Faith and Work Quotes:

When work is your identity, if you are successful it goes to your head, if you are a failure it goes to your heart.  Tim Keller

At some point every one of us confronts the question: How do I find and fulfill the central purpose of my life? Os Guinness

• Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. Vince Lombardi

• Leadership is like coaching. Recruit great players. Train. Motivate. Keep developing. Help them have their best game. Celebrate wins. Ron Edmondson

• As modern people we are all on a search for significance. We desire to make a difference. We long to leave a legacy. Os Guinness

• In 1962 there were zero articles on self-esteem in the education journals. By 1992 there were 2,500 a year. David Brooks

• In leadership, the quality of your success is often directly proportional to the quality of your investment in others. Ron Edmondson

• A wise man will cultivate a servant’s spirit, for that particular attribute attracts people like no other. Andy Andrews

• What I have learned about mentoring is that when you help others you learn a lot too. Be intentional about spending time with others. Ken Blanchard

• I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance. Seth Godin.

• What are you busy doing? As a leader, you should be busy serving others. Mark Miller

• Success is never owned, it’s rented and rent is due every day. Coach K

• Are you becoming the kind of person you want to be? Are you growing into the kind of person you admire? Dr. Alan Zimmerman

• To be successful, leaders have to fight (often enormous) pressure and expectations and discover how to effectively use the word no. Ron Edmondson.

Faith and Work News:

• Best Books on Faith and Work. The Connecting Sunday Worship & Monday Work blog writes “The past few decades, numerous books have been written on integrating faith and work. We’ve created an annotated list of the best books on theology of work, calling and vocation, business and ethics, practical application, prayer, leadership and engaging culture.”
• The Massive Upside to Determining Destination First, Methods Second. In this podcast, Andy Andrews answers a listener question on how to guide your thinking when beginning with the very best end result in mind.
• Maximize Vacation ROI. The Harvard Business Review offers four suggestions on how to reduce stress on your next vacation.”
• Poise. In this “Minute from Maxwell”, John Maxwell looks at the word poise.
• Is Your Work Meaningless? C Patton writes “We first need to realize that our work, to the extent that it points others to God and a relationship with His Son, can have eternal meaning AND create eternal reward! Once we realize this, we can begin working through our jobs and businesses to have impact on people for eternity.”
• 4 Root Idols That Corrupt Leaders. Eric Geiger writes “Because leaders set the pace for others, idols in a leader’s heart harm others too. Leaders are wise to heed the apostle John’s encouragement: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”
• Change or Chance – What’s Your Approach? Dr. Alan Zimmerman shares two tips to ensure successful change.
• An Example Mission, Vision, and Core Values. C. Patton shares an example of God-centered mission, vision and core values from his organization.
• Yes, You Can Talk About Christ Without Being A Jerk in the Workplace. Bill Peel responds to John Shore’s post entitled “10 Reasons It’s Wrong to Evangelize in the Workplace.”
• Why Is It so Important to Befriend and Build Relationships with Non-Believers at Work? Jessica Schaeffer writes “Regardless of how often we are in the vicinity of those who need Christ, it is imperative that we as believers make intentional efforts to befriend non-believers.”
• How an Ex-Convict Learned to Worship Through His Work. Joseph Sunde introduces us to Alfonso. Watch this short video “Work is Worship” in which Alfonso tells his story.
• 13 Signs of Leadership Fatigue. Chuck Lawless writes “Leadership is sometimes wearisome – so wearisome that we come close to giving up. Over the years, I’ve watched leaders slide into defeat, and I’ve seen some of these common signs of trouble.”
• Make it Happen. Nick Vujicic’s 5-part video series will make you think twice about what may be holding you back from living life and accomplishing your dream.
• Tom Nelson to Lead New Pastors Network. Nelson, author of Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work, was announced last week as the President of Made to Flourish (MTF), a new network that seeks to help pastors close the gap between Sunday worship and Monday work “in order to empower them to lead churches that produce human flourishing for the common good.”

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

 The Advantage Book Club

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business by Patrick Lencioni

I’m reading this book with a few colleagues at work. This time we look at Behavior 2: Mastering Conflict.

