Unlearning and relearning

Alvin Toffler- “The illiterate of the twenty first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” This is a great quote I ran across recently. I wonder how this concept relates to church leadership as it changes...

Catch before you pitch

One of the mistakes leaders frequently make is that they pitch their idea or solution before they’ve prepared people to be able to respond.  Leaders often will see ahead of others that there’s a problem or need. They pre-think the solution, then gather people into a...

Never assume someone is too busy

  One of the things I’ve observed is that leaders sometimes make decisions for other people by deciding in advance that the other person is already too busy for a particular new challenge. Therefore the leader doesn’t ask them. That’s presumptuous. By making that...

Pruning comes first

  Before you can begin delegating new tasks and developing new leaders, pruning must come first. The primary question of pruning is: What are you going to stop doing? If you don’t prune, you don’t have the bandwidth to develop others because you’re still carrying...

Why staff meetings are mostly a waste

Consider the average staff meeting: some catch up, coordinating of calendars, maybe a bit of support. Usually when you walk away, you haven’t accomplished much, and you’re generally you’re not in a place where the team had enough time for focused thinking about the...

Annual time budget

The questions have been asked before: What are the big rocks? The core contributions we’re supposed to be making? How do we allocate significant blocks of time to do those? The higher you are in leadership, the more important it is to look at your whole year. Most of...