• Your Job Is God’s Assignment. Here’s an excerpt from John Piper’s article “Your Job as Ministry”.
• Work with Your Hands, Not with Your Worship. Marshall Segal of Desiring God looks at three reasons why we are all tempted to worship the work of our hands.
• EntreLeadership Podcast. Check out recent programs featuring John Maxwell, Dr. Henry Cloud and Patrick Lencioni.
• Leading Yourself. Dave Kraft shares a few areas, along with questions to consider, that are consistent with Scripture as you consider leading yourself.
• 10 Keys to a Great Team. Brad Lomenick writes “There are lots of qualities that make up a great team, but thought I would point out ten that seem to be consistently evident across the board.”
• 6 Ways to Assure That You Accomplish Nothing. This article from the Millennial Leaders states “We all want our life to count. For Christians, we want to accomplish the purpose that God has for us. Here are 6 ways to be sure you accomplish nothing.”
• Good Words on Communication. John Maxwell shares some of his favorite quotes on communications.
• Churches are Creating Job-Specific Resources. Should Yours? A recent Barna Group study found that while 86% of pastors reported preaching sermons that addressed work in the past year, over 70% of Christians still cannot envision how the work they do serves God. One approach that churches are taking is to develop vocation-specific resources for their congregations.
• View from the Office of a College President. Jen Pollock Michel interviews Philip Ryken, the President of Wheaton College since 2010.
• John Maxwell on Laziness. In this “Minute with Maxwell” John Maxwell talks about laziness.
• Give Your Stress a Big Kick in the You-Know-What. Dr. Alan Zimmerman writes “We all get the same 24 hours every day. But only a few emotionally intelligent people get to live those hours to the fullest. The rest of the people, whose plates may be just as full, live those hours under the ever-gnawing presence of stress and eventually burnout. What should you do?”
• Top 50 Leadership Books to Read. Brad Lomenick offers his list of top leadership books to read, 15 of which I’ve read.
• Why We Struggle to Connect Faith and Work. This article is adapted from a talk by Katherine Leary Alsdorf at the 2014 Faith@Work Summit. She is co-author with Tim Keller of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.
• Owning the Spotlight: How to Handle a Leadership Role Where People Look Up to You. Andy Andrews answers a listener question on how to handle the pressure of people watching and looking up to you.
•  Three Roads to Joy in Bi-vocational Ministry. I enjoyed this article from Matt Heerema, a pastor who also runs a small business. He offers three avenues to joy in bi-vocational ministry.
• More Videos from the Faith@Work Summit. Some more great talks from the Faith@Work Summit have now been posted. (Here’s the first set , here’s the second set, here’s the third set, and here’s the fourth set.) Enjoy!
• Transfiguration in Cultural Engagement. Abraham Cho of Redeemer Presbyterian Church writes “At Redeemer, we think it is of utmost importance that we help people develop a robust theological understanding of their work. We often frame this in terms of “transforming” or “redeeming” culture through our work. But, could thinking in terms of the “transfiguration” yield new insight?” :
• New Research Shows More Pastors Are Preaching about Faith and Work. How Are People in the Pews Being Impacted by This Change? Greg Ayers writes “In addition to commissioning churchgoers, interviewing them, and publicly praying for them, what else can be done to help people see that their work matters to God”.
• Does Manual Labor Have a Place in the Faith and Work Discussion? Joe Carter writes “We must ensure there’s a place for manual work and toilsome labor in the faith and work conversation. We’re failing in our efforts if we aren’t showing people how through such labor they are participating in God’s own work.”
• 5 Myths of Great Workplaces. Ron Friedman of the Harvard Business Review writes “What differentiates great workplaces is not the number of extravagant perks. It’s the extent to which they satisfy their employees’ emotional needs and develop working conditions that help people produce their best work.”
•  Managing Tension. In this month’s Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast Andy explores how to maintain a healthy level of tension in your organization.

Faith and Work Book Clubs – Won’t you read along with us?

The Conviction to Lead Book Club

The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters by Albert Mohler

We’re reading this excellent book from Albert Mohler, one of the best that I’ve read on leadership. It is broken down into 25 relatively short chapters. Won’t you read along with us? This week we look at Chapter 7 – Leaders Are Thinkers:

• You can be certain that the quality of your actions will never exceed the quality of your thinking.
• Careful attention to thinking is what first sets the leader apart.
• Like everyone else, leaders operate out of capacities such as instinct, intuition, and habit. But what sets the leader apart is the commitment to bring these very things under the control of active intellect and right patterns of thinking.
• We lead out of authenticity and the open acknowledgment that we are doing what all leaders must do—face the facts, lean into the truth, apply the right principles, acknowledge the alternatives, and, finally, make the right decision. In other words, the leader leads by conviction.
• The conscious denial of reality is a central danger of leadership, and the leader must defend against this temptation.
• The leader must be unafraid of data and facts, and he must surround himself with people who know the information he needs and will give it to him.
• The Christian leader is, by definition, committed to living in truth. This is one of the most distinctive and essential elements of Christian leadership, for it is foundational to the Christian life.
• The Christian leader leans into truth, knowing that the truth always matters and that nothing less than the truth will do.
• The leader is committed to the development of a comprehensive worldview based in truth and to the consistent application of truth to decision making. This is the essence of convictional leadership and the faithful operation of convictional intelligence.
• If the right decision were always clear to everyone, we would not need leaders. Leaders must know the way the organization should be directed and the course that must be taken, but they also need the skill to motivate others to follow that lead.
• The most effective leaders make the right decisions over and over again and develop credibility even as they gain experience.
• Some people seem to have little or no confidence in their decision-making ability. Are they missing a decision-making gene? No, they lack the courage of their convictions, the discipline of critical thinking, or the confidence of steady leadership.
• The leader who faces the facts, leans into truth, applies the right principles, and acknowledges the alternatives will then be ready to make the decision—the right decision.