• Contrary to popular wisdom and behavior, conflict is not a bad thing for a team. In fact, the fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems.
• Of course, the kind of conflict I’m referring to here is not the nasty kind that centers around people or personalities. Rather, it is what I call productive ideological conflict, the willingness to disagree, even passionately when necessary, around important issues and decisions that must be made. But this can only happen when there is trust.
• When team members trust one another, when they know that everyone on the team is capable of admitting when they don’t have the right answer, and when they’re willing to acknowledge when someone else’s idea is better than theirs, the fear of conflict and the discomfort it entails is greatly diminished. When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer. It is not only okay but desirable. Conflict without trust, however, is politics, an attempt to manipulate others in order to win an argument regardless of the truth.
• But that’s not to say that even productive conflict isn’t a little uncomfortable.
• Overcoming the tendency to run from discomfort is one of the most important requirements for any leadership team—in fact, for any leader.
• Avoiding conflict creates problems even beyond boring meetings and poorly vetted decisions, as bad as those things are. When leadership team members avoid discomfort among themselves, they only transfer it in far greater quantities to larger groups of people throughout the organization they’re supposed to be serving. In essence, they leave it to others below them to try to resolve issues that really must be addressed at the top. This contributes to employee angst and job misery as much as anything else in organizational life.
• As critical as conflict is, it’s important to understand that different people, different families, and different cultures participate in conflict in different ways.
• When people fail to be honest with one another about an issue they disagree on, their disagreement around that issue festers and ferments over time until it transforms into frustration around that person.
• When it comes to the range of different conflict dynamics in an organization, I’ve found there is a continuum of sorts. At one end of that continuum is no conflict at all. I call this artificial harmony, because it is marked by a lot of false smiling and disingenuous agreement around just about everything, at least publicly. At the other end of the continuum is relentless, nasty, and destructive conflict, with people constantly at one another’s throats. As you move away from the extreme of artificial harmony, you encounter more and more constructive conflict. Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes is the demarcation line where good, constructive conflict crosses over into the destructive kind.
• The optimal place to be on this continuum is just to the left of the demarcation line (the Ideal Conflict Point). That would be the point where a team is engaged in all the constructive conflict they could possibly have, but never stepping over the line into destructive territory.
• Nowhere does this tendency toward artificial harmony show itself more than in mission-driven nonprofit organizations, most notably churches. People who work in those organizations tend to have a misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another. What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.
• When leadership team members fail to disagree around issues, not only are they increasing the likelihood of losing respect for one another and encountering destructive conflict later when people start griping in the hallways, they’re also making bad decisions and letting down the people they’re supposed to be serving. And they do this all in the name of being “nice.”
• Even when teams understand the importance of conflict, it is frequently difficult to get them to engage in it.
• One of the best ways for leaders to raise the level of healthy conflict on a team is by mining for conflict during meetings. This happens when they suspect that unearthed disagreement is lurking in the room and gently demand that people come clean.
• By looking for and exposing potential and even subtle disagreements that have not come to the surface, team leaders—and, heck, team members can do it too—avoid the destructive hallway conversations that inevitably result when people are reluctant to engage in direct, productive debate.
• Another tool for increasing conflict is something I refer to as real-time permission. When a leader sees her people engaging in disagreement during a meeting, even over something relatively innocuous, she should do something that may seem counterintuitive but is remarkably helpful: interrupt. That’s right. Just as people are beginning to challenge one another, she should stop them for a moment to remind them that what they are doing is good.
• What it will do is give people the permission they need to overcome their guilt—and they’ll definitely be fighting off feelings of guilt—and continue to engage in healthy but uncomfortable conflict without unnecessary and distracting tension.
• It’s important to remember that the reluctance to engage in conflict is not always a problem of conflict per se. In many cases, and perhaps in most of them, the real problem goes back to a lack of trust. Remember that when team members aren’t comfortable being vulnerable, they aren’t going to feel comfortable or safe engaging in conflict. If that’s the case, then no amount of training or discussion around conflict is going to bring it about. Trust must be established if real conflict is to occur.

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 19: The Leader and the Media:

• But it really doesn’t matter which kind of leader you are—if you are a leader, the media is part of your world.
• Never apologize for having a message and for wanting that message to receive the widest possible coverage and exposure. That is why you are leading. You are the steward of beliefs and convictions that your organization represents and to which you have committed your life. Your organization exists to serve the mission defined by those beliefs, and you have been charged to lead. So lead, and never apologize for leading.
• Here is one of the keys to all communication: People simply tune out the things that don’t interest them.
• If you send out a press release, it had better be interesting. Don’t expect an assignment editor to waste time on the boring or the ordinary.
• If you want to get your message out through an op-ed column on the editorial pages, you had better have a good, clear point to make about an issue of very current concern, and your column had better be written well.
• The best way to learn what kinds of news items make their way into print and what kind of columns get printed on the opinion pages is to read those same papers and magazines regularly, carefully, and strategically. There is no substitute for familiarity.
• On the radio waves, you have one central asset—your voice.
• You have a message, and you cannot ignore television. In terms of impact, nothing yet exceeds the nationally broadcast networks and cable news channels.
• If you want to get your message out on these platforms, learn to face a camera with confidence, learn to immediately lead with something interesting, learn to answer the interviewer’s questions, and learn how to be warm and unflappable on the outside, even when you are frustrated and agitated on the inside. The camera reads emotions more quickly than the microphone carries words.
• Leaders need to determine in advance what to do when a reporter calls, because you never know when one will.

