George Washington on Servant Leadership

By Stephen Blandino on January 26, 2012 in Leadership with 0 Comments

It’s very easy for leaders to wield power from a place of positional authority. And if we’re not careful, we’ll use that power to demean and demoralize people and destroy a spirit of teamwork. In his book, The Five Levels of Leadership, John Maxwell tells a great story from the life of George Washington that illustrates the power of servant leadership:

One day during the American Revolutionary War, George Washington rode up to a group of soldiers trying to raise a beam to a high position. The corporal who was overseeing the work kept shouting words of encouragement, but they couldn’t manage to do it. After watching their lack of success, Washington asked the corporal why he didn’t join in and help. The corporal replied quickly, “Do you realize that I am the corporal?” Washington very politely replied, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Corporal, I did.” Washington dismounted his horse and went to work with the soldiers until the beam was put into place. Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, “If you should need help again, call on Washington, your commander in chief, and I will come.”

Servant leadership is not just words we type on a corporate values statement. It is action. It is the humility to actually serve alongside the people who signed up to serve us. It’s the gratitude to serve people who sacrifice day in and day out. And it’s the generosity of spirit to serve those who have nothing to offer to us.

The next time you’re tempted to stay in your ivory tower and shout your encouragement from the comfort of your office chair, remember Washington. Dismount and serve.

 

The Goal in Life

By Stephen Blandino on January 24, 2012 in Personal Growth with 1 Comment

Television and media outlets do a pretty good job of glamorizing products and services that will make us look young…forever. And even though we know most of it’s hype, we actually believe it. If we’re not careful, our goal in life will be the eternal fountain of youth.

John Maxwell puts things in perspective when he writes, “The goal in life is not to live forever. The goal in life is to create something that does.” The facts are clear…one out of one dies. It’s the ultimate stat.

So what is the something that will live beyond you? What is the goal in your life that will serve as a contribution to our world long after you’re gone? Unless you determine the answer to that question early, you won’t live long enough to make it a reality. If you want to leave a legacy worth remembering when you die, you have to write a legacy worth recording while you’re alive.

 

Jesus on Coaching with Questions

By Stephen Blandino on January 23, 2012 in Leadership, Personal Growth with 0 Comments

Coaching is a powerful tool that helps leaders grow personally and professionally. Whereas mentoring is more about “pouring in” to a person, coaching is about “drawing out” what’s hidden deep inside of them. Coaches understand that the greatest skill in their coaching arsenal is question-asking. If they ask the right questions, they can help a client surface the solutions to some of their toughest issues.

Apparently Jesus understood this better than anyone. Author Ravi Zacharias observes that nine times out of ten, when Jesus is asked a question, He responds with a question. And author John Dear observes that in the Gospels, there are over 300 questions recorded by Jesus…307 to be exact.

So if you want to excel as a coach, stop just handing out answers to everyone’s questions. Starting asking questions that force people to think, reflect, and respond. The solutions people own the most are the ones they come up with. Your questions can help them come up with the best solutions to their biggest challenges.

Question: What are the best coaching questions you can ask?

Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul

By Stephen Blandino on January 23, 2012 in Personal Growth, Uncategorized with 0 Comments

Every leader’s soul shapes how he or she leads. The question is, “Is your soul healthy?” I recently read Lance Witt’s new book, Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul.

Witt addresses a host of topics from detoxing your soul, to sustaining a lifetime of health, to building healthy teams. He helps leaders to put life and ministry in perspective. He tackles the distractions that so often derail leaders and offers practical insight to cultivate a healthy interior life.

There are so many great takeaways from this book. I highly recommend you read it. Rather than doing a full review, I thought I would simply highlight some of my favorite quotes. Enjoy!

“A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what’s going on inside of himself or herself…lest the act of leaderhsip create more harm than good.” Quaker Author Parker Palmer

“When leaders neglect their interior life, they run the risk of prostituting the sacred gift of leadership.”

“Never lose sight of the fact that the box (your ministry) is not as valuable as the gift (Jesus). And the only reason the box exists is to deliver the gift. You have dedicated your life to the gift, not to the box.”

