Focused Leadership

One of the great sins of leadership today - across the board - is a lack of focus on what is most important with the resulting diffusion of energy, resources and results.

There is a natural human tendency away from focused living which requires more work, greater discipline and better thinking. As Jim Collins says, good is the enemy of great. Great requires focus. Good requires less.

My observation is that team members take their cues regarding focus from their leader. The less focused the leader, the less focused others in the organization. The more focused the leader, the more disciplined and focused those who work on their team. This puts even more responsibility on ministry leaders to model intentional, disciplined and focused lives.

The central practice of focused life and work is one we we often do not like: Discipline. Focus requires discipline and discipline implies bringing our priorities, time, energy and choices into line with what we have been tasked to do.

Lack of focus is really about laziness - the opposite of discipline. We don't like that word either but it describes the root cause of a lack of focus. One can do good work and be relatively lazy. One cannot do great work without discipline.

There are two areas where those who lead need to be constantly vigilant about their focus.

The first is missional focus. It is very easy to forget that our ministry must always be about fulfilling our mission. Mission drift is where we unconsciously drift away from the mission of the organization and it happens all the time.

Focused leaders think about mission every single day and they constantly remind their team that everything they do is both about their mission and must contribute to the mission. The less a leader thinks and talks mission, the less their team will live it.

It is very easy for leaders to move from missional to organizational. To focus on organizational issues instead of missional issues. Why? It is easier. It requires less work and less thinking. Focused leaders do not allow their missional focus to slip into organizational focus.

The second discipline is that of focused choices. The most precious commodity we have is our time - we can never get it back. The choices we make with how we spend our time reveal the level of discipline of our lives.

Truly focused leaders make choices about their activities based on whether that activity is critical in achieving their mission and they often say no to the nice in order to spend time on the critical.

The choices and activities of many leaders are not consistent with a missional focus. They do a lot of stuff, but it is often not the stuff that is most critical to lead them or their team to missional effectiveness. Again it is easy to default to organizational activity rather than the activity that will lead to mission fulfillment.

Focused leaders are always evaluating their choices and activities against the mission of the organization and exercise great personal discipline to focus on what is truly important in the fulfillment of mission.

How focused are you on the mission?

How disciplined are you in your choices and activity?

Are these two in alignment?

Barriers to good and timely decision making

It is the same in ministry or business. There are a a predictable number of barriers that staff can face in making even routine decisions that disempower them, and make it difficult to make timely and good decisions. Wise leaders do all that they can to remove these barriers for the sake of their staff and the organization as a whole.

1. Not having the organizational clarity needed to know on what basis I can make a decision. Because organizational clarity defines who we are, where we are going and the non-negotiables, it gives me a framework with which to make good decisions. In its absence I can only guess.

2. Not having clear boundaries from my leader as to what I can decide and what needs upward clearance. This is a leadership issue but when there is not clarity on "decision making authority" staff must by definition either ask permission or forgiveness.

3. A culture of blame when something goes wrong. In such cultures, staff members are reluctant to make decisions for fear that if it goes wrong, they will take the heat. So the ubiquitous CYA attitude that pervades many organizations to their detriment.

4. A culture of control that insists that all decisions are cleared by the senior leader or his/her designate. Control comes from a lack of trust in those who work for you to make their own good decisions. It becomes a huge bottleneck to forward progress and disempowers good staff. This will always plateau an organization because it is not a scaleable process.

5. Bureaucracy that requires decisions to be made multiple times at multiple levels. It is the difference between General Motors and Toyota in terms of how they operated over the years. Bureaucracy is a means of trying to control in the absence of clarity by getting multiple parties and levels involved even in routine decision making.

This is all about what it means to empower others. They will often do things differently than we would but if it gets us to the same destination, what is the difference. The greater clarity your organization has the easier it is for good staff to make decisions based on that common clarity. And to avoid decisions that would violate the culture and ethos of the organization. 

Removing barriers to good and timely decisions is a critical factor in a growing organization. If you want to know that barriers there actually are, just ask your staff. We might learn something.

Paying greater attention to gifting when it comes to those we put into church leadership

We ought to pay closer attention to the difference between leadership and caring gifts. For instance, many congregations have a group tasked primarily with leadership issues (usually the senior board or council of a church). Another board, committee or group meets individual needs of members in times of illness, difficulty or crisis.

The primary gifts needed to fulfill the leadership function are fundamentally different from those needed to fulfill a caring function. People in crisis need caregivers who are high on mercy, understanding and patience. What they don't need (or want) are type A leaders who want to give them the five steps out of their crisis in the next 48 hours, if they would only get their act together!

Those with strong leadership gifts are often not great at "feeling your pain." When enmeshed in caring ministries, many leadership-gifted individuals want to get on with the stuff of vision, strategy and decision-making.

