional alignment. The alternative is chaos.

#003- The Power of Failure to Make Us Better

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 12:34:00 GMT

Determination is a trait in people that we admire. But it is a two-edged sword.

Leadership

In a previous post I pointed out that for leaders to overcome chaos requires 1) right purpose, 2) right process and 3) the right people aligned around that purpose. Sounds easy, but we all know it’s not. Once a purpose is declared the hard work of figuring out how to fulfill that purpose and do it right ensue. What are the steps that will produce the result we want? Which people should do what and when? It takes a huge amount of tenacity to work through all the variable and get things working. It takes an ‘iron will’ to battle through these things.

Disaster

I now tell you a story about how my own ‘iron will’ can get in the way. As a young CEO I worked with our team to decide to build a new major software product. It was an ambitious product with big goals. Once the decision was made, I was resolute about our objective and when things didn’t go right, we doubled down, added people, worked harder. ‘We are not quitting’, was my mantra. This went on until I almost bankrupt the company and was forced to lay off half our workforce. It was devastatingly painful as we were a ‘riends and family’ type company.

The disaster of ‘running out of money’ was the only force that was strong enough to overcome my determination to keep going. Remember the formula for good leadership: 1) purpose, 2) process and 3) people. If the purpose is wrong, you can’t make up for it with people and process. My leadership trait of determination (which was essential as a leader), was also the reason I could not accept the truth about this project. It had the wrong purpose.

Fortunately, the disaster of financial failure and layoffs forced us all to get laser focused on a new direction, which lead to a 6-fold growth over the next 6 years.

Principle

Humans are created with an amazing capacity to set goals and pursue them. BUT leadership of self and others requires the humility to consider that maybe our purposes aren’t aligned with reality– they may not be aligned with what is true. Sometimes it takes disaster to get us to figure this out. It is worth disaster to learn the truth.

Conquering Chaos Requires 3 Skills

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:11:00 GMT

Miss any of the following, and you end up back in the quagmire.

Leaders must deliver:

Purpose Excellence . The direction for your team has to be crystal clear and that direction must align with the rest of the organization. If not, then your team and the rest of the organization will be fighting against each other.
Process Excellence . The way you build or deliver your products and services has to work smoothly and predictably. If not the life of you and your team will be just as unpredictable.
People Excellence . People must be treated as humans with respect and care. Without a caring environment, you will not have the openness and the oneness required to work toward shared goals. People are not like machines that obey the laws of physics.

Principle:

The enduring principle is that chaos is always the result of misalignment among purpose, people, and process.

Leaders Should Read the Bible Even If They Don’t Believe It

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:26:00 GMT

There are three reasons why leaders should read the Bible — even if they don't believe it.

69% of Americans believe the bible is true with 49% saying it is inspired by God but should not necessarily be taken literally. You can lead and manage more effectively if you have an understanding of what forms the 69%’s world view and affects their. values. https://bit.ly/3n8EZHN
the Bible offers theories of human architecture, motivation, needs and weaknesses that you may not have considered. You come to understand your own world view better when you compare it to others.
the Bible has a unique definition of what leadership is and implies that it is one of the most important attributes of every human, i.e., the ability to form and choose purpose and act upon it. The Bible the leader’s role in civilization.

This idea applies to all world views.

Christians should be reading about other faiths, not to be converted but to learn. The principle being advocated is that we should dig more deeply and try to understand each other’s beliefs rather than silence or intimidate.

If we can agree that we are all on a path of seeking the truth, maybe we will find it faster. What have we got to lose, what we are doing now isn’t working.

Talk About Firing Before You Hire

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:34:00 GMT

I read somewhere that there is a correlation between heart attacks and firings.

The message was that firing people is so stressful it affects our health. And it is certainly not fun for the person being fired either. What can you do to reduce the stress?

It took me a long-time to figure out what works best. As part of the hiring process, I now discuss what happens if either of us decide to part ways. In this conversation we discuss:

What happens if either one of us conclude this is not the place for you?
On our side, if we think you are not performing well, we will tell you and work with you to improve or find a position in the company that is a better fit.
If we can’t do that, we will tell you in plenty of time (2 to 6 months depending upon the job) to find a job while you continue working. It is easier to find work while you are employed. We will support you in this process any way we can.
In return we ask you to treat us in the same way. If you conclude it is not working give us a chance to fix it.
If we can’t then give us as much notice as you can. Tell us you are beginning to look so we can do the same.

I finish the conversation by saying that in the end we want what’s best for you. Working in a position that isn’t a fit isn’t best for you or us. If we trust each other, we can figure this out in a constructive, win-win way. I have found people are relieved to have the discussion, it builds trust and addresses the reality that there is always risk that it won’t work out.

Beating Chaos Requires Purpose, People AND Process

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 14:14:00 GMT

Chaos is the raw material from which we build our lives.

The sources of chaos are

those things over which humanity has no control – weather, earthquakes, etc.
the chaos of relationships – how society interacts with each other and
the chaos within. Understanding who we are, what we want and how to pursue what we want.

For this post let’s focus on the second category and narrow our focus to work. How is order established and maintained at work? The answer to that question is what leadership is all about. Three skills are required.

First, leaders must be able to evaluate all relevant factors and set clear purpose. Without purpose there is no framework for utilizing resources. Without purpose chaos reigns.

Second, l eaders must have the skill to select, organize and engage the right people on an ongoing basis. It’s the ongoing part that’s a challenge since people are continually growing and changing. This requires authentic caring about people and establishing the trusted relationships upon which oneness is built.

Last, leaders must see that the purpose is pursued with excellence. It requires the process skills to build and support a great product or service and do it in high quality and predictable ways. Without orderly processes, the team is unable to work together effectively, frustration grows, and trust breaks down. The deepest desire of people is to ‘win’ at something, and poor processes stand in the way of that desire.

Like so many things, the above three skills are easy to talk about, but in practice learning to balance them in ways that optimize results is a life-long pursuit. Step back and consider where you might improve the fit among these three skills.

Warning: Order is Easier to Create Than Keep

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:21:00 GMT

The extreme example of this truth is family. Getting married is a form of bringing order.

Out of all the possible relationships two people commit to a unique relationship with each other. But keeping a good marriage is much more difficult than getting married.

Why? Two reasons: The first is time. Getting married takes a year or two of courtship, being married takes a lifetime. People change over a lifetime which leads to unmet expectations.

Second is growth. Most relationships lead to growth – marriage leads to children, grand-children, in-laws, etc. Businesses lead to more products, employees and customers. Growth leads to complexity and communication challenges. It gets increasingly more difficult to stay ‘one’ with others.

The biblical principle for coping with this is making the relationship the first priority. The bond among people has to be an end unto itself, not just a means to an end.

The commitment to each other (love) has to be stronger than the chaos of everyday life whether at home or at work. In the business world this translates to caring for people because it is the right thing to do, not because you can get more out of people. To lead well we have to care honestly.

