We strongly encourage all the entrepreneurs we work with to go through our LifePlan retreat. Getting clear on the life they are intended to live is a crucial first step in having the clarity and conviction it takes to get their business working for them. Once they have their ideal life in clear focus, doing the work it takes to re-engineer their business to support that life becomes a foregone conclusion…
The organizations you lead and the roles you play there, should support and fulfill the purpose for your life, not the other way around. More often than not, we see leaders completely unaware of their calling or purpose other than what their vocational role might dictate.
It is our contention that you are not only created for a particular purpose, but that your Creator desperately wants you to know what it is. The clues are written on your heart, have been evident throughout your life, and are fully embodied in the things that bring you greatest joy, deepest pain, and get you out of bed in the morning.
When I look at the life of Jesus, for instance, He seemed to only do and say what the Father told him. In fact, He routinely walked past the opportunity to do good, because He seemed to be called to other places and things. Often that thing was simply spending more time alone with the Father.
As a Christian, it is hard to look past the opportunity to do good. As a Type-A person who has spent a lot of time trying to do good things for God, I’ve had to come to the sobering reality that God would rather have me do a few things with Him than do a lot of good things apart from Him.
This is the time of year, when hope springs eternal. With 365 days (minus about 25 now), we can accomplish almost anything. But in the chaos of the tyranny of the urgent, even the best laid plans we’ve made begin to fade. Like sets of endless waves crashing on the beach, the day to day issues we face in our lives and enterprise, can begin to wear us down.
It is the beginning of a new year and every intentional leader I talk to is hoping that 2016 will be different than 2015. They’re seeing the new year as a grand opportunity to chart a course toward a different future. Believing that maybe this is the year where a sense of team emerges, their biggest challenges and frustrations get addressed, and they have a huge celebration at the end of the year to celebrate all they’ve accomplished.
I may have a hope in the coming Kingdom that my Albanian acquaintance, Mirjeta, didn’t appear to have, but she has a cornerstone experience that is essential to all of us who believe. We were born into a world at war and we will live all of our days there. The context of that reality in the story we live in, makes it all the more brilliant and easier to understand.
It is in living the transformed life you were uniquely created to live where God’s glory is most manifest. It is the catalyst for others in our world as we “unconsciously give others permission to the do the same”. I would say that a little stronger: Our living the life we were meant to live makes it incontrovertible for them to live any other life. It is highly disruptive to the status quo.
In both small business management and consulting work, sitting in front of a whiteboard (and sometimes a flip chart) is a familiar occurrence. A blank whiteboard holds the potential for endless possibility and the sobriety of painful truths. It should also allow clear room for our Father to speak. May it be that the power of interpretation in our lives be sourced more from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit than our own mind, will, or emotions.
Once we have walked through that doorway and eternity is procured; our enemy has lost that war. The battle lines, however, get redrawn. Our enemy now comes to steal, kill, and destroy the abundant life purchased for us. So that we don’t live in the victory, joy, and the fulfillment afforded all of us. In order that we might walk in the quiet desperation that wouldn’t attract any others to join us for that ultimate prize.
We hear lots of talk these days about the power of “storytelling”—and why it’s so critical for businesses and brands as we continue to rush forth in the digital age. But like so much of this other stuff we yap about in the marketing and branding realm, storytelling has always been important. It has been the essence of the greatest and most successful communicators since the beginning of man.
As the owner, do you also think of yourself as a coach? Embracing this part of your role - to help your people grow while your business does - is more important than ever before. Because even if they don't always say so, everyone on your team wants the same thing: to feel that their work mattered today, to you and to them.
No great strategy was born without careful thought. That’s why the process of planning a strategy itself is an important vehicle for setting priorities, making investment decisions, and laying out growth plans. But for many companies, the activity has devolved into either an overexplained budget or just bad amateur theater – lots of costumes in the form of analysis, charts, and presentations – but with very little meaningful substance that can be translated into action.
Help them make real-world connections, and make it fruitful for the mentor, too.
Managing employees is not easy, and for the most part, human resource policies in large organizations are designed to simplify things. But sometimes, in their tendency to focus on risks and avoid worse-case abuses, these policies serve to discourage supervisors from doing what makes sense. By allowing workers more control over the “work” part of their lives, direct supervisors can help them achieve the balance they need to meet both work and family commitments.
Why is customer experience so difficult to get right? The main hurdle is translating boardroom vision into action at the front line. That’s even more important in an era when optimizing individual customer touchpoints is no longer enough —when you have to focus on holistic customer journeys, instead.
Employee mentoring starts with accepting the real responsibility that lies in having authority and influence over someone else’s paycheck, not to mention the rest of their day. That’s why it’s one of the most essential components in our coaching curriculum.
If you want to build a culture of accountability in your team, you need to set the example and be more accountable yourself. Get started with these four simple tips.
You have to integrate the behaviors you want into your team’s daily routines in order to normalize those behaviors within the organization’s culture. If feedback is something that happens only at unusual times (such as a performance review or when something’s gone wrong), it’ll never really be an organic part of the organizational culture. It has to show up in everyday life — on a walk down the hallway, at the end of a meeting, over a cup of coffee.