At the same time, many decisions that leaders make are going to cause someone or some group in the church to be unhappy. High mercy individuals often find conflict difficult, and leadership has its share of conflict (good and bad kinds). I have encountered high mercy types in senior leadership roles who feel totally out of their comfort zone. They serve because they were asked, but it is a painful and frustrating experience for them.

Perhaps one of the reasons so many churches in the United States are at a plateau or in decline is that we have not asked enough leaders to lead and have paid little attention to where we deploy individuals in relation to their God-given gift set. My experience is that nominating committees (or whoever are the gatekeepers for those asked to serve) receive little or no training in the whole process of giftedness. Yet they are the recruiters of people into key ministry roles.

In the marketplace, huge energy and money is expended to get the right people into the right spot based on abilities and wiring. In the church, far too little attention is paid to this, even though the New Testament clearly articulates the principle.

Strong leadership boards are made up of individuals who have leadership or administrative gifts within their gift set, are comfortable in their leadership role, are people of proven influence, and are willing to carry out all the New Testament-given functions of senior church leaders.

Thanking those who mentored and influenced you

None of us became who we without the influence of some significant individuals in our lives. All of us stand on the shoulders of others whether parents, mentors, influencers, spouses and friends. Each of them was a gift to us and should be considered precious to us because God used them in our lives to make us better than we would have been without them.

Have you ever thanked those who helped mold you? Each of them gave us a great gift. I can look to parents, close friends, colleagues, a key seminary professor, Christian leaders who engaged with me when I was young, even those I know from afar through their writing but who had a profound influence. None of us are "self made." We bear the lessons, influence and maturity of others whose  faith and life have rubbed off on us. We are all better because of it.

In our fast paced and self centered world, don't forget to thank those who helped shape you. It is easy to take them for granted but also sad. They were faithful in some way that made us who we are. Lets thank God for them and lets thank them. When we get to heaven we will realize how much others helped shape us. All of us stand on the shoulders of others. A grateful heart recognizes their influence and takes the time to thank them. I for one am very thankful for those who invested in me.

The high wire of faith

Contributing Writer

Mary Ann Addington

When our son Steven was in 5th grade I was asked to be a parent volunteer on a 3 day class trip to Wolfridge Environmental Learning Center in northeast Minnesota. One of the activities was a high ropes course. Starting from a walk across a balance beam sort of structure, the course builds up to a thirty foot high Burma Bridge and ends in a zip line back to the ground.

The Burma Bridge was the most intimidating because one walks across on a single cable. Even being hooked into a cable above your head and cables at your side, you still have to step out onto the single line. After I coaxed and encouraged about ten 5th graders to go over the Burma Bridge, one youngster turned to me and said, “Mrs. Addington! Now it is your turn!”

This was not what I had signed up for, but I could hardly chicken out after telling all the kids that they could do it. As I was on the platform trying to figure out if there was any way out of stepping onto the cable, my fan club stood below. “Mrs. Addington, we know you can do it!” “Come on, Mrs. Addington, you helped us do it!”

With trepidation I take my first step out the cable holds and the line above is still hooked in. About half way across I even breathed enough to notice that above the trees I could see Lake Superior off in the distance. And to the delight of my fan club below I actually made it across the cable and back to terra firma.

Living by faith when life comes undone is much like walking the Bermuda Bridge. The cable is hard to walk, it is a long way down, and every step forward requires balance and the faith that the cable will hold and that the safety ropes can be trusted.

The first steps are the hardest but there comes a place where we actually start to breathe again. While we would never willingly sign up for it, we learn that we can take the step of faith, put our weight on the line and that the cable will hold the safety ropes hold.

Living on the wire of faith means sticking to the confidence that God is in control and can be trusted even when all evidence is to the contrary. During T.J.’s initial illness, I would be irritated with people who would say over and over how hard this must have been on his dad because he was a doctor and understood how sick Tim was.

I would think, “This is true, but give me some credit!” I am an RN with ER and ICU experience and had done of lot of research on MRSA and ARDS. I knew that this was really, really bad. There were numbers on his monitor that were worse than I had ever seen- except on someone who was dying. I could tell by the body language of the nursing and medical staff that they thought I was in lala land when I spoke of discharge planning.

Every night I would go to sleep at night listening to Lincoln Brewster’s “Another Hallelujah” and had to tell God that this would be my response to whatever happened the next day. Every day was like taking another step of faith on the high ropes, choosing to trust God.

I had to train myself to move from fear to trust countless times during the long ICU ordeal. “Fear not” is the most repeated command in all of Scripture because it is so easy to live in fear rather than in faith. It is a choice we make and it is really about whether we focus on our undoneness or on God.

My worst day in T.J.’s first ordeal in the ICU was when I received a call from his sister telling me to get to his room right away because his stats were terrible. I rushed back to the hospital from a nearby restaurant to find T.J.’s heart beating at 240 beats per minute. This was on top of his massive pneumonia, ARDS, septic shock and a failed mitral valve in his heart. His heart was desperately trying to compensate for the mitral valve failure and get oxygen to his organs.