A Leaders First Responsibility Is to Determine Purpose

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 02:50:00 GMT

Chaos and purpose are on opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Chaos is the raw material use to pursue purpose. For some reason God wired us to relentlessly want to overcome, build, create — bring order out of chaos. All of life whether raising a family, cooking a meal or building a medical care center is about this eternal battle that gives our life meaning.

The power of purpose is illustrated with a simple analogy. The Bible points out that light conquers darkness – always. The proof is that you cannot go into a lighted room and turn on the “dark” switch. You can only turn-off the light. So it is with chaos. Chaos is the absence of purpose; Purpose is not the absence of chaos.

If you want to strike a blow to the chaos in your life, home or business, step back and determine what your real purpose is. A proverb paraphrase says that “the purpose of the human heart is deep water and those who are wise search it out.

It is only when your purpose is clear that you begin to know how to order the chaos. In the same way that all the spices and ingredients in your kitchen are chaos until you pick your recipe, so it is in your life. You are built to defeat chaos, but it always starts with purpose.

6 Truths Effective Leaders Must Learn

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:43:00 GMT

Following are six principles that effective leaders figure out over time.

They may not use the same words, but they come to understand these truths over time.

Chaos Refines Us – Chaos is the raw material of life. And the effort of transforming it into something useful challenges us to the limit but it makes us stronger. It tests and refines.
You Are Designed to Win – Everyone has deep within the capability (and the desire) to win at something. Leaders are good at helping people find and fulfill that purpose.
All Chaos is Not Alike -There are three kinds of chaos and they each bring different types of challenge. There are external factors we absolutely have no control over – earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. The best we can do is prepare for what we would do in such a disaster. Social chaos is what occurs among people. It is a chaos created by how we interact wtih each other and it is maddeningly complex and frustrating because it seems like we should be able to overcome it but it is a constant challenge. The third type of chaos is internal. It is what is going on inside of individuals who are trying to figure what they want, who they are and what to do to get what they want. As a leader the interaction among these 3 forces requires great skill and is why leadership is the most important work in the world.
Purpose is Your First Responsibility – the place to start in overcoming chaos is always with purpose. A leader’s most important first responsibility is to determine purpose. Upon that foundation you can then begin to address the types of chaos above.
People Don’t Obey the Laws of Physics — People are not machines. They have a mind of their own with unique desires that grow and change. Effective leaders build relationships at the individual level that honors uniqueness.
Order is Easier to Create than to Keep –this last learning is hard to believe until you experience it. When you are building something for the first time it seems overwhelming to get it built. But after it is built you gradually realize that it takes more wisdom and effort to sustain the success of a business, family, society than it did to create it. It makes sense, sustaining is forever, creating is one-time.

Electromagnetic Energy Holds Our Bodies Together, What Holds Our Organizations Together?

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:54:00 GMT

The amazing reality of creation is that it is made up 98% of two atoms. And the magnificent variety of what we see around us is the result of those atoms being assembled in different ways but held together by electromagnetism (and three other forces).

A question every leader should consider is what is it that holds our organizations together. Organizations are made up of people (not atoms) and the effectiveness of the organization depends on the how the people are aligned and relate to each other. So, what is it that holds people in relation to each other?

The Bible clearly answers this question. People are held together by shared purpose and by a specific kind of love (not sexual nor friendship) but an ‘other focused’ kind of love where we do what’s best for other people regardless of whether they deserve it or not. The Bible refers to it as a supernatural type of love. And its source is God Himself.

There are about 800,000 words in the Bible and yet Jesus says that all those words can be summed up by “love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Leadership of self and of others starts with understanding that this is what holds organizations together.

Leaders Must Live in the World of AND not OR

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 17:26:00 GMT

We all like simplified models of the world — especially when it comes to people.

Tom is a people person or a task person. Susan is a big picture or a detail person. It is true that we all have strengths that can be polar opposites of each other. Most people who are great at seeing the big picture are not great at making the day-to-day stuff work.

The problem occurs when we apply this simplistic view to the organization as a whole. The hard truth is that leaders must figure out a way to assure that two opposite kinds of capability co-exist in balance for the organization to be effective long-term.

These opposites are

The relationship skills required to genuinely care for people and build the openness and trust required for people to work together effectively. And the other dimension is
The process dimension where there is a focus on organizing the way things work in a consistent, efficient and high-quality way.

Leaders who are great at building relationships but can’t deliver order get people initially excited, but that excitement turns to disillusionment when the organization cannot win. In contrast, leaders who are masters at the detail required to make things work efficiently but can’t develop strong relationships creates a bureaucratic, lifeless organization that loses the engagement of heart and mind.

Like so many things in life we need to focus on AND not OR to thrive. The Bible talks about this very idea when it says we must speak the truth (hard core) but (AND) in love. One without the other will not last.

Be encouraged, you can do this. You were built to lead yourself and others.

Understanding 3 Human Design Traits Will Make You a Better Leader

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 15:29:00 GMT

If you have never seen a hammer before and examine it you fairly quickly figure out it is designed to hit something. You won’t know that it is designed to drive nails or bend metal, but you can tell it is made to strike something.

As leaders we need to be students of people and discern how they are “designed”. Ancient biblical wisdom proposes that humans have the following three traits:

People are designed to win. There is a deep need built for every human to win at something. This need is as important as food and oxygen.
For people to win they have to figure out what winning means for them. What do they want? Their purpose, their goals? And they usually need the help of others to fulfill their purpose.
When people don’t win over a long period of time, they show different symptoms – anger, discouragement, disengagement from life, work and other people.

Leadership requires understanding these three truths and helping people figure out how to win. Leadership is required at home, at school and at work. Ledership is the most challenging work in the world because everyone is different and it is the most rewarding work because you are helping people fulfill their most basic need, being what God created them to be.

The First Step to Overcome Chaos – Think Differently

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 15:17:00 GMT

Most of the time we sort of personify chaos, by referring to it as though it was a “thing” we can touch and perhaps curse a little under our breath.

I encourage you to think of chaos differently.

Chaos is just unordered or unutilized resource available for your use. For example, you have probably driven by a building site and in its early stages it appears as total chaos with piles of steel rods, sand, concrete, lumber, window frames — a huge inventory of pieces lying about. Then you drive by six months later a building is standing and the chaos is gone.

The difference is that someone had a blueprint and a team of people and equipment that transformed what looked like chaos into a planned structure. The point of this simple example is to not allow the “pile” of chaos in front of you overwhelm you or take away your power.

Chaos is transformed by purpose. A God-given trait of humans is the ability to form a purpose and pursue it. And with good purposes we bring order out of the chaotic resources around us. This is the first step to master chaos, realizing that you ARE built to beat chaos. Chaos does not have a mind or heart, but you do.