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”

“Looking back I realize there’s a correlation between my communion with God and my courage for God. The deeper my intimacy the greater my tenacity to stand courageously.”

“We have to ask ourselves, ‘Am I raelly trying to discern God’s will, or determine whether I want to do it?’” Erwin McManus

“In some ways, courage is a matter of trust. Do I trust that if I do what’s right, he will have my back?”

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless.” Mother Teresa

These are just a handful of great thoughts…there are so many more. If you find yourself feeling burned out, frazzled by ministry, or simply needing to refresh your soul, read this book. You won’t be disappointed.

 

Are You Known for “Serving” or “Being Served?”

By Stephen Blandino on January 22, 2012 in Leadership with 0 Comments

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to sit with a group of leaders where we discussed servanthood, question asking, and communication. Our guest was Todd Sinelli, author of One Simple Word. Todd made a statement in his presentation that challenged me (or perhaps I should say “convicted me”):

“When people think of you, do they think of someone who likes to serve or someone who wants to be served?”

This is such a simple yet profound statement. It’s so easy to get caught up in the rat race of productivity that we forget to serve the people who make so much of our achievement possible in the first place. Todd noted that Jesus’ most frequently asked question is, “What can I do for you?” (Matthew 20:32, Mark 10:36, 51, Luke 18:41). As leaders, our default is often to ask what others can do for us. But when we follow Jesus’ model–”What can I do for you?”– we exhibit the true heart of a servant.

I know it’s impossible to meet every need. I also know that leaders are pulled in every direction and that it’s humanly impossible to stop and answer every request for help. But if we’re not careful, we’ll become known for “being served” rather than serving others.

So what does serving look like for leaders? Max Depree once said, “The leader is the servant who removes the obstacles that prevent people from doing their jobs.”  What are the obstacles that you could help remove that would allow your teams and volunteers to experience greater satisfaction and fulfillment? And is there a person you could serve that can do nothing for you in return?

 

College Students’ Commitment to End Modern-Day Slavery

By Stephen Blandino on January 6, 2012 in Culture with 0 Comments

Louie Giglio’s Passion City Church just hosted the Passion 2012 Conference. Drawing 42,000 college students, this amazing event for 18-25 year olds is inspiring young leaders to make their lives count. And this generation is taking action. During the four-day conference, students gave $2.6 million to help end modern-day slavery. Take a look at their story.

But I’m Too Old to Learn How To…

By Stephen Blandino on January 4, 2012 in Personal Growth with 0 Comments

How long would you wait to learn how to read? If you were 92 years old, you would probably say, “What’s the point in learning now?” But that’s exactly what Jim Henry did. When he heard the story of George Dawson, the son of slaves, who learned to read at the age of 98, Jim Henry decided that he could too. Although he experienced a four-year setback after his wife’s death, he ultimately pushed himself to learn how to read.

Today Jim is 98 years old, and he’s doing more than reading…now he’s writing. He just published his first book, In a Fisherman’s Language. The book recounts stories from Jim’s life and sold more than 800 copies in its first two weeks. The response has been overwhelming with orders for his book coming from all over the world.

So what have you always wanted to do but have put off week after week, month after month, and year after year. Maybe it’s not too late to learn after all. If Jim Henry could learn to read in his nineties, what might you learn to do at your age?

 

Productive Paranoia: Lesson #3 From Jim Collins’ Great By Choice

By Stephen Blandino on January 3, 2012 in Leadership, Organizations with 0 Comments

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have written a book titled, Great By Choice in which they explore three behaviors that allow companies and organizations to thrive in chaotic and uncertain environments. I wrote about the first behavior, FANATIC DISCIPLINE, and the second behavior, EMPIRICAL CREATIVITY. In this post I’ll tackle the third core behavior employed by what they call “10x companies”: PRODUCTIVE PARANOIA.