The nurses hustled me out of the room so they could try and shock his heart back into rhythm. I went to a nearby room where I could see what was happening overwhelmed with fear. This was the worst it could be. Humanly speaking, T.J.’s heart would just give up. They could not do surgery to mend the mitral valve because he would not survive the surgery. It was God’s intervention or death. And that intervention had to be quick.

Sitting in that alcove watching the medical personnel around T.J.’s bed I wrestled with fear and faith in a way I had never done before. God had told me that it would be close but he would make it. Could I really believe that in the face of what I was watching? Was that rational? Could God really be trusted? Had I heard him right? This was one of the cases when the medical personnel would not even make eye contact with me because they knew the inevitable outcome. Indescribably fear gripped my whole body. I felt like I was about to go into a free fall from the high wire and there were no safety lines attached.

I chose faith over fear as hard as that was watching what I was watching. The staff were not able to shock T.J.’s heart back into rhythm and we knew that unless the mitral valve was healed there was no way he would survive. We put an urgent call for a day of prayer and fasting specifically asking for a miracle to heal the mitral valve. Across the globe those watching the blog (over 10,000 individual users) stormed the gates of heaven boldly asking for an outright miracle. Within that twenty four hour period it started to slowly heal! He was not out of the woods by any means but God was true to the words He had given me.

To this day, when T.J. visits his cardiologist he shakes his head and says, “How did you dodge that bullet?” They were certain that he would need surgery to repair the valve when he was well enough to have it – if he survived. On his most recent visit, the cardiologist told T.J. he did not need to come back.

One of the hard things is that God does not always do what we wish He would do. His ways are sovereign and we will not always understand His plans or purposes for our lives. But we always have the choice of focusing on Him or focusing on our circumstances. Our circumstances are unpredictable but His is always faithful. It is the choice we make between fear and faith when life comes undone.

God loves it when we choose to trust him! And it is as much as a choice as when we put our full weight on the cable and begin that hard walk. Trusting does not mean that we know how everything will turn out, but that we live in the confidence that God loves us like we love our kids and that He is in control. Trusting God brings peace, even when that does not seem logical.

Isaiah 26:3 has been up on my bathroom mirror since December of 2007:
You will keep in perfect peace

him whose mind is steadfast,

because he trusts in you.

It is not about me! It is about keeping my mind and emotions focused on who God is. It is not about whether I have done all the right things, or even that I am trusting the right way. It is about keeping our minds steadfast on who God said He is and what He has promised to do which includes peace when all evidence says that cannot happen. Life on the high ropes is not about us- it is all about God, His grace, and our simple trust in Him. It’s putting our weight on the wire one step at a time.

Older leaders and their attitudes toward younger leaders

Recently I asked a successful pastor in his fifties who pastors a large church in the Midwest what leadership lessons he had learned recently. His answer was interesting and I think relevant in many situations. He said, "I am learning the need to allow younger leaders to lead, to not get in their way, and to give them the freedom to do things the way they want to do them."

I believe his answer applies to churches, missions and other ministries. It is often difficult for leaders in their latter years to release leaders in their young years because younger leaders will often approach ministry and strategy differently than those of us in our fifties (me included).

He made an interesting observation: "It is easy to try to control these young leaders but it is counterproductive." I agree. When we bring young leaders onto our teams we must release them as we release all others to use their gifts in line with their wiring to accomplish what we have asked them to accomplish. They will challenge our methodology and paradigms and they will help us become all that we can be.

Key to releasing others is a secure leader who is not threatened by other good people who may well have ideas that are better than theirs. That takes a very non defensive attitude and humility. But again, it is not about us but about God and the building of his kingdom.

If you are a leader in your fifties and sixties and have younger leaders on your staff you may want to have a candid dialogue with your younger leaders and find out how free they feel, how empowered they feel. Often we don't realize that we are not truly releasing others fully. The more we do, the stronger our ministries will be - and the better leaders we are.

A vision, a plan and a leader

Want to get something done? Three things are needed every time! A vision (what do we want to accomplish?), a plan (how are we going to do it?) and a leader (who will lead the way?). It is pretty simple but all too often good intentions fall prey to the lack of one of these three.

Think of the local church where there is no end of ministry dreams and possibilities. Three simple questions need to be asked. What is the vision of this ministry and how does it fit with the vision of the church? The desire to do something is not a vision. Vision has to do with what we want to accomplish and why.

What is your plan is question two. Vision is not a substitute for a workable, reasonable, plan for how the vision is going to be carried out. The world has many "visionaries" who have no plan and generally they don't produce much.

Who is going to lead the way? No endeavor works without a leader who will take the responsibility to ensure that what needs to happen happens and will give coordination and encouragement to the group.

It is simple but then again most effective strategies are.