Face Your Chaos

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:53:00 GMT

As you enter the new year, it is a great time to confront the chaos around you. Chaos is nothing more than the raw material of life, it is the flour, sugar and baking soda of your cake. There are three types of chaos:

External Chaos

This includes things insurance companies call “acts of God” –floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and pandemics. We are not in control of these types of events, but we do have control of how or if we prepare for them.

Social Chaos

This reflects the high unpredictability of human interaction. Every single person alive has unique desires, imagination and skills. The result is surprising difficulty in staying on the same page with our family, co-workers, people we see on our commute and even whole nations. This type of chaos is more frustrating because it seems like it should be in our control to do something about it.

The Chaos Within

This is the hidden chaos that refers to misalignment deep inside us — our desires, our reason and our actions. Often, we ourselves don’t understand the root cause of this misalignment but it’s there. You know that nagging sense of discontent, but you don’t know its exact source. The chaos within is often pushed aside but it eventually surfaces in the form of anger, frustration, discontent, disengagement or even depression.

3 Tips for Beating Chaos

Be encouraged that the Bible says you are created in God’s image with the ability to overcome chaos. You are created to be a victor, not a victim. Following are 3 steps for taking control:

Pick your battle wisely. There is an infinite amount of chaos (opportunity) around us. Choose carefully which area you want to start building more order.
Clarify purpose. Purpose is the only way to overcome chaos. Purpose is really the opposite of chaos. Clarity of purpose shows how to use the chaos around you. Back to the baking analogy, you can’t do anything with the flour and sugar until you pick the recipe.
Don’t go alone. Tell someone you trust your battle plan so they can encourage you on your journey. Another biblical principle is that we are not meant to overcome alone, we need others to work with us.

Leaders: Chaos Is Not Your Problem, It’s Your Purpose

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:07:00 GMT

Believe it or not, you were created to beat chaos.

That is what the Bible says. It is emphatic about this truth and uses terms like “dominion”, “rule”, “overcome”, “master” from the very first chapter to the very last. We are designed to bring order out of chaos. It is our purpose. The creation narrative says that you and I are designed in God’s image to create and have dominion.

So, if you are facing chaos be encouraged. In the struggle against it you will find meaning. The creation narrative in the book of Genesis says that God created chaos first (the earth was void and without form) and then He begins to bring order out of the chaos step by step. He is showing us the way.

We are designed to do the same thing and we are not fulfilled unless we are winning at something important. For some it is mastering a musical instrument, for others it is preparing a Thanksgiving feast, some till the ground and others manufacture products.

The Essence of Leadership

The biblical idea of leadership applies to every person on earth. Do not ever believe the lie that you are a loser and can’t win. It is simply not true. God never intended for your life to be easy, but it did intend for it to be meaningful.

Each week I will share practical insights about the nature of chaos and how to make it serve your purposes as you lead yourself and others.

5 Steps To Effective Leadership Development

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 16:10:00 GMT

Why leadership development matters

Step 1: Identify your primary leadership roles
Step 2: Distinguish between people skills & business process skills
Step 3: Make leadership growth a continual process
Step 4: Build an individualized leadership development plan
Step 5: Measure Leadership Growth
Final Thoughts on our leadership development model

Why leadership development matters

The biggest challenge with leadership development is that we underestimate the skill required to lead effectively.

In fact, I believe leading ourselves and leading others is the most difficult work there is.

Let me explain with an example from physics. The world’s major accomplishments result from integration – putting pieces together into a “whole”.

Cars are an integration of computer chips, steel, plastic, rubber – thousands of components carefully engineered to fit together.

The human body consists of trillions of atoms with protons, neutrons and electrons held together by the laws of physics.

The energy holding things together is much higher proportion than the mass that is being held together. So it is with teams of people.

Whereas an engineer integrates physical items that obey the laws of physics, leaders are called to integrate people into shared purpose.

But guess what?

People don’t obey the laws of physics because they each have their own desires, dreams and skill sets. Somehow leaders have to provide and wisdom and finding the binding force that holds people together.

There are principles that guide us in how to get people to work together. Leading yourself and leading others is the most important and challenging work of all. For this reason, leaders need constant development so they can build on what they have learned in recent experience and drive their learning to the next level.

In the rest of this article, we describe a five-step framework for establishing an effective leadership development program. These steps will help you establish a sustainable model for growing leaders.

Step 1: Identify your primary leadership roles

Five leadership roles exist in all organizations . A role is a type of leadership with specific requirements. It is not synonymous with a job title. Every leader has to master more than one role.

The five roles (see diagram) and related skills are described below:

Self-Leadership –take responsibility for yourself. The traits you want in every worker – honesty, openness, trustworthiness, and getting along with people.
Change (Project) Leadership – define clear outcomes, organize and manage a project, drive change and keep people informed.
Functional Leadership – ongoing responsibility for a department, planning, measurement, getting results, providing accountability, and building leaders.
Process Leadership – coordinate cross-functional team to drive improvement in a process, measurement, team coordination, and continuous improvement.
Strategy Leadership –sets long-term priorities for organization or department, determines change roadmap for reaching vision, building engagement, and connecting short-term action with long-term vision.

Each role has differences in time horizon, functional diversity of the teams they manage, and time in the job to gain the wisdom required to fulfill the role.

All the roles start with self-leadership .

Most managers need to fulfill most of the roles. Executive leadership spends far more time on strategy and long-term thinking. But even a front-line supervisor will grow to think ahead behind the current year’s operating plans.

Beyond Self Leadership, which everyone must master, leadership development plans should consider which of these roles needs to be developed first for a leader and how to give that leader experiential learning.

Step 2: Distinguish between people skills & business process skills

Sometimes I am a slow learner. What share next took decades to sink in. I understood the following at the “head” level, but it didn’t get to the “heart level” until much later.

There are two different dimensions of leadership development.

The first is what I call “process skills” — basic skills involved with organizing work. This includes things like crafting long-term strategy, identifying customer requirements, planning, and forecasting, defining measures and targets, running effective meetings, tracking projects, performance reviews, hiring, disciplining, and resolving conflict.

It is a long list. No one masters all skills at once. It takes time.

The second dimension focuses on human interaction and engagement. It ties back to the introduction and the not-so-obvious challenges of leadership. For the task-oriented person, people skills are far more challenging to master than the business process skills.

In contrast, others are energized by people interaction and naturally build strong relationships. Most leaders aren’t equally adept at both dimensions of leadership.

The chart below illustrates effective leadership involves a balance of both skills. Those who overemphasize the processes over people to get things done can easily create a bureaucratic culture. And lose sight of why the processes exist in the first place – to make people more effective.

Those with strong people skills talk a great game but aren’t organized enough to keep everyone on the same page.

In this mode, people love their leader but become disillusioned with the ability to organize the team so they can work together effectively.

Think about the people you are mentoring, and consider which of these dimensions needs the most work.

I am a Process guy so I need to focus more on the People side. It takes more conscious effort to bring balance to that dimension.

Regardless of where you fall, the remaining steps point out that you need to measure what you are doing and continuously adjust to stay on an optimum path.

