Home

I think that one of the biggest obstacles that can prevent a vision from becoming a reality is ambiguity.  If you are vague and unclear as a leader it will frustrate your forward progress and those around you in the process. It will also frustrate you.  If you continually find yourself let down by your team because they haven’t executed what you envisioned, perhaps the fault lies with you. For if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle?(1 Corinthians 14:8)   You might be surprised to know that what’s missing in your organization and holding you back might not be resources, people, or talent but clarity.

Trust me, your team wants to know where they stand, how they are doing, what protocols are rigid,  and what the primary objective is. People crave clarity.  They are looking for someone to rise up with a clarion call that they can follow into battle. So find your voice and be crystal clear.

An adage I think about often is, “don’t communicate so you’ll be understood, communicate so that it’s impossible to be misunderstood.”

In order to see your dreams become a reality there are going to be times where you are going to have to flat-out sprint. Burn the candle a little bit more than you should. Strain your muscles and your mind. Run yourself ragged. Come right to the edge of delirium.

I know, I know. This goes against all wise counsel. Every sermon you have ever heard about the sabbath; and all the leadership blogs you have read about how if you don’t guard your day off you don’t love Jesus are probably coming to your mind about now.

I totally agree with all of that, as a rule. There is nothing spiritual or profitable about being a workaholic. Psalm 127:2 straight up says we should not run in the red but should rest. I get it. None of us keep the world spinning, or the sun rising. We don’t need to stay up all-night-every-night working.

But I have met people who are so dogmatic and almost Pharisaical (you know I get 6 points for dropping that word) about their day off not being disrupted…not ever, and are rigid about the rule. They will walk out the door at 5pm and not one minute afterwards, whether the job is done or not. Their day off is sacred and their schedule is set in stone, no matter what is going on; they will only expend the agreed-upon amount of energy and no more. That’s fine and the desire to not burnout is a good one. But it’s not realistic to think that greatness can be achieved without extraordinary effort being called for at times.

Nothing sweet is ever achieved without sweat. Occasionally exceptional times will come along where you have to go above and beyond the call of duty. There will be short seasons that require extra effort to punch through to a next level God is calling you to, to complete a project, or go through a door that has been opened. And you will need to kick it into high gear and give it all you’ve got.

The good news is that a rule is still a rule even if there are exceptions. The trick is not allowing that to become the new normal. If it does, it’s not an exception anymore, it’s the rule and if you keep it up for long something will inevitably suffer–your marriage, your kids, or your sanity.

What I have learned (through trial and error) is to see these seasons coming before I’m in the midst of them and to prayerfully accept them, with my wife’s blessing. If you do that, no one is blindsided and you can plan a recovery as a part of the process. So if a unique project is going to have you pulling 13 hour work days for a week and a half you can take three days off at the end and not just plunge back into reality and grind it out.

It helps me to think of these unique times as interval training. Yes, it might be crazy right now but this is a sprint, it’s supposed to be above the normal craziness. It’s time to go all out. Soon I will be drinking a gatorade, catching my breath and getting back into the usual flow. The secret isn’t living a life that’s never crazy, it’s making sure that when things do get crazy you make time for recovery.

Paul McCartney was once asked when he knew the writing was on the wall for the Beatles, as a band. He pointed to the summer of 1965 and specifically their sold-out performance at Shea Stadium. Because the screaming of the crowd was was so loud, and there wasn’t such a thing as in-ear monitors to block out noise back then; they could not hear themselves play their set. Paul said that he knew in his gut that it was the beginning of the end when they could no longer hear the music but they kept performing anyway.

I think that is a haunting lesson for anyone who is passionately pursuing any dream. Failure, as trying as it can be, is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Success can actually be worse. This is true in ministry and in business. You can get so big and so successful that as an organization you are no longer lit by the same fire you once had. You have to fight to retain the original passion you had when you were starting out.

There are two things that we have been intentional about doing at fresh life, as we have grown, to keep us on mission and fight the forces of entropy. One is being careful to remember our history. This is vital. New hires and those who join later on need to understand what they are a part of or they will take the sacrifices paid early on for granted. The second is to make sure that the core values that lead to the success in the first place are instilled afresh, again and again, so that they are not forsaken.

A while back a friend of mine, Pastor Steven Furtick from Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, gave me a book that really opened my eyes to seeing the need for these things to be specifically nailed down and not allowed to remain nebulous. The book is called The Orange Code: How ING Direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel with a Cause (you can buy it here). That and the book Onward by Howard Schultz (link) are two phenomenal resources for any leader looking to create clarity in their organizational culture.

One things for sure, it’s a war you must wage if you want to continue to hear the music. It doesn’t happen on accident.

Check out this video where I explain what’s unique about the culture at fresh life to our church.

A few months back I brought a quote into one of our staff meetings that was very challenging to all of us and gave great opportunity for discussion. I wanted to share it here. It was written by the CEO of Starbucks about coffee but there is the potential for application on many different leadership levels.

“A store manager’s job is not to oversee millions of customer’s transactions a week, but one transaction millions of times a week.”

This hit me hard when I read it. Typically pastors and church staffs speak about church attendance as a number. we ask, “what was attendance this weekend?” Whether the answer is 648, 2,042 or 199 the idea is that so many hundreds or thousands of spiritual transactions were facilitated this weekend. True. But to each of those individuals there was only one experience–their own.

I told our team that every single person who arrives at a campus has their own experience. Their individual time finding a parking spot, getting greeted, finding a seat, discovering where to check in their kids. It doesn’t matter if the greeters were super friendly to the 148 people that came in before them, if they weren’t greeted they assume that is how it normally is. They don’t know that the bathrooms aren’t normally this messy, but they were stuck in a stall with no toilet paper and that is not a good time. They don’t care that the last 1,242 people who tried to download our podcast found it updated on time, they just know it wasn’t there when they tried to listen. All they know about is their own experience.

We have to lead focused on the big picture, but we must also keep the small picture in mind. Don’t let the size of your ministry allow you to gloss over the small details that matter dearly to the individual. It takes practice, but it is a very helpful exercise to focus on the individual perspective and to shrink your focus.

Here is the rest of the quote from Howard Schultz.

“…The only number that matters is one. One cup. One customer. One partner. One experience at a time. We had to get back to what mattered most.”

Most people understand that the job of a key leader is to establish the vision of the organization/team/company/family. They are the one who must decide why they exist and what they are pursuing. Vision gets talked about a lot, but by itself it is not enough. In order for your picture of the future to ever come to pass, you must intentionally create a culture that empowers that vision. In this clip from our uprising series I talk about the sister subjects of vision & culture and how they work together.