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.

Feedback can be helpful. If you run a company you can’t afford to not stay in tune to what people think about your brand and your customer service. People have more options than ever and if you treat them like they aren’t there, soon they won’t be. They will just go to another store, restaurant, website or church.

Having an ear to the ground can alert you to “wow” moments that are happening that you aren’t aware of but you should be encouraging. Things that employees are doing that blow customers away that you can make a more wide spread behavior. Or maybe you will find out that some small thing you have in place is actually doing the exact opposite of what you want it to. Feedback could allow for a small tweak that could make a huge difference.

An openness to feedback will allow you to see your team or organization or church through a new set of eyes. This even applies to individuals. One of the ways to grow is to have people in your life that can speak into your life when they see things that are keeping you from growing. We all have a way of being blind to our own weaknesses. Honest evaluation can be a majorly valuable tool.

The key is to know what feedback to take seriously and what input to ignore altogether. If you listen to the wrong feedback you could find yourself compromising where you shouldn’t. For example, if you have recently given your life to Christ and the negative feedback is pouring in from people you used to party with, you are going to want to ignore their contribution. The same applies to business. Perhaps some people very vocally complain about your sky-high prices and you are tempted to add cheaper items to the menu. But if you are going for a boutique vibe, diluting your higher-end price point could be a mistake and weaken what sets you apart. Pleasing the wrong people could keep you from reaching the right people.

Start by accepting the fact that no one can please everyone. You have got to identify who you are trying to impact, isolate their input and reject all others.

In my world, I am open to hearing feedback from all sorts of different people, but I filter it through the grid of who I am trying to reach. If I hear complaints from someone who comes to freshlife for the first time and thinks that the music was too loud and they didn’t like stuff we did because that’s not how it was in their last church, I’m not phased. The feedback that I key into is the person who writes and tells me they haven’t been to a religious service in 20 years but their life was rocked by their experience and they didn’t even know church could be like this. I want to encourage and foster stories like that. So I care very much about the fact that they were invited by a friend, heard our radio station and were intrigued by the name of the series.

To be blunt, I don’t care if a person who is already saved doesn’t like it. If they are already going to heaven, they are good. They can just go to another church and I am more than fine with that. The person who isn’t going to any church is the one whose head I want to get in to. In order to reach the right people I am willing to not please the wrong people.

If you know who or what you are targeting you can practice selective hearing when you listen to what people say about your organization and not find yourself deviating from your primary objective. Define success and then pursue it wholeheartedly.

I bought a coffee from Starbucks the other day and was impacted by what was written on the cup. I am not generally one to spend deep moments pondering fortune cookie’s or coffee cup insights. It was a fluke that I even saw it. When I picked it up the sleeve fell off and I noticed that the writing on the wall wasn’t one of those motivational poems or schmaltzy quotes that I have become accustomed to tuning out. This was different. They were talking about me. That cut through the clutter and got my attention.

Here is what it said:
YOU.
HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL FOR 10 YEARS.

Now, as I read that I immediately thought, “No, I haven’t… I must have been given the wrong cup. There is probably a seasoned conservation activist somewhere who is gonna be so mad when he finds out I have his drink.” But then I noticed what was written immediately below…

Everything we do, you do. Buy our coffee and good things happen. Take Starbucks 10-year partnership with CI in making things better for farmers and the planet…It makes a difference. Just like you do. Congratulations, you.

Brilliant. I have been buying coffee from them for over ten years and what this cup was saying is that I am not just a customer, I’m a partner in the mission that they are on. I have never personally met a single coffee bean farmer but I am making a difference, because me and the mermaid are on the same team. I gotta admit, it felt pretty darn good.

As I sat there sipping my coffee and congratulating myself on all the great things I was accomplishing around the world by doing so, I thought of a conversation that I had the night before. I had bumped into someone around town who goes to freshlife. After we met, he shook my hand and told me, “you guys are doing a great job,” and then he went on for a bit about all the great things that me and my team were doing for the Lord, and how he prays for us and how pumped he is to be here. I listened until he was done and then congratulated him right back. He looked a bit surprised by that. But he had just told me that he prays and that he serves, I reminded him of this. I asked if he gives to the church as well and he said that he does. I shook his hand once more and then rephrased the compliment he had given me just moments ago, telling him, “We’re doing a great job!”

I want those who are a part of freshlife to understand what Starbucks knows to convey. Everything we do, they do. As we stand as one behind the God-given vision we are pursuing; we are partners together in all that we accomplish. No matter what your role is on the team, you are a part of the uprising. Congratulations, you.

One of a leader’s most important responsibilities is to continually foster this sense of unity and ownership in their organizational culture.