RLL 26: The Power of Partnerships--Two C's to Working Better Together

RLL 26

The Power of Partnerships: Two C’s of Working Better Together

I’m very excited to be working on the final editing and revisions for my book that’s due out this summer! Since I’m planning to self-publish, I’ve been learning as much about that process as I can, and this week I stumbled across a hidden jewel that applies not just in book writing but in all of leadership. Here it is (paraphrased from Chandler Bolt, best-selling author of six books, including Publish and Book Launch): ‘When writing a book, the purpose of working with an editor is to produce something that is better than you would have been able to create on your own.’

As my wife and I were walking our dogs yesterday, I told her about how I came across that piece of wisdom and how much it struck a chord with me. She agreed, and we discussed it at further length as we continued to walk, and the more we discussed it, the more examples I came across in my world. I want to share with you two key insights today that I gathered from Chandler’s wisdom: collaboration and compromise are necessary to the creation of great things, and that requires the humility to engage in both.

Key #1: The Necessity of COLLABORATION

All of us gathered together to celebrate our daughter's baptism at her grandfather's church.

The first key to understanding why partnerships are so powerful is in that sentence above, because (within reason) working with other people toward a common goal is going to produce better results than you would have achieved alone. We see this in education, where many classrooms today use the word collaboration to describe ways in which students work together on projects, in study groups, or to complete complex assignments. In these situations, students use their particular skill sets in combination with other students, and the results are of a higher quality than any individual student would have produced alone. Collaboration has become a bit of an education buzzword actually, both for students and for teachers, and the goal is always the same: raise the quality of work being done by combining the strengths (and thus also shoring up the weaknesses) of multiple people.

The same is true in family life, when both parents are working together for the good of the family. Now, please, don’t misunderstand me: I’m NOT bashing single parents. I know there are many, many single parents who do more and work harder and longer hours than they should have to, just for the sake of their children. I also know (and am thankful for) the many loving friends and family members who help single parents with logistical things, like picking kids up from school or running errands from time to time. And I believe all of these things further drive home my point: when there are two parents, a mother and father working together, that is when the family functions best. That’s why God designed it that way.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me give a little background into my own world: my parents divorced when I was in middle school, and we lived with my mom afterward. However, because of my parents’ love for us and their willingness to compromise, we also saw my father almost every day and we even still celebrated many holidays together. That is, my mom and dad continued to work together for the sake of their three children even though it was sometimes difficult and unusual. As an adult, I also am divorced and was a single parent for a time, as was my ex-wife. I am now remarried, as is my ex-wife, and the four adults involved all work together for the sake of our children. This is the type of collaboration that is necessary in our current divorce-heavy culture. And this leads to the second key here: having enough humility to compromise.

KEY #2: COMPROMISE requires humility

Butterscotch (on the left) and Bruiser (on the right) don't look too happy about being kept out of the garden!

Any time you work in close contact with another adult, there will have to be compromise. In working on the final revisions of my book, I’ve asked my wife and a few other people to go through and make editing suggestions. One of the people who did, a lady I call my second mom, emailed me with a list of over fifty different edits that needed to be made. And in her email, she made a joke about how I’ll probably never ask for her help again because of the number of mistakes. I was sure to email her back and let her know that I was actually very grateful to her for the suggestions that she made and that I took no offense at how many mistakes she found.

We saw this idea in my house again this weekend when my wife and I were rebuilding a garden in our backyard. We built a garden last weekend, but the quality was not very high, and it became obvious that we needed to rethink our plan. So she went and talked with her parents, and they came up with a much better design. As we built the garden beds, moved the dirt, and built a better fence, multiple small changes were necessary in order to accommodate the reality of our situation: our backyard was not as flat as we’d thought, and we have two large dogs who needed to be kept out of the beds. In the end, thanks to suggestions and hard work from my wife, her mom, and her dad, the final product is somewhat different and also much better than what we had originally done last week and what was intended to be done yesterday. This wouldn’t have been possible if we had stubbornly stuck to the plan drawn up on paper, instead of being willing to make a few changes.

Conclusion: working together (within reason) always produces better results than we would be able to achieve on our own! So, let us have the humility to compromise and collaborate with others so that, together, we can produce things of better quality and lasting value.

Action Step: ask someone for help with a project you’re working on, and be willing to implement at least one of their suggestions even if they’re radically different than what you had originally intended.

Don’t forget to be looking out for my upcoming book on leadership! In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed the first chapter that I emailed out to everyone last week. If you’d like to partner with me in sharing buzz about the book ahead of time, please let me know. Thanks, and God bless!

RLL 25: Leadership IS Action

Real Life Leading #25: Leadership IS Action

Better leadership means more doing.