The start of a new year is always a great time to think about what we want to see happen in the coming year, and to resolve to pursue those objectives more actively. If you have been feeling torn between resolutions to exercise more and to be a better working parent or spouse, then this should come as great news: You can do both.
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It is the opportunity to not just exist, but to have a life worth living. To be a change agent for the lives of others. It is what lies at the end of the rainbow. It is what we were created for. It is our mantle and heritage. It is the secret and sometimes desperate heart cry of all mankind. It is the world’s one great hope. But rather than requiting that deep desire, we seek to anesthetize it with all manner of ridiculousness. We are consumed with less-wild lovers when the one great Lover of our Souls, and His great mission here on earth, await.
Sometimes we are blowing it and the Lord does choose to not come to our rescue at times, but we also have an enemy set against the beloved of God. Our opposer has come to steal, kill, and destroy those that would claim citizenship in the Kingdom of God. Sometimes the frustration and confusion we find is rooted there. A good interpretive grid of spiritual warfare not only helps you interpret the situation, but will help lead you to resolution.
“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.” Donald Miller
One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite authors. Donald seems to clearly understand that once you get a clear mission set in front of you, all other things seem to fade into relative insignificance. His Storyline conferences inspire individuals to write a better story with their lives. The things you once worried about might even be found laughable in contrast to one really true and significant thing.
While this is obviously true for individual lives, it is no less true for organizations. A collaborative of individuals, organized around a transcendent mission, can find momentum, clarity, and purpose in focusing on one great imperative. Clear and obvious examples can be found in sports or the military, moving toward championships or a targeted mission.
The critically acclaimed television show “Mad Men” is set in New York City. According to the show, the term “mad men” was created by the advertising executives themselves from their offices located on Madison Avenue. The series takes place in the early sixties when Americans still largely believed everything they heard and saw, especially through the major media channels.
The series walks us through the cultural shift from taking most things at face value to the questioning of nearly everything in the late 60′s. Political scandal, uncertainty of war, and changing social mores, all played into a general sense of innocence lost. America was now a long way from “your word is your bond” and only doing business with people you knew on a handshake.
One of the great things about having older kids is the luxury of both time and expendable income they enjoy. It affords them the luxury of cultural relevancy. (I think that thing about being “connected” in that informational technology sort of way probably has something to do with that as well.) When it comes to movies or music, they seem to be perpetually informed of the latest, greatest, and the “not to be missed”.
My wife and I took in the latest recommendation from the kids by catching a showing of “About Time” on a recent date night. The trailer reveals the most important and determining plot element; the males of a family are given the privilege of traveling back in time. The young protagonist uses his newly awakened ability to procure the girl of his dreams. It was a story that was clever enough to hold my attention and infused with enough heart and sentimentality to hold my wife’s as well.
We started a 4-day weekend on Thursday with a group of men by having them think about some fundamental questions: Who am I?, Who is God?, & What does He think of me?
Knowing the true answers to these three very simple questions will change the balance of a man’s life. If every man knew, with a deep kind of heart knowledge of God, that…
…the world would be a radically different place. Families, neighborhoods, churches, companies, and even cities, would transform. The need for psychiatrists, counselors, mood stabilizers, and every other manner we use to anesthetize that deep sense that we and everything else in the world is not okay, would diminish. The necessity of so much that we institutionally provide for, would no longer exist.
One of the core convictions around our company is that it is imperative to have healthy leaders if you are going to have healthy organizations. Given that one of our core mentors, Patrick Lencioni, believes that organizational health is the single greatest determinant of long-term success, trumping all other business proficiencies, practices, or disciplines, having healthy leaders is a pretty big deal.
I am currently preparing for a “boot camp” that starts this Thursday. ”Boot camp” is the name we use for a 3 day men’s retreat where we deeply intersect with a man through the masculine journey. It is a powerful redefining experience that allows many men the chance to break through the snare of the stories they’ve lived and find unprecedented clarity and healing. It takes a tremendous amount of courage and conviction to make this trek.
There is that moment for every leader. When hope and expectation becomes reality. When time and energy invested seems to have taken root. When all you have encouraged, desired, and hoped for, is reflected back to you. It is fleeting and feels far too infrequent, but it is part of the essential air that leaders breathe.
Every parent has felt that great sense of satisfaction…the realization that our awkward attempts at leading a family weren’t an exercise in futility. Despite so much evidence to the contrary (and the determined whispers of our enemy), that maybe the child set in front of us was going to turn out okay. Reading one of my children’s blogs and seeing the quote above was one of those moments.
My friend Mitch writes a lot about the abundance of God’s Kingdom versus he economy of scarcity that dictates our Western culture. When we all generatively govern out of the time, talents, and treasures we have all been given, we become stewards instead of leaders. We become maximizers of life for the wellbeing of all people. This is not only the privilege, but the mandate for all Christian leaders in their context.
Last week, we assembled a collection of folks around our “Purpose Project” idea. They consisted of a consultant from the HR field, a “retired” sage with decades of experience, our current HR and administration managers, Scott, and I. We used personal story, quotes, passages, and some multimedia, to paint a vision of what intending God’s purposes in the lives of all we govern (employ or lead in other contexts) might look like.
We saw them invigorated around God’s vision for providing stewardship over team members (employees) at the highest level. We saw them grab the reins, form a subcommittee, circle part of the project, and take the ball to start running.
