Four Warning Signs You’re Approaching Burnout
The pressure, responsibilities, and pace placed on leaders can be immense. If leaders don’t care for themselves, burnout is inevitable. Sadly, many leaders struggle with reading the signs that they are approaching burnout. Despite all the advice, books, and sessions calling leaders to care for themselves, many leaders struggle with slowing down. Many fail to […]
Four Reasons to Have a “Stop Doing” List
We don’t drift toward greater efficiency and effectiveness. An organization’s natural drift is toward complexity and a fruitless fury of activity. It takes discipline and focus to continually move to greater effectiveness. For this reason, Jim Collins has encouraged leaders to develop a “stop doing” list. A “stop doing” list forces you to evaluate what […]
Four Leadership Personalities: What Color Are You?
With our leadership team, we use the Insights Discovery tool to help each other understand our unique personalities. The tool is validated and has proven helpful to our team in serving and communicating with one another. Our Auxano consulting team often uses the tool when consulting with churches. Though there are variations of each color […]
You Are Wasting Your Weekly Staff Meeting If…
Most people struggle with meetings, unless they are leading them—and they think those are awesome! The truth is that meetings are important. Without meetings, teams can move in a plethora of directions, communication gaps can grow, and execution can suffer. But weekly meetings, if not led well, can be an absolute waste of time. And […]
How to (Re)gain Your Leader’s Trust
If you attempt great things, you will experience moments of failure and disappointment. You will make mistakes. Your plans will not always go as they were mapped out to go. Life will mess with your best plans. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In some […]
Five Ways to Critique Without Crushing
As a leader, you owe it to those you lead to offer them feedback. Without feedback, development is hampered, as people don’t know what actions to repeat and what actions to tweak. Giving encouragement and accolades is not something leaders dread, but offering feedback that could be perceived as critical is something many leaders struggle […]
5 Questions on Creating an Organizational Culture
I recently sat down with Todd Adkins and Barnabas Piper to discuss leadership and reading for the “Five Questions Leadership Podcast.” You should check out the podcast, which has skyrocketed on iTunes, for some great content. Here are the five questions we discussed about organizational culture, with a few notes I jotted down after each […]
Getting Hired: 3 Lessons from My Wife
My wife, Kaye, is an awesome teacher. And I am not just saying that because she is my wife (objective evidence: she was “teacher of the year” when we lived in Cincinnati). She is super-encouraging, creative, and passionate about helping children learn and become who they were created to be. When we started having our […]
Amazon, Values, and the People of God
The recent New York Times article outlining the culture at Amazon created quite a stir, even prompting CEO Jeff Bezos to respond and declare the article to be inaccurate. The article read very similarly to the biography on Bezos and Amazon. In both the book and the article, the culture at Amazon is painted as […]
Four Warning Signs You Are Not Listening to Your Team
Wise leaders listen to the people they lead. They recognize they are finite in their knowledge and wisdom, don’t have all the answers, and benefit from the minds of those they serve alongside. It is foolish to not listen to those on your team. Not only do you lose the benefit of their collective wisdom […]