Collins and Hansen make it clear: “The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive” (p. 91). The idea of Productive Paranoia is not for leaders to walk around scared, afraid to make decisions and suspiciously paranoid about their employees. Rather, the authors note that leaders in the 10x companies constantly ask “What If.” They state, “The 10x winners in our research always assumed that conditions can–and often do–unexpectedly change, violently and fast. They were hypersensitive to changing conditions, continually asking, ‘What if?’” (p. 91)

Collins and Hansen examine three dimensions of productive paranoia employed by 10x organizations:

1. Build Cash Reserves and Buffers - Companies rarely hoard cash but rather deploy it, working hard to take advantage of new opportunities. However, the 10x companies were careful to build cash reserves and create a buffer against unpredictable environments. They were careful to prepare for the worst before it happened. This was a pattern since the early days of the 10x companies. Collins and Hansen observe:

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Empirical Creativity: Lesson #2 from Jim Collins’ Great By Choice

By Stephen Blandino on January 2, 2012 in Leadership, Organizations with 0 Comments

In my last post, I shared lesson #1, FANATIC DISCIPLINE, from Jim Collins and Morten Hanson’s book, Great By Choice. It’s the first of three core behaviors that mark the 10x companies shared in Collins and Hanson’s latest research. The second behavior that allowed 10x companies to thrive during chaotic and uncertain environments is EMPIRICAL CREATIVITY.

There is a common perception in leadership that innovation is the key to success. Or, put more plainly, the more innovative you are, the more successful you’ll be. However, Collins and Hansen discovered a different reality:

“The evidence from our research does not support the premise that 10x companies will necessarily be more innovative than their less successful comparisons. And in some cases, such as Southwest Airlines versus PSA and Amgen versus Genentech, the 10x companies were less innovative than the comparison….we’re not saying that innovation is unimportant…We concluded that each environment has a level of ‘threshold innovation’ that you need to meet to be a contender in the game; some industries such as airlines, have a low threshold, whereas other industries, such as biotechnology, command a high threshold. Companies that fail even to meet the innovation threshold cannot win. But–and this surprised us–once you’re above the threshold, especially in a highly turbulent environment, being more innovative doesn’t seem to matter very much.” (p. 65, 67)

What’s essential is that creativity and discipline exist together. “Intel’s founders believed that innovation without discipline leads to disaster” (p. 69). In fact, Intel’s #1 core value isn’t innovation or creativity, it’s discipline. Collins and Hansen observe, “The great task, rarely achieved, is to blend creativity intensity with relentless discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it” (p. 70).

But the key is not just creativity…it’s EMPIRICAL CREATIVITY. In other words, 10x companies don’t innovate blindly, throwing huge amounts of resources at new ideas. They employ what Collins and Hansen call, “Bullets, Then Cannonballs.”

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Fanatic Discipline: Lesson #1 From Jim Collins’ Great By Choice

By Stephen Blandino on December 30, 2011 in Leadership, Organizations with 2 Comments

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen’s latest book, Great By Choice, is the result of a nine-year research project aimed at answering one question: “Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?” Our world is unstable, uncertain, and filled with unanswered what ifs. And while we cannot predict the future, as the authors observe, we can create it. And a handful of companies have done so exceptionally well.

Collins and Hansen identified what they call “10x Companies.” They write: “We set out to find companies that started from a position of vulnerability, rose to become great companies with spectacular performance, and did so in unstable environments characterized by big forces, out of their control, fast moving, uncertain, and potentially harmful” (p. 7).

Starting with 20,400 companies, their rigorous research identified seven 10x companies including Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker. These 10x companies beat their industry index by at least 10 times. And they did it during chaotic environments.

For example, in the chaotic airline environment from 1972 to 2002 filled with fuel shocks, deregulation, labor strife, air-traffic-control strikes, interest-rate spikes, hijackings (including 9-11), recessions, and multiple bankruptcies, Southwest Airlines had a stock return 63 times better than the general stock market. Had you invested $10,000 in Southwest Airlines on December 31, 1972, it would have been worth $12 million by the end of 2002.

How did the 10x companies achieve such astounding results in such uncertain environments? Collins and Hansen’s extensive research reveals three core behaviors that set the 10x companies apart from their comparison companies. Over the next three posts, I’ll explore each of these behaviors.

The first behavior is FANATIC DISCIPLINE. Discipline is “consistency of action” (p. 23). It’s not the same as regimentation, measurement, hierarchical obedience, or adherence to bureaucratic rules. “For a 10xer, the only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult” (p. 23).

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