For the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of assisting one of our pastors in facilitating soft skills modules for seminary students at our church through a NXTGEN Pastors Cohort. Recently, we covered the module “How to Run a Meeting”.
Attending poorly organized and managed meetings “weakens me”, and to be honest, it can be rare when we attend a well-run meeting. The bad news is that I’ve attended a lot of meetings at work, in professional organizations and church. Marcus Buckingham defines an activity that weakens us as one that drains us, bores us and is something on our calendars that we don’t look forward to. For many of us, meetings fall into that category. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Patrick Lencioni has said: “Bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations and good meetings are the origin of cohesion, clarity and communication. Your meetings are a barometer of everything else.” Continue reading
Category Archives: Articles ~ Work
Are You Working in Your “Strength Zone”?
I re-read John Maxwell’s 2008 book Leadership Gold: Lessons I’ve Learned from a Lifetime of Leading. You can read my review of the book here. One of my favorite chapters in the book is “Get in the Zone and Stay There”. The chapter is about working in your “strength zone”. Maxwell writes that the more you work in this zone, the more successful you will be.
I was introduced to the idea of discovering and working in your strength zone through the work of Marcus Buckingham. Primarily through the use of his 2007 book Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, I was able to see the difference (of team members and myself), that working in your strength zone can make. People are energized, highly engaged in their work, and look forward to coming to work each day if they are doing work in their strength zone. I appreciate that Maxwell states that good leaders help others find their strength zones and empower them to work in them. Continue reading
Do You Love Your Work?
In Marcus Buckingham’s latest book Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life, he tells us that to do anything great in your life, you will have to take seriously what you love and express it in some sort of productive way. I have enjoyed Buckingham’s work for a number of years, especially his work on strengths, and his 2007 book Go Put Your Strengths to work.
When Buckingham talks about strengths and weaknesses it may be a bit different from how you have always thought of them. For Buckingham, a strength is an activity that strengthens you, while a weakness is an activity that weakens you. It does not necessarily matter if the activity is something at which you are particularly good. There are just some activities that we love and some that we loathe. I worked with someone who was particularly good with budgets, and as a result was always asked to do our team’s budget work. But even though she was good at this activity, she hated it (loathed it), and it always weakened her. Do you have a similar example in your work – something you are particularly good at, but you hate doing? My wife Tammy is particularly good at accounting work, but she does not really like it, and it weakens her when she must do it. Continue reading
Leadership Attributes: Continuous Learning
In our series on leadership attributes, we now look at continuous learning. In the organization I worked in my entire career we used to say that “school was never out”, to indicate a life-long learning mentality. That’s an approach every leader should have, as good leaders never stop learning. Continue reading
The Importance of a Strong Work Ethic
As a leader, having team members with a strong work ethic was always extremely important to me. A strong work ethic can include a number of items, some of which are:
- Attitude
- Integrity
- Reliability
- Dedication
- Initiative
- Adaptability
- Responsibility
- Accountability
- Quality
- Discipline
What would you add to this list?
As a leader, I would rather have team members with an excellent work ethic than those who might have greater skills, but a poor work ethic. Continue reading
Leadership Attributes: Vision
In our series looking at leadership attributes, we now look at vision. Why do people follow a leader? Most likely it is because that leader has cast a compelling vision for making things better for them personally, and possibly also for the common good. A good leader convinces people that they will be able to bring the vision to fruition, and have successfully influenced others to follow them.
Leadership is about moving an organization (church, business, country, etc.) forward, improving them, and making things better. Harry Reeder in his book 3D Leadership: Defining, Developing and Deploying Christian Leaders Who Can Change the World, defines leadership as a leader influencing others to effectively achieve a defined mission together. John Maxwell famously goes even further and states that “Leadership is influence, nothing more and nothing less”. The way to influence others to follow you to is develop and communicate (or cast) a compelling vision. Continue reading
Book Launch: Uncommon Greatness by Mark Miller
Uncommon Greatness: Five Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership by Mark Miller. Matt Holt. 272 pages. 2024
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I’ve read and benefitted from all of Mark Miller’s books. In his new book Uncommon Greatness, based on research that included more than four thousand leaders from six countries, he explores the five Fundamentals leaders need to study, practice, develop, and pursue. After the introduction of each Fundamental, which includes examples of those who have demonstrated that Fundamental, there is an entire chapter devoted to best practices and strategies to help you apply what you just read about.
In defining Uncommon Greatness, as opposed to common greatness, the author tells us that Uncommon Greatness is evident by the impact the leader has on others. It releases untapped human potential allowing people and organizations to flourish, creating enduring value. The author challenges, equips and inspires leaders to never settle for mere common greatness again, and tells us that the pursuit of Uncommon Greatness will always encounter opposition. Continue reading
Leadership Attributes: Leading by Example
In our series on leadership attributes, we now look at leading by example. We might call a leader that consistently demonstrates this attribute a role model. They are the type of leaders that are worth following. These are the leaders that you want to work for and learn from. You would actively try to join their team if the opportunity arose. John Maxwell has said that these leaders know the way, go the way and show the way. I like how Dee Ann Turner describes this type of leader in her book Bet on Talent:
“When I was selecting (Chick fil-A franchisees, at the end of every interview, I always asked myself a question taught to me by a former boss: ‘Would I want my three children to work for this person?’ It’s a simple question that sums up my decision.” Continue reading
Leadership Lessons from Elon Musk
I read Walter Isaacson’s new book Elon Musk for two primary reasons. First, to see what we can learn about Musk’s leadership, and second, because I had enjoyed the author’s book Steve Jobs. At the time of the book’s release, Musk was amazingly running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, Twitter (now X), The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.AI. One of Musk’s primary goals is to colonize Mars, so humans can survive if and when Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change. He is also striving for “Full Self-Driving” vehicles, which he promises will revolutionize the world. Isaacson tells us that a core question about Musk is whether his bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that has made him successful.
The book discusses Musk having Asperger’s, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a person’s social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. Regarding Musk’s leadership, his innovation, vision, and results are to be admired – his people skills not so much. How much of the latter is due to his Asperger’s is hard to tell. In some ways, his leadership reminded me of that of Steve Jobs. Continue reading
Reflections on Vocational Regrets
I want to take a few minutes to address the subject of regrets again. Previously, I had written “How Should We Handle Our Regrets”. Recently, while reading John Maxwell’s latest book The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, I came across a section where he wrote about a study in which people were asked to respond to the following:
“When you look back on your experiences in life and think of those things that you regret, what would you say you regret more, those things that you did but wish you hadn’t, or those things that you didn’t do but wish you had?”
He goes on to state that of those who responded, 75% replied that they regretted those things that they didn’t do but wish that they had. It surprised me, but immediately what came to mind for me was not becoming a pastor, but instead having a career in the general marketplace. I say it surprised me because it isn’t something that I had really thought about. Continue reading