1. First, be honest.
2. Second, be direct.
3. Third, realize that you can say no.
4. Fourth, respect the reporter or program host.
5. Fifth, realize that reporters do not control the final form of a printed news story, and that radio and television reporters are also subject to editing.
6. Sixth, realize that some media appearances don’t go as you expect, and some don’t even go.
7. Seventh, know that everyone at every stage in this process operates out of his or her own worldview.
8. Eighth, building on what was just stated, know that explaining what you believe is the very mission that brought you to this position of leadership.

• Boring Work: Good for the Soul. Bradley Nassif writes “Our daily life is nothing less than a sacred journey into the being of God. Our most important spiritual work, then, is located wherever we find ourselves. That is the place where we till the soil of our jobs, and where the soil of our jobs tills us. It’s where God meets us, transfigures us, and leads us from glory to glory. Our workplace is our monastery.”
• Building an Army. Bob Chapman writes about the Conscious Capitalism 2015 event he recently spoke at with Simon Sinek (Start with Why, Leaders Eat Last) and others in Chicago.
• Your Job is Not Your Savior. Listen to this episode of “Ask Pastor John” featuring Bruce Hindmarsh.
• Are You Doing the Right Things? Mark Miller writes “Below are some behaviors for you to consider. As you read the list, see if you can guess which are the nice things, and which ones are the right things.”
• Dorothy Sayers: Clamor to be Engaged in Work Worth Doing. Matt Perman shares some quotes from Dorothy Sayers’ essay “Why Work”.
• Is it What You Do or Who You Are? How Your Identity Changes Your Work. Dan Cumberland writes “It’s an internal switch. It’s a choice to put on a new identity that is deeply connected to who you are. It’s the choice to let yourself be something that you’ve felt yourself longing to become. It’s allowing yourself to be identified as having a particular work in the world.”
• Workers and Laborers or Kings and Priests? John Bolt writes “To think of our work as the work of a royal priest ennobles it, giving work a glory that comes from seeing it sub specie aeternitatis (from the vantage point of eternity). Seeing our work from the perspective of eternity also leads us to confront the purely utilitarian understanding of work. It confronts the notion that work should be done just so we can be free—for weekends, for holidays, for vacations, for leisure—that our work is a necessary means to an end.”
• Going on Vocation. Watch the trailer for this new video series from the Christian History Institute. Looks like it could be good for as faith and work small group study or an Adult Sunday School class.
• Your Job is Not a Vocation. Malcom B. Yarnall III writes “To put it boldly, as Luther himself might: It is more important to find out who you are in Christ than it is to find out what you are to do in the world. But once you are in Christ, do what you are doing for his glory!”
• The Secret to Living a Remarkable Life. In this podcast Jeff Goin and his co-host discuss whether or not there is a specific process to finding your calling and how we should look at trials, difficulties and obstacles along the way — not as things that prevent us from our purpose but actually help us get there. They also talk about how your calling isn’t something you plan. It’s really what happens when the plan goes horribly wrong.
• How to Be Productive According to the Bible. Colin Smith writes “Your work and productivity matter to God and are profoundly important in his eyes. This goes for every job you may have. If you’re mopping floors for a living, you are mopping floors for the glory of God. Working productively allows you to honor God by maximizing the use of your time and to do more good works for his glory. This is what Christian productivity is all about.”
• You Have Just Enough Time. Jon Bloom writes “Busyness is moral laziness, God has given us just enough time, every moment is a sacrament — these are massively important truths I need to soak in.”
• Rest? Who Has Time for Rest?! Heather Day writes “Jesus clearly needed spiritual rest and solitude with His Father. How can we possibly think we need anything less?”

SUCCESS AND FAILURE:

• 8 Lies Christians Believe about Success. Emily T. Wierenga writes “I have spent my whole life trying to be successful. I thought it was what we were supposed to do. Worse than that, I thought success was the mark of a blessed Christian.”
• How Do You Become a Successful Failure? John Maxwell writes “Anyone pursuing a goal of value will make mistakes and wrong decisions. So the key is to expect failure, to prepare for it, to be ready to turn it into a lesson and a stepping-stone to success. There is such a thing as a successful failure. These are some of the traits of such a person.”
• Is it Better to Try and Fail or Not Try at All? Dan Miller writes “My theory is that you will be a brighter, better person for trying something big – even if you “fail.”

