Never assume someone is too busy

Developing, Leadership

  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

Leadership, Prioritizing

  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

Leadership, Teambuilding

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

Leadership, Prioritizing

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...

Not defining success by outcomes

Coaching, Leadership

In many cases, the success of an endeavor is measured by whether it accomplishes the intended outcomes. And if the outcomes are something under your control, that’s a perfectly fine measurement to use. Yet I’ve found that in ministry, we often tie our success to...

City Seminary: in New York City

Leadership, Outreach, Training

I recently met with some Vineyard leaders at City Seminary in Harlem. It was a great time as we talked about how to reach the diverse mosaic of neighborhoods in all the boroughs of NYC… with a multitude of missional communities and neighborhood churches. During one of...