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.

RLL 23: Delegation and Humility

RLL 23: Delegation and Humility

As a teacher, my single least favorite task is grading essays, and as a soccer coach my least favorite aspect of the job is keeping up with jerseys and shorts. I love teaching history: the subject matter fascinates me, the students are bundles of potential, and I have my own coffee pot in my classroom. What could be better? I also love coaching soccer: the smell of grass, the beauty of the game, the hard work and life lessons; all of those things are wonderful. But sometimes I feel overwhelmed, and that has been especially true this year.

Most people, whether teenagers in high school, students in college, members of the workforce (to say nothing of a parent or head of a company), know the feeling I’m talking about: too much to do, too little time; no matter what you get done, it feels like the list keeps getting longer; a creeping sense that there’s no possible way to get everything done as well as it needs to be done. So, what’s the solution?

This was from a few years back: our program's first-ever playoff victory!

In the past couple of years, I have been consciously working on improving my own ability to perform one of the most crucial aspects of leadership: delegation. Delegation is the solution. In learning how to do this better, I have discovered a few things about it that I wanted to share with you. Whether at home, in my classroom, in my soccer program, or in a business, delegation is a key component of leadership, and here are a few ways it will benefit not just you but your entire group.

First, delegation is a perfect example of what Confident Humility is all about. Remember, Confident Humility is about using your gifts and talents in the service of others, and leadership is the art of positively influencing those around you to help them become better versions of themselves. Delegation is perhaps the simplest way of putting those ideas into action in a practical way. In order to delegate, a leader must be confident enough not to feel threatened by another person performing a crucial role or task, and he or she must also be humble enough to admit that another person might be better suited to that task, whatever it may be.

Second, delegation is crucial if you as the leader are to be the best you can be: that is, by assigning or giving tasks to others on your team, you free yourself up to focus more on whatever you are best at. I once heard delegation described this way: sure, the president or CEO could help clean his office or make the coffee, and sometimes that’s appropriate; but if the CEO spends all of his or her time doing that, who is making the crucial business decisions? By delegating, you free yourself up to focus on the most importants tasks of your role, rather than spending time and energy on something that another person could have done just as well.

Third, delegation allows the various members of your team or group to also showcase their strengths. If you as a leader have done your job and hired people who are complementary to you in terms of their various skill sets, then there are members of your team who are better than you are different things. Recognize that, and use that to the benefit of the whole team or group.

Let me give you an example.Within my soccer program, both of my assistants (in addition to being good at coaching) are extraordinary player-managers, forming great relationships with the kids. One of them loves the administrative work: forming rosters, keeping track of various stats, and taking are of uniform issues. My other assistant loves focusing on the defensive aspects of the game. When it comes time to work on defending, or if I’m having a difficult time with a player or group of players, or when it’s time to do the various administrative work, then instead of me trying to fix all these issues at once, I can allow each of my assistants to focus on these tasks, especially since they are likely to perform them better than I would anyway! This has a variety of benefits: the players receive more direct attention, the assistant coaches get the satisfaction of doing crucial work with the team, and they grow in confidence due to being trusted with those roles.

This is us last year: our second straight trip to the state championship game! We couldn't have done it without everyone involved: supporters, parents, players, and coaches!

Allowing the other members of your team to get involved has one additional benefit as well, and this is something that all leaders should be thinking about regularly: it is helping train them to be the next set of leaders. In my case, by delegating various tasks to my assistants, it helps them prepare to become head coaches. When I give certain tasks in my classroom to the students, trusting them to take care of certain things, it helps them develop confidence and skill sets they’ll use in the future. By delegating certain chores at home, I’m helping my children learn what it will be like when they are adults and live on their own.

Lastly, I’ve learned that delegation is not something to be done simply after I’m feeling overwhelmed. Rather, it’s much better to begin delegating much earlier, before things get too crazy. I encourage you to look around and see what tasks your leadership team can help you perform and how much that would benefit the whole group. Then, be sure to trust your team to perform them; guide them, but don’t micromanage. Remember, part of the exercise is to learn to better trust others, and this will also help them grow in confidence.

Action Step: this week, ask your leadership team what tasks or type of tasks they truly enjoy, and then see how you can delegate certain jobs that will play to their various strengths. Be sure to email me and let me know how it goes!