LEADERSHIP:

• Why Leaders Fail. Dan Rockwell shares 32 reasons why leaders fail.
• Top 20 Leadership Podcasts I Listen To. Brad Lomenick shares his list.
• The Essence of Excellent Leadership. Dave Kraft writes “Leadership is about people who: 1) Possess certain characteristics; 2) Are heading toward a specific destination; 3) Have the ability to enlist people to join them on the journey.”
• Balancing Love and Honesty as a Leader of Leaders. Ed Stetzer writes “I have found that one of the most important parts of my ministry is helping people who are in the wrong place find the right place, and that requires honesty in a loving way.”
• 4 Leadership Traits the World Needs. Eric Geiger writes “The world is longing for leaders who are filled with integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. In essence, the research says that people benefit from leadership that is Christian in nature.”
• Atheism Growing in the Workplace. If it seems like more and more people in your workplace disdain faith in God, it’s not your imagination.
• 8 Transformational Characteristics All Leaders Share. TJ Trent writes “leaders must transform so their organizations may continue to thrive in dynamic conditions.”

FAITH AND WORK QUOTES:

• God has an interest in all our nonreligious life. All our business transactions are his concern. God is not so distant or even ‘religious’ that he only cares about what happens at church and during devotions. Every square inch of this earth is his and every minute of our lives is a loan from his breath. He is much more secular than we often think. John Piper
• If you love what you are pursuing, things like rejection and setbacks will not hinder you in your pursuit. Coach K
• If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
• A leader makes certain that his followers know they are working with him not for him.” John Wooden
• Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping them up. Coach K
• How can you be a positive influence for someone in your life? Andy Andrews
• Don’t wait for the perfect set of conditions before you do something. If you know it’s the right thing to do … just do it. Dr. Alan Zimmerman

 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 13: The Leader and Power:

• The essence of leadership is motivating and influencing followers to get the right things done—putting conviction into corporate action. This requires the exercise of power.
• Faithful leaders understand that while they will influence the organization with their personality, they must never allow personality to be the defining mark of leadership.
• There are two dangers here. The first is the well-known “cult of personality,” in which the persona of the leader becomes the hallmark of the organization. The other danger is that the leader will rely on personality as a substitute for conviction or competence.
• Personality is important, but it will fall flat when conviction wanes or competence is lacking. In addition to the power of personality, power also comes from the office the leader holds.
• A leader unwilling to exercise the responsibility of office has no business accepting that stewardship.
• Leaders must keep one truth constantly in focus—the office you hold exists because the organization depends on it.
• Power of office works in two ways. First, it allows leaders to define reality to outside constituencies. The one who holds the office of leadership gets to speak for the organization. Second, the power of office allows the leader to force change within the organization.
• Any leader unwilling to force change is destined for ineffectiveness. The faithful leader uses this power sparingly, but uses it nonetheless.
• The truth is that people within an organization feel most secure when the leader leads.
• The most sobering thought I often have in the course of a day is that I will make decisions that will impact people’s lives.
• If the leader’s main task is to lead by conviction, then the convictions must be more central and prominent than the leader’s personality. If the personality looms larger than the convictions, alarms should go off, and they had better be heeded.
• The Christian leader cannot succumb to the temptations of ostentation and the glorification of power.
• The Christian leader will serve by leading and lead by serving, knowing that the power of office and leadership is there to be used, but to be used toward the right ends and in the right manner.
• Power and responsibility must come accountability. A leader without accountability is an accident waiting to happen.
• The stewardship of power is one of the greatest moral challenges any leader will ever face.

The Advantage Book Club

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni. Jossey-Bass. 240 pages. 2012

Patrick Lencioni is one of my favorite business authors. His books The Advantage and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team are among my favorites. I recently started reading and discussing The Advantage with two colleagues at work. I’m sharing key learnings from the book here.