Step 3: Make leadership growth a continual process

There are two strong arguments for designing your leadership development program around a continuous process.

First, a continuous process is optimized to identify what the next learning should be. This continuous focus optimizes the stacked learning of moving from basic to more advanced topics. It allows for tailoring to the individual roles and the l priorities of strategy, functional, project, process and self-leadership.

Everyone’s path is different, so a continuous process is always measuring and looking for the next best topic for any leader or group;

The second reason is learning retention. Continuous learning is optimized for learning on the job as opposed to large block classroom training.

Below are a few stats reported by Joan Burge from an Association of Talent Development (ATD) session she attended. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this data, but I know from personal experience people learn more effectively when they apply what they are doing immediately.

Adult Learning Retention Statistics:
Lecture – 5%
Reading – 10%
Demonstration – 30%
Group – 50%
Practice and Doing (experiential!) – 75%!

Source: Your Case for Training: Adult Learning Retention Statistics (officedynamics.com)

The Bottom line?

If your leader development program is delivered continuously, your system will be optimized for individual needs just-in-time. AND content is will be applied quickly, so retention (effectiveness) of the training will be higher.

Step 4: Build an individualized leadership development plan

Following is a template for leadership development planning that incorporates the principles from the steps above. First it incorporates insight into the needs for each leadership role and it recognizes that the priorities for a leader vary based on their background and work situation.

Implementation Steps:

Review the form below and add any new topics you would like incorporated into your leader development skills checklist.
Benchmark their level of development in each of these roles based on their own input and that of their leaders, peers, and direct reports (multi-rater feedback).
Meet with the leader to review scores and choose the skills to work on in the next few quarters. Focus on 2-3 max. Getting a firm foundation in a couple of areas makes the next skill easier to achieve.
Setup training deliverables that involve the individual and the group they report to. Make this a team effort to grow skills. By engaging the team, the leader gets reinforcement, plus the team learns on the same topic. It creates learning synergy.

Step 5: Measure Leadership Growth

Organizations grow and change. New products, services, customers, markets, employees, and technologies. Life is an exciting and challenging chaos.

The Bible says we are designed to bring order to a chaotic world. This is what the creation narrative means when it says ‘God created us to rule over the earth’.

With all this change, it is important to measure leadership growth.

Are there needed skills that a leader never developed? Are there areas the leader has fallen behind? Has the organization changed so that new skills are required?

Answering these questions is why you need to monitor leadership and managerial skills development.

We suggest you start with the plan you built in step 4. Establish clear standards of leadership outcomes you want, and find good content that is available as microlearning that can be delivered in real-time. Finally, use a data gathering approach where the leader’s skills maturity can be measured by the primary stakeholders who interact with the leader.

The frequency of measurement depends on how dynamic you want leadership development to be.

One approach is to benchmark all the skills once a year. Then decide which skills the leader will build in the next four quarters. Incorporate those priorities into their development plan and monitor their progress like you would any other important goal.

Be aware that the measurement process builds awareness within the people that support the leader. In a mature culture, the team will think of individual development as a team effort that benefits everyone.

Final Thoughts on the leadership development model

Whether leading yourself or others, leadership is the most important responsibility any of us have. The world needs people who know where they want to go and how to conquer chaos to get there.

Since change in the world is continuous, learning must be continuous. Delivering organizational lifelong learning becomes a strategic priority for any organization that does not want to outgrow its own ability to execute.

In Christ, the best is ahead!

-Gary

P.S. Are you looking for tools to help your leaders bring order out of chaos? I recommend you take a look at LeadFirst – a leadership management system designed to help develop and care for the leaders in your organization.

What is Biblical Leadership? 6 Principles for Building More Effective Organizations

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 21:38:00 GMT

Principle 1: Human Worth – Every Life Is Important

In the creation narrative at the beginning of the Bible, it states that we are created by God and in His likeness (image). This means that everyone has infinite value and worth.

Why do we say infinite?

For three reasons.

First, we are created in the likeness of God. As a species, no other creature is like us.
Second, as individuals, we cannot be replaced once we are gone. There is no other person like us.
Third, we live forever. Even after departure from this earth we still live on another form. The Bible speaks clearly that everyone lives forever, some in God’s presence and some apart from Him. Anything that exists forever is valuable.

These truths mean that an individual’s worth is not what they do, but who they are. Accepting this changes how you relate to each person in your life. It is foundational to biblical leadership. Building on this foundation of a person’s value equips us to apply the principles that follow.

Principle 2: Human Purpose – Bringing Order Out Of Chaos

The Bible states that the very first thing God created was chaos. And from that chaos He incrementally brought order to that chaos to serve His purposes.

The creation narrative also states that humans are designed to have dominion over the earth. The Bible is emphatic about this and uses several phrases to express the concept – “dominion”, “rule”, “overcome”, and “mastery”.

This is the essence of biblical leadership: setting purpose and figuring out how to use the chaotic resources around us to achieve our purpose. In this sense, everyone is a leader of themselves. We are designed to lead ourselves and won’t really be fulfilled and living in our purpose if we don’t do that.

It is curious that of all the things God could create; He chose a mini-version of Himself. We are each a “creator” who has raw materials (chaos) available and the ability to do something with that raw material.

Understanding our purpose provides insight as to the root cause for our behaviors, frustrations, dreams and amazing achievements.

Sometimes we think of chaos as a problem, but it’s really our purpose. We are built to beat chaos, not to be its victim.

Principle 3: Human Design – Desire | Reason | Intention | Action

In the world of design, there is a difference between design requirements and design. In principle 2, we uncovered that the design requirement for humans (our purpose) is to have dominion, to overcome. In principle 3, we explore how we are actually designed to have dominion.

In the story of Noah in the Bible, four interacting components described how we bring order out of chaos. They are – heart, mind, imagination and body. In biblical language, they represent desire, reason, intention and action.

In order for us to have the motivation it takes to have dominion, God has equipped us with incalculable levels of desire for different purposes.

The mind brings reason and wisdom to our desires so they are channeled in constructive ways. When desire and reason interact we gradually form (imagine) an intention. The intention then leads to action.

Each of these components interacts constantly. Our reason adjusts our desires, our actions provide feedback to our reason about what works and what doesn’t. This adjusts our intentions.

This four-box model is a simple representation of a much more integrated function. But this simple model helps us understand human behavior.

For example, a few years ago, “Justin” approached me with an idea that he thought would be useful in the business world. At this point, he had a desire, but didn’t know what to do about it. But, he had moved from the desire box to the reason box since he was seeking input about different ways to pursue fulfill his desire.

After discussions with me and others over a period of months, he decided he was going to start a business. This decision represented moving into the “intention” box. Someone called intention the “first creation” meaning a thing has to exist in our mind before we can create it.

Justin then spent the last several years acting on his intention and has built a successful business. Of course, as he acted on his intention he learned things that affected his prior thinking and made adjustments.