“We’re thankful to be alive, and it’s been so encouraging to see so many people from all different backgrounds come together to help each other.” These words were from one of my former soccer coaches, regarding how his family’s home was destroyed during the recent tornado that swept through Jacksonville, Alabama. My wife and I went out to see if we could lend a hand, and we spent a few minutes also just chatting with Darren and his wife. While we were there I was struck by the implication of what he said and the powerful truth hidden inside: To lead is to act. It is to do. It is to serve. If you want to start being a better leader right now, this day, then the key is to stop thinking about it and start doing it. Go. Lead. Serve.

I have been as guilty as any person ever when it comes to “paralysis by analysis” in different leadership roles. That is, I study, I read, I plan, I study some more, and at some point I either become afraid of making a wrong decision or simply worried about which decision is the right one. The result of this is that instead of making a decision and sticking with it, I procrastinate and stall instead. The end product of all of this is what you would expect: nothing. Nothing happens, nothing gets done.

As leaders, we cannot afford to do nothing.  Whether in the midst of tragedy like what happened in Jacksonville recently, or in the day-to-day lives in our homes, we cannot afford to do nothing. We must be willing to act and do, even if that means making mistakes. In fact, to DO means that we WILL make mistakes, and we as leaders must be willing to accept that as part of the price of leadership. As Dr. Goh Keng Swee of Singapore said, “The only way to avoid making mistakes is not to do anything. And that, in the final analysis, will be the ultimate mistake.” As leaders, we must be willing to act, even though it means we will inevitably make mistakes.

This seems to be a problem especially true of younger leaders and young people in general, that they are less willing to do and to act. The good news is that there is also hope, because this young generation has more access to knowledge than anyone before. If that knowledge can be turned into action, the world will never be the same. Last summer I was speaking with one of the lifeguards at our local swimming pool while he was on his break. He was reading a book in preparation for an upcoming college class, and the book was called, “Just Do Something” by Kevin DeYoung. The book is about exhorting young people and especially young Christians to seek out God’s will by DOING, not by sitting around and waiting for God to write a message on a wall or speak through a burning bush.

The idea behind that book also applies in terms of leadership: if you want to learn how you can best lead and where you can best serve, the key is to go and start leading and serving, rather than sitting around just researching and thinking all the time. I say this to myself as much as to anyone else: we must go and DO. There will always be a time and place for research and contemplation. But we must also get out of our comfort zone and go and ACT.

The amazing students at JSU's International House! We had a great time that night, and now my wife and I are glad to be able to help them out in the aftermath of the recent tornado.

90 years ago, Herbert Hoover was elected US President during a period of prosperity following the introduction of the Dawes Plan that encouraged US investment in Europe to help rebuild the wartorn countries still suffering the after effects of World War I. Around a year after Hoover began his presidency, the US stock market crashed and the Great Depression began to set in. Hoover, like most political leaders of his time, did not believe it was the government’s role (or economically wise) to take drastic steps to aid in the recovery. After all, the thinking went, America had been through economic depressions before, and we had always recovered.

But this was worse, and the world was changing, and as a result, in the next election President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in a landslide due to his promise to offer Americans a “New Deal” economically. The key: government involvement in economics and social aid. As a historian, I can tell you that many of the programs FDR’s New Deal came up with were unsound, and many of them were struck down by the Supreme Court. Much of FDR’s policies, in fact, were things that are of debatable merit. Having said that, he is also the only person in history to be elected president four straight times (and he is the reason why a Constitutional amendment was passed making that same feat impossible today), and I believe a major reason for Americans’ continued faith in him is because he acted when others were afraid to.

I’m actually not a huge FDR apologist, but I do believe that his life is instructive in terms of showing the power of action versus inaction, and thus worthy of studying on many levels. I say something similar to my Bible classes every semester: if what we study and read and memorize and discuss and write essays about doesn’t change who you are, how you think, and what you DO, then we have wasted our time. We must be willing to act, and we should start today.

What have you been putting off that needs to get done? What leadership role have you been considering for longer than you should have? How can you serve those around you? None of us has to go very far to see situations in our world that need correcting, whether it’s huge issues we see on the national news or simply trash on the side of a road near our homes. The key to solving both issues is the same: ACT. I’m very proud of my younger daughter and my wife who spent time last summer picking up trash in our neighborhood, cleaning up an area that is known as a “dump spot” for random bits of trash. Did it change the climate or rescue thousands of animals? No. But it made a difference in our little pocket of the world, and everything you do has the same potential.

A final thought: as we were driving home from Jacksonville yesterday, my wife said, “This is like our own little ‘Starfish story.’” I asked her to explain, and she said, “Well, we weren’t able to help every single person whose homes and lives were damaged by the tornadoes. But we were able to make a difference in the lives of a few people.” [If you’re not familiar with the ‘Starfish story’ that she referenced you can check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower.]