Some good resources around organizational health can be found here: http://www.tablegroup.com/oh

This week we look at “The Case for Organizational Health”:

• The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it. That is the premise of this book—not to mention my career—and I am utterly convinced that it is true.
• In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health (which I’ll be defining shortly) because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it. In other words, they think it’s beneath them.
• The health of an organization provides the context for strategy, finance, marketing, technology, and everything else that happens within it, which is why it is the single greatest factor determining an organization’s success. More than talent. More than knowledge. More than innovation.
• But before leaders can tap into the power of organizational health, they must humble themselves enough to overcome the three biases that prevent them from embracing it. The Sophistication Bias: Organizational health is so simple and accessible that many leaders have a hard time seeing it as a real opportunity for meaningful advantage.
• The Adrenaline Bias: Becoming a healthy organization takes a little time. Unfortunately, many of the leaders I’ve worked with suffer from a chronic case of adrenaline addiction, seemingly hooked on the daily rush of activity and firefighting within their organizations. It’s as though they’re afraid to slow down and deal with issues that are critical but don’t seem particularly urgent.
• The Quantification Bias: The benefits of becoming a healthy organization, as powerful as they are, are difficult to accurately quantify.
• There is yet another reason that might prevent them from tapping into the power of organizational health, and that is what provoked me to write this book: it has never been presented as a simple, integrated, and practical discipline.
• I am convinced that once organizational health is properly understood and placed into the right context, it will surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage. Really.
• At its core, organizational health is about integrity, but not in the ethical or moral way that integrity is defined so often today. An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.
• Any organization that really wants to maximize its success must come to embody two basic qualities: it must be smart, and it must be healthy.
• Smart organizations are good at those classic fundamentals of business—subjects like strategy, marketing, finance, and technology—which I consider to be decision sciences.
• A good way to recognize health is to look for the signs that indicate an organization has it. These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.
• Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health.
• The advantages to be found in the classic areas of business—finance, marketing, strategy—in spite of all the attention they receive, are incremental and fleeting.
• The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, expertise, and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.
• After two decades of working with CEOs and their teams of senior executives, I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.
• An organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. That’s because people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes.
• The healthier an organization is, the more of its intelligence it is able to tap into and use. Most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them. But the healthy ones tap into almost all of it.
• First, organizational health just isn’t very sexy, so journalists aren’t terribly excited to talk or write about it.
• Another reason that organizational health has been overlooked by academia and the media has to do with the difficulty of measuring its impact.
• Trying to identify exactly how much a company’s health affects its bottom line is next to impossible; there are just too many variables to isolate it from the myriad of other factors.
• Finally, organizational health gets overlooked because the elements that make it up don’t seem to be anything new. And in many ways, they aren’t. The basic components—leadership, teamwork, culture, strategy, meetings—have been a subject of discussion within academia for a long time. The problem is that we’ve been looking at those elements in isolated, discreet, and theoretical ways instead of as an integrated, practical discipline.
• The financial cost of having an unhealthy organization is undeniable: wasted resources and time, decreased productivity, increased employee turnover, and customer attrition. The money an organization loses as a result of these problems, and the money it has to spend to recover from them, is staggering. And that’s only the beginning of the problem.
• Aside from the obvious impact this has within the organization, there is a larger social cost. People who work in unhealthy organizations eventually come to see work as drudgery. They view success as being unlikely or, even worse, out of their control. This leads to a diminished sense of hope and lower self-esteem, which leaks beyond the walls of the companies where they work, into their families where it often contributes to deep personal problems, the effects of which may be felt for years.
• Turning an unhealthy company into a healthy one will not only create a massive competitive advantage and improved bottom line, it will also make a real difference in the lives of the people who work there. And for the leaders who spearhead those efforts, it will be one of the most meaningful and rewarding endeavors they will ever pursue.
• DISCIPLINE 1: BUILD A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM. An organization simply cannot be healthy if the people who are chartered with running it are not behaviorally cohesive in five fundamental ways. In any kind of organization, from a corporation to a department within that corporation, from a small, entrepreneurial company to a church or a school, dysfunction and lack of cohesion at the top inevitably lead to a lack of health throughout.
• DISCIPLINE 2: CREATE CLARITY. In addition to being behaviorally cohesive, the leadership team of a healthy organization must be intellectually aligned and committed to the same answers to six simple but critical questions.
• DISCIPLINE 3: OVERCOMMUNICATE CLARITY. Once a leadership team has established behavioral cohesion and created clarity around the answers to those questions, it must then communicate those answers to employees clearly, repeatedly, enthusiastically, and repeatedly (that’s not a typo). When it comes to reinforcing clarity, there is no such thing as too much communication.
• DISCIPLINE 4: REINFORCE CLARITY. Finally, in order for an organization to remain healthy over time, its leaders must establish a few critical, nonbureaucratic systems to reinforce clarity in every process that involves people. Every policy, every program, every activity should be designed to remind employees what is really most important.