Thinking about human behavior this model explains many things. Sometimes people can’t figure out what they want. It takes times and some never figure it out. In these situations, there can be a deep discontent that they cannot define, but it can spill over into their attitude toward all of life.

Others know what they want but don’t know how to get it. They can be blocked by knowledge or resources. This too can cause frustration directed at others who may not support them. Sometimes this anger is directed at a specific person or can just be someone angry “at the world”.

This insight has helped me when I see someone who seems really difficult to be around, to realize that underneath there is some underlying reason they themselves may not even understand. It makes me want to learn more about the motives for people’s actions, rather than judge their actions.

The opposite of these examples are those who have found their place. Their desires, reason, and imagination are aligned with action. These are highly engaged people and know the fulness that God intended when He designed us.

What a privilege it is when you can assist someone to get into this place in their life. This is another reward of biblical leadership.

Principle 4: Human Relationships – We Can’t Win Alone

One part of the creation narrative that I left out has huge ramifications. God stated that to have dominion we must “multiply and fill the earth” to do it. To be what we are created to be we must work with others to do it. This complicates things a great deal!

Why?

Remember from the design above that EACH person has their own set of desires, reason, imagination and action.

How do we get all this uniqueness working together?

Not easily.

History teaches that no civilization has done it for more than a few hundred years. We as leaders have to face this brutal fact.

The Bible gives some insight into what it takes. There are 800,000 words in the English Bible, but God says they are all recapped with 25 words: “ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. ” Matt 22.

It has taken me a lifetime to understand the significance of these twenty-five words in a business setting. (And I think it may be the most challenging principle of all when it comes to biblical leadership.)

This verse is talking about how to achieve the alignment that is essential for human achievement. The word used for love (agape) is not brotherly, family, or sexual love. It is a relationship where you do what’s right for the other person, regardless of whether they reciprocate. It is proactive, not reactive.

This verse has two dimensions of alignment – internal and external.

Internally you have to “love” yourself. You are aided by your belief that God created you and you have value not based on performance, but in who you are. It’s a big journey for most of us.

Next, out of the centeredness of loving yourself, you can love others proactively. It is a mysterious synergy. God initiates love for us by creating us. As we come to accept this, we can love ourselves for who God says we are. This, in turns allows us to love God and to love others.

To apply this in the business world, you need something to align around (purpose). And you need strong relationships where people care both about the purpose AND each other. This caring bond needs to be strong enough to weather the storms of human failure and the external stress of chaos.

It’s a tall order, whether you are trying to lead yourself or trying to lead others.

Principle 5: Human Mentorship – The Growth Paradox

As organizations grow, they become more complex. The chart below illustrates that when a team goes from 3 to 2 5 people, there is an 8X increase in headcount but a 117 X increase in potential interactions among those people.

This leads to the execution paradox, which states that every organization eventually outgrows its own ability to execute. ( described in my second book, Execution Revolution .

Given that it is difficult to build organizations that sustain unity of purpose and relationships, how do you do it? Biblical leadership wisdom suggests it does not happen just by talking.

People must be taught the concepts and why they matter. But ultimately building an organization where purpose is clear and people care about each other comes by showing people, not telling them.

The Bible refers to this as building disciples. We refer to as mentoring. The way mentoring works is that one individual is mentored by someone else who is further along in their journey. The person mentoring learns even more by mentoring someone else. And that person repeats the process.

This mentoring process is the only way you can build an organization that grows rapidly and still maintains its cohesiveness. The organization must reproduce itself at a pace that keeps up with growth. The alternative is chaos.

Principle 6: Work Is Holy – Leadership Is Deeply Meaningful

The Bible has great encouragement as we lead ourselves or others. When you help people work together to achieve some worthwhile purpose, you are doing what is called “holy” work.

Holiness is often thought of as a ‘church’ or “God” word. It is true that God is holy in ways we will never understand. But there is a human dimension to holiness that the Bible discusses.

It turns out holiness is tied to fulfilling a purpose. To illustrate, the Bible records God declared even tables and garments used in the temple as “holy. God views that things which fulfill His purpose as holy.

From the very beginning, God created people to bring order out of chaos. To invent, create and exercise our desires, minds, intentions, and actions for a purpose of our choosing. God gives us the freedom to choose our purposes, and all of them are not good.

But you can with confidence know that when you help people exercise their God-given abilities to build something that helps others and that enables them to provide for their family you ARE doing holy work.

Be encouraged when you are exhausted on your biblical leadership journey. You are making a difference in the world. Your impact will multiply through the people you serve into the future.

Final Thoughts

I leave with you with the following insight from a book I wrote on Biblical leadership principles that drills into the topic above more deeply: Built to Beat Chaos, Biblical Wisdom for Leading Yourself and Others:

I am a huge fan of Bill Knapp’s chocolate cake and Cheesecake Factory cake is right up there too.) But consider this. The ingredients of a chocolate cake are flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and chocolate. Yet none of those ingredients correlate to the taste and experience of eating a piece of that cake. Like the delicious melting of cake in your mouth, there is mystery and surprise when you learn and follow biblical principles in life. The abundance is unexpectedly good and beyond any individual ingredient.

Life is truly the ultimate adventure. The principles in this post are just a few of the wisdom ingredients in life. They become an integral part of your leadership management system. The wonder and joy come from working with others to bake your own cake and taste it as you go!

In Christ, the best is ahead!

-Gary | Contact me

P.S. Are you looking for tools to help your leaders bring order out of chaos? I recommend you take a look at LeadFirst – a leadership management system designed to help develop the leaders in your organization.

Teamwork Driven Execution #2

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 17:54:00 GMT

A process to align and motivate every team.

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

-Peter Drucker

Are your teams engaged and high-performing?

Do your leaders struggle to keep their direct reports engaged?
Are your people busy but not as effective as you know they can be?
Is ‘communication’ a problem at all levels of the organization?
Do your front-line leaders know how to ‘coach’ rather than ‘command’?

Discipline IV guides your teams through a series of best practices to focus them on the most important work.

Here are all the questions they will answer:

Quarterly Team Check-In – What do we need to get done in the next quarter to achieve our annual targets?
Self-Check-In – What do I need to get done next week to reach the quarter targets?
Weekly Team Check-In – What adjustments do we need to make to stay on track?
Daily Check-In – What are the most important things to complete today?
Monthly Team Check-In – How do we broaden our understanding of what’s happening?
Quarterly 1:1 Check-In – How can we help people win?

Collaboration Software
making DIV: Teamwork Driven Execution work

Focus team members on the right goals. Visible, transparent progress keeps everyone motivated and accountable.

Track progress and check-in
See exactly how individual efforts make a difference
Get alerts and notifications
Create clear meeting agenda and next action steps
Manage all your individual action items

Continuous Leader Development
training on DIV: Teamwork Driven Execution

The Teamwork Driven Execution Workshop trains every team on the management rhythms that will keep them aligned, agile, and motivated.