The point is: even if we can’t change the whole world, we can make a difference where we are. Get started today, and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish!

Action plan: pick something that you’ve been putting off, and GO and ACT and SERVE! Then be sure to email me to let me know how it went!

RLL 24: Two Tees to Better Leadership

Real Life Leading 24: Two Tees to Better Leadership

Unfortunately, we have all seen it: a family undone, a business gone under, a previously thriving community or relationship split or broken due to poor decisions by the leadership. In many of these cases, the decisions were entirely avoidable. How? Here are two “-tys” (pronounced “tees”) to better leadership: humility and accountability. In the Bible, there are many different verses that talk about the corrupt nature of man since the Fall. I teach about it in my classroom as the starting point for our worldview discussion on the first day of every new semester.

So, how do we go about avoiding this creeping corruption in our hearts, homes, and communities? Humility and accountability. The first is inward and the second is outward. That is, humility is required because we must be willing to look within ourselves and admit that we, not just ‘other people,’ are prone to corruption and deceit and selfishness. Remember being a teenager and how hard we worked to hide things from our parents? Remember being an athlete and seeing just how much we could get away with before the referee called us for a foul?

The truth is, we’re programmed to want to do whatever benefits ourselves, even if it comes at the expense of others, and this is a double-edged sword. In some ways, it is good: we do need to take care of ourselves via eating and drinking, breathing and sleeping. But we often then take those things too far and try to provide ourselves with other benefits that can only be gotten by depriving others of something, and this is where the danger comes in.

My former youth pastor, soccer coach, and accountability partner, Erik.

I see this in my classroom when students copy each other’s homework. This may seem insignificant, but in my opinion it is very revealing: if I can’t trust students to do a simple task like homework without cheating, why should I trust them with larger tasks as they get older and leave school and enter college or the workforce? Students typically respond with, “It’s just homework, it’s not a big deal.” Well, yes and no. It may or may not be a huge deal right now, but it’s creating a habit, a lifestyle, of cutting corners, of not following the rules, and of shirking responsibility, and it is also depriving yourself of the opportunity to learn something. In the long run, it is the habit, not the single homework assignment, that is the big deal. Copying homework is a very small, yet common, example of deceit: turning in work that isn’t yours and getting a grade you didn’t earn. Again, it may seem small, but it’s not.

The first step, then, is to recognize that, as Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things.” We are all given to varying levels of self-serving deceit, and the first step in dealing with that is to admit it and recognize it in ourselves. So ask yourself: in what ways do you allow your own desires to override those of the people you are supposed to be serving? Remember how we define leadership here at Real Life Leading: confident humility (the leadership philosophy upon which all of this is based) is “others-centered, servant leadership; the art of positively influencing others to help them become better versions of themselves.” We can’t do that if we are serving ourselves, so let us be willing to admit that we often stumble, in order that we can take steps that will help us to stumble less often.

The second step in dealing with this issue is accountability, having a person or system in place by which our decisions are monitored and in which someone we love and trust can help us stay on the right track. How many of us know a person that seems to be utterly unaware of a particular personal habit or trait that anyone else sees within a few minutes of meeting them? We all have blind spots in the way we see ourselves and our choices, and thus it is imperative that we have a person or a system in place which can help us overcome those blind spots. We need accountability from those we love and trust if we are to truly lead others how we should. Accountability can be tricky because it forces us to be vulnerable and willing to admit we did something wrong; it is also necessary to make sure that you really do trust those holding you accountable to gently correct you, rather than simply gloating over every mistake you make.

So, to encourage and help yourself, find someone you trust and ask them to hold you accountable in your leadership. When you do something that serves yourself at the expense of others, they should have the right to call you on it, and you have to be willing to listen (this is where the humility comes in, over and over again)! If you are not willing to listen to someone else who is holding you accountable, your pride may be leading you astray, rather than allowing humility to bring you back to the right path of repentance and correction.

The difficult truth is that we are all prone to corruption, to selfishness, and to wanting things our own way. So we need to recognize that, admit it, and ask for God and those around us to help us not give in to those selfish impulses. Most of our giant mistakes didn’t start out that way; they started as small mistakes that grew into giant ones. Very rarely do we plan to make poor decisions; most often, we make them because we were self-serving, rather than focusing on others. So in order to stay on the right path of leadership, let us remember we need two things: the humility to admit that we don’t always make the best decisions and accountability, someone or something to call us out--hopefully with gentleness and respect--when we’re doing the wrong thing.

Action Plan: This week, ask one person you trust to hold you accountable in your area of leadership, to gentle correct you when they think that your decision-making isn’t what it necessarily should be.