Daily Check-In
Weekly Self Check-In
Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly Team Check-Ins
Quarterly One-On-One Check-Ins

Ongoing Coaching
reinforcing DIV: Teamwork Driven Execution

Coaching is at the heart of what we do. Our coaching model not only provide ongoing support for every team, but we also train every team leader to ‘coach’ rather than ‘command.’

Facilitate quarterly team check-in
Ongoing support
Workshop facilitation
Software training and set-up
Train and support Six Disciplines Internal Coaches

Organization Improvement through Organization Development Methodology

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 18:22:00 GMT

Continuous Improvement in Your Business

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 18:16:00 GMT

Discipline V guides your team through a series of best practices to gather, prioritize, and implement employee driven improvement suggestions.

Teamwork Driven Execution

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 18:12:00 GMT

Operational Alignment

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:55:00 GMT

Strategic Change Management

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:44:00 GMT

Develop and Communicate Your Strategic Vision

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:26:00 GMT

A process to clarify your strategy for everyone in your organization.

Do you struggle with strategy?

Have you been through a strategic planning process with little real change?
Are your mission, values, and vision played out in the daily actions of your teams?
Do your front-line leaders understand your unique strategy?
Are you growing and want better communication of your vision?

The LeadFirst Framework Discipline I guides your team through a series of best practices to develop, commit to, and communicate your strategic vision.

Here are all the questions you will answer:

Mission – What is our enduring purpose?
Values – What is our character?
Market Analysis – What does our market require?
Competitive Analysis – How well is the market served?
Vision Focus – What will we be best at?
Strategic Themes – What will we invest in to deliver our difference?
Scorecard: Growth Strategy – How will the organization grow?
Scorecard: Customer Focus – How do we maintain a healthy focus on our customers?
Scorecard: Operational Effectiveness – What must we be good at to operate effectively?
Scorecard: People Focus – How do we focus on our employees?

Collaboration Software
making DI: Strategic Vision work

Get your strategy’s goals and projects into LeadFirst software so your entire organization can align their work to it.

Collaboration exercises
Dashboards
Visible, one-page plan

Our Purpose Workshop brings a powerful strategy planning process to your top leaders.

Strategic question exercises
Gain agreement on Mission, Values, and Vision
Build a Strategy Scorecard
Great opportunity to develop junior leaders’ strategic thinking

Ongoing Coaching reinforcing DI: Strategic Vision

Our experienced coaches do more than get you off to a great start with the strategic planning process. They stick with you, consistently joining you onsite to encourage, support, and hold you accountable as you execute your plan.

Workshop facilitation
Software setup
Project management

How to Increase Organizational Performance

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:20:00 GMT

Results. In one way or another, this is what every leader of an organization wants.

Organizations with broad-based systems of management grow faster and are 2x’s more profitable .

Strategy

Today’s competitive environment demands that organizations take disciplined action. But, disciplined action is not possible without disciplined thought, specifically, strategic choice. Choice about what you will and will NOT do. According to strategy expert Michael Porter, the essence of strategy is “deciding what not to do.”

Sustainable success requires being different in ways that matter to customers. Answering three questions will determine your strategic difference.

What will make us different?
What do what have a passion for?
What drives our economic engine?

Execution

Executing your strategy is a universal challenge.

An astonishing 90% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution.
Only 5% of employee’s understand their corporate strategy.
Only 37% of an employee’s time goes toward strategic projects. The rest is waste.
If your number of employees grow 8x’s, the number of possible lines of communication grows 117x’s. The complexity from your growth makes execution exponentially more difficult.

Strategy execution is hard for a variety of reasons, but it is not rocket science. You simply need a system to manage it.

Holistic Approach

Two previous studies*, involving over 2000 organizations over ten years, provide compelling evidence that organizations that effectively implement a systematic, organization-wide approach to managing all key aspects of the business perform better. The first study found that the compound growth rates in earnings were more than double those of the control firms over four years after implementation, and about 75% in terms of compound sales. Here are a few key findings:

It is not the ‘brand’ of the systematic approach you use that matters. What matters is that you HAVE a system .
Industry, size, country, culture didn’t significantly change the results. The principles involved in good management processes apply to all types of organizations.
The biggest challenge is not the development (or selection) of a management system, it is implementing and sustaining the implementation.

*”Don’t Count TQM Out,” by Hendrix and Singhal in Quality Progress Magazine, April 1999
“Does Quality Still Pay?” by Zhang and Xia in Production and Operations Management, January 2013

Purpose Drives Performance

3x more The likelihood of employees staying in a purpose-driven organization.
75% Companies with a clear sense of purpose are the new leaders in customer retention with 75% retention rate.
72% of global consumers would recommend a company with a purpose, a 39% increase from 2008.
1.4x Employees are also 1.4 times more engaged.
89% of clients believe a purpose-driven company will deliver the highest quality products & services.
13% Investments focused on activating the company’s purpose generate higher average annualized returns by 13% vs S&P 500 (4%)
10x Purpose led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 10 times between 1996 and 2014.
2x Employees are twice as optimistic about the future of their organization when they feel connected to a higher purpose.
120% ‘Meaningful brands’ connected to human well-being outperformed the stock market by 120% in 2013.

Sources: The Energy Project, What Is Your Quality of Life at Work, 2013; Edelman, The Goodpurpose Study, 2013; Raj Sisodia, Firms of Endearment, 2007; Havas, Meaningful Brands Index (2013), EY Beacon 2014.

Purpose-Driven Employee Engagement

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:12:00 GMT

Engaging people with purpose in their work is about day-to-day action, not speeches.

In 2012, less than one-third ( 29% ) of American workers were engaged; 52% were not engaged; and 19% were actively disengaged.

The top 5 things your employees say drive engagement.

1. The Organization Cares About Me

Out of 65 factors, this was the number one influence on employee engagement. Sound soft and intangible? The next four data points flesh out what “cares about me” means.

2. Openness & Honesty

All relationships, work relationships included, are built on truth and trust. Anything less feels like manipulation. Shoot straight with them and people will know you care.

3. I Care About the Organization

People are looking for purpose at work more than perks and pampering. How do you care for people? Show how their work fits in the bigger picture.

4. Lives Our Values

People want an organization that has clear values and, shocking, actually lives them.

5. People Around Me Are Enthused About Their Work

Shower someone with benefits but stick them with apathetic co-workers and they will quit. Or worse, stay and stop caring. People what to be on a team that cares about their work and pulls together.

A Six-step model for better employee engagement

1. Individual Plan

Know What is Important.

Individual engagement starts with knowing what you are, and are not, responsible for . Everyone should have a plan they ‘own.’

Makes ongoing responsibilities clear (‘big rocks’)
Links those responsibilities to the organization’s purpose
Identify projects for improving results
Holds employees accountable for professional growth

2. Weekly Self Check-In

Realign Around What’s Important.

This what Steven Covey called the putting in the ‘big rocks’ first. (the bucket representing limited time, and the big rocks being what’s important and the pebbles being distractions that come at you every day)

Doing this well requires:

Knowing what the ‘big rocks’ are (priorities from your plan)
Clarifying status of each plan item identifying problems early
Identify next action steps so others know what’s coming
Say no to the urgent but unimportant stuff

3. Weekly Team Check-In

Pull as a Team.

Important work usually requires people to cooperate. The Team Check-in process helps:

Clarify status and misunderstandings
Catch surprises early
Make agile adjustments based on the latest information
Keep the team aligned

4. 1:1 Check-in (Quarterly)

Coach not Command.

Set your managers up to build strong, growth-oriented relationships with every worker. Learn from the past quarter and prepare for the next.

Compare past plan to and what actually happened
Focus on the real objective of helping the individual to grow
Balance individual performance with overall team performance
Provide perspective the individual may not see
Consider progress on self-development plan

5. Stakeholder Check-in

Get Stakeholder Feedback for Every Worker.

High quality performance reviews start collecting the right information. Stakeholder Check-in’s help workers see their real contributions and envision their own potential.

This step provides the leader and worker with:

A review of quarterly check-in conversations and results
Multi-rater feedback from the employees stakeholders
A peer assessment of leadership aptitude
Time savings that can be invested in thinking about the future

6. Annual Check-In

Take the Long View.

Even with quarterly check-ins, an annual check-in provides an opportunity to engage employees at a more strategic level. Weekly meetings and quarterly check-ins tend to be focused on short-term issues. An annual meeting provides an opportunity to step back from the detail and help workers think about their future.

Typical objectives:

Clear review of what happened last year (20%)
Understanding of areas of aptitude and strength (40%)
Opportunities for long-term development (40%)

LeadFirst Leadership Development Model

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:05:00 GMT

90% of employees in purpose-driven organizations report being engaged, compared to 32% of employees in other companies.

Different Expectations

Millennials likely now make up the majority of your workforce. And compared to their predecessors, this generation brings different expectations to work. According to a 2015 Deloitte Study, a “sense of purpose” is part of the reason they chose to work for you. But they likely won’t see the “why” behind their work unless you show it to them. If we want the best out of people, we must connect them to purpose in their work. However menial some jobs may seem, every person’s work matters, and their unique ability can make life better for the rest of us.

Win at Work

People come hard-wired to win. In 2015, Gallup observed that employees who work for a manager who helps them set performance goals are 17 times more likely to be engaged than disengaged. In contrast, employees who strongly disagree that their manager helps them set performance goals are almost seven times more likely to be disengaged than engaged. The take-away? Most people want to succeed in their jobs. It may not seem true when you greet the sea of gloomy faces on Monday morning, but we have a deep, innate desire to do meaningful work and win at work.

Winning Looks Different

Every person has work that only he/she can accomplish. President John F. Kennedy once famously asked a NASA Janitor, “What are you doing?” The man answered, “Putting a man on the moon!” To be a purpose-driven leader means you are adamant to help every employee discover the meaning inherent in their work, showing them how the direct connection between their job and the organization’s mission and strategy.

Profit and Purpose

Profit is the natural by-product of purpose in work. Focus on solely on profit, and you may swindle customers in the short run but, as is common knowledge, people stop doing business with people and organizations they don’t trust. Instead, if you focus on purpose, bringing real and lasting value to your customers, they will reward you with lasting profit. In fact, according to a Korn Ferry study, purpose-driven businesses have 4x’s the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of companies in the S&P 500 Consumer Sector.

Leaders Need New Skills

Leaders need both hard and soft skills to connect people to purpose in their work. ‘Hard’ skills translate the strategic objectives into clear, measurable responsibilities for every worker. ‘Soft’ skills are the emotionally intelligent efforts and gestures needed to motivate people, communicate clearly, give thoughtful feedback, and be a champion for their employees individual contribution to the bigger effort of the organization. Every employee wants to know their manager has their back.

Performance Management System — LeadFirst

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 15:01:00 GMT

Need software to align and develop your workforce?

Is everyone’s work aligned with top priorities?
Do your managers have effective performance conversations?
Need at a glance data so you know exactly what needs your attention?
Want transparency and timely check-ins on key projects?

Engage

Encourage your managers to coach their teams with best practices, using more frequent feedback and regular check-ins.

Collaborate

Transparent, aligned goals ensure everyone sees progress in real time, promoting cross functional team alignment.

Train

Built around the best practices taught in our leadership workshops, our software helps develop leaders at all levels, year-round.

Execute

Streamline goal-setting, plan building, project management, meetings, individual actions, and progress monitoring.

Dashboards

Respond faster. Perform better. Our dashboards give you easy access to the real-time performance management information you need to engage every employee and stay purpose-driven.

At-a-glance access to goals, plans, actions, and data
See up-to-date goal measures cleary with charts and graphs
Import widgets from our ready-to-use library or create customized widgets from scratch
Customize and share dashboards
Import custom/external data from multiple sources

Plan Manager

Clarify your organization’s strategic vision. Build a change roadmap. Execute the plan. Plan Manager provides your team with an on-going, systematic process to develop, review and revise plans, keeping you agile.

Clarify your organization’s strategic plan
Develop department/operational plans
Align individual plans
Tracks measures and outcomes for accountability
All data feeds into quarterly check-ins for real and helpful feedback

Meeting Manager

Solve the meeting dilemma. Ineffective meetings waste time and drag down the momentum of your team. Our software helps your leaders plan and facilitate purposeful, and helpful, meetings.

Carry-forward open items for closure
Review plan progress in real-time
Track individual assignments
Access meeting history – no meeting left behind!

Action Manager

Access plans, projects, and actions anytime, anywhere, on any device. Unlike normal ‘to-do’ apps, our mobile Action Manager connects you with every plan, meeting, and responsibility you have in your organization. Finally, you can be on top of the most important priorities wherever and whenever you need access to them.

Actionable to-do list
Integrated actions from all your projects and goals
Encourages daily and weekly planning
Easily create to-do’s from your email inbox

Check-Ins and Reviews

Make performance reviews meaningful. Many leaders and employees see annual reviews as a necessary evil. Our software makes transparency and continual growth a part of the organizational culture.

Real-time progress reports and feedback
Employee aptitudes are explored and captured for use when new opportunities come available within the organization
Last quarter’s/year’s data at your fingertips so the focus quickly shifts from the past to the the future.
Define and track professional goals for every employee

RightPage™

Get people on the RightPage – FASTER! Have you ever experienced a brainstorming session that seems to go on forever, yet nothing is accomplished? Six Discipline’s RightPage helps your team get on the right page quickly and easily.

Poll your team with an important question
Together, create a list of possible solutions
Vote on devices and see the results immediately
Provides objectivity and increases stakeholder buy-in
RightPage makes your SWOT analysis simple and effective

Six Disciplines for Continuous Leadership Development - The LeadFirst Framework

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 14:28:00 GMT

Get More Than a Workshop. Get Continuous Leader Development.

Our processes, software, and leadership development program are all designed around a common set of best practices. Sixty-five of them packed into the six disciplines.

The workshops teach them.
The software applies them.
The coaching reinforces them.

No more attending a leadership workshop to realize a year later that nothing has changed.

Six Disciplines leader development program is different:

Leadership skills are applied to your business strategy not to theoretical case studies
Workgroups participate as a group so they learn together
Certified coaches help your teams stay on course throughout the year
Post workshop follow-up is built into weekly, quarterly, and annual check-ins
We benchmark proficiency before the workshop so you can measure progress
All training is done on-site so there is no travel cost

Our Approach to Workshops

Designed to take concepts from ‘head to heart,’ each workshop exposes your team to short bursts of competency principles and then deep-dive exercises in small table groups.

Led by your coach, a certified facilitator
Everyone takes home an in-depth workbook.
Every lesson begins with an engaging 10-minute principle video.
Every lesson is driven home with 40-minutes of discussion and small group exercise.
Post-event, every principle is reinforced by the software and coaching.

Discipline Workshops

Train your teams on the disciplines with a series of six workshops. Together, the six disciplines establish a management rhythm that aligns strategy, operations, and individual engagement around shared-purpose.

DI – Strategic Vision
DII – Strategic Change Management
DIII – Operational Alignment
DIV – Teamwork Driven Execution
DV – Continuous Improvement
DVI – Organization Development

Self-Leadership Workshop

Drive organizational maturity and business impact by introducing people at every level of your organization to core competencies.

Lead and manage yourself
Openness and honesty
Integrity and trustworthiness
Emotional intelligence
Customer focus
Multi-Rater feedback report from your co-workers
DISC Personality Assessment report

DISC Team Building Workshop

Help your teams start paying better attention to people’s behaviors, noticing their personality styles, and adapting to be more effective.

Noticing body language and speech patterns
Awareness of how your style comes across to others
Ability to adapt rather than simply react
How DISC applies to meetings, voicemail, delegating tasks, and email
23-page in depth DISC Full Profile Report for every participant

Functional Leadership Workshop

Equip your team leaders (e.g., divisions, departments) to effectively lead their group and keep them aligned with the wider mission of the organization.

Why they, as leaders, are the most important part
Build clear plans
Align goals and targets
Drive change and close gaps
Manage plan execution
One-on-One Coaching

Methodology - The LeadFirst Framework

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 14:14:00 GMT

Practical, research-based management framework for faith-friendly organizations

The question is not whether you have a method to your management. The question is whether it is effective.

Thousands of hours of research. More than 15 years of trial and error testing in business. The LeadFirst Framework includes the Six Disciplines, the first methodology to distill widespread business best practices into one cohesive whole.

The “best of the best” integrated into six step-by-step disciplines.

Together, the disciplines establish a management rhythm that aligns strategy, operations, and individual engagement around shared-purpose.

Discipline I: Strategic Vision

Collaborating to answer a series of important questions, the senior strategy team develops a shared vision to articulate the organization’s purpose and what it will excel at over the long term.

Discipline II: Strategic Change Management

The strategy team then builds a change roadmap with goal targets and vital change projects. The result is shared clarity used to engage the rest of the organization with the strategic vision.

Discipline III: Operational Alignment

The strategy team’s plan naturally creates a tension between current work and future changes. The strategy team must help workers understand changes and balance “running” and “changing” the business. Discipline III harmonizes operating plans and change initiatives.

Discipline IV: Teamwork Driven Execution

Changing conditions and better information mean plans must change. Using coaching, software, and regular team check-in’s, Discipline IV helps teams form communication habits to stay agile and keep focused on a their most important work

Discipline V: Continuous Improvement

Every day, team members see quality problems and inefficiencies. Discipline V puts in place an effective process to assure these ideas are prioritized and acted on quickly. This empowers everyone, all the time, to improve the business.

Discipline VI: Organization Improvement

A regular self-examination helps the organization analyze external factors like regulations, economy, technology, and competitors; gaps between current and best practices; current strategy execution; and the strengths of their people. Discipline VI prepares the organization for the next planning cycle and for future success.

Soft Skills Drive Employee Engagement, Hard Skills Drive Organizational Performance

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 13:32:00 GMT

From the new landmark research study recently released from Six Disciplines, and detailed in this 30-page research paper, “ 7 Key Findings About What Employees Say Drives Performance and Engagement “, survey results find that soft skills drive employee engagement, while hard skills drive organizational performance.

‘Soft’ skills refers to more intangible factors and behaviors, like attitude and relationship. ‘Hard’ skills is more about
identifiable systems and processes that individuals and teams use to get things done.

Interestingly, ‘Openness and Honesty’ appears on both soft and hard skill lists. They are the “oxygen” of both
communication and collaboration.

The sheer breadth of these two lists of soft and hard skills shows why frontline leadership is such a challenging role.

Why the Normal Definition of Leadership is Wrong

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 05:00:00 GMT

LeadFirst CEO Gary Harpst (formerly the CEO of Six Disciplines) explains why the normal definition of leadership is WRONG, and how you need to reset your sights on what it really means.

Let's talk about what leadership really means.

And by leadership, we mean that everyone in the organization needs to be challenged to both lead and to manage wealth. Let’s talk about the definition. Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. This is a quote from Peter Drucker, the father of modern management.

And we agree with his definition, but we would add a clarification that so many times people lapse into thinking leadership is something people at the top need to exert, management is something that people in the middle need to be good at, and people at the bottom need to be good at executing the work. And our view is that leadership and management need to be done by every single position in the organization.

There’s a knowing what the right thing to do aspect of every role, and there’s a doing it. Both are critical. And so, we see five types of leadership, five leadership roles. It does not mean it’s a position. It means it’s a role you serve in, and you can serve in more than one.

The first is strategic leadership , which focuses on long term, where does the organization need to go? It’s long-term time horizons. The next one is a functional leadership , where you have a group of people in a department who have expertise in sales, or engineering, or marketing, or IT, and the thing that unites them is they’re deep in knowledge on that particular topic. That’s a different kind of leadership.

A third kind of leadership is what we call project or change leadership . It’s the ability to bring about a cross-functional group of people together to solve some particular long-term strategic problem. And it takes a different kind of leadership, because these are people that don’t report to you, and they’re parts of different departments. Different functional capability is very different makeup.

And then the fourth kind of leadership is what we call process leadership . That’s the idea of cross-functional groups that have an ongoing responsibility, sort of like a committee. And last of all is probably the most important, is self-leadership . These are the capabilities every single person has to have to know how to be responsible and accountable, and do their job, to have the discipline to do their job.

The alternative to these kinds of leadership is bureaucracy. When you find an organization creating lots of rules, it’s because they don’t trust the behavior, the leadership capability of the people in the organization.