902 words … a quick 3.5 minute read
If you’ve known me for long, you know that I’m a collector and connector of ideas. Hope you’ll enjoy a couple that I stumbled across this week. Full credit given to the authors for the content.
Preaching to the choir… Seth Godin
“The original expression implies that preaching to the converted is a waste of time. After all, why bother marketing to people who are already on the team?
The reality is that the people who aren’t enrolled in the journey are going to ignore you. They’re simply not open to being marketed to, taught, talked at or lectured.
On the other hand, the folks who are in on it have a chance to become members of the choir.
And they are the ones that spread the word. It’s peer-to-peer interaction that shapes our culture, and culture that shapes our world.
The opportunity for anyone seeking to make a change happen is to enlist people who are on a similar path and give them the tools and the motivation to engage with the people around them.
If your work is worth doing, it’s worth preaching to the choir.”
Who are the choirs that you should be preaching to create the best leveraged opportunities to drive change and transformation?
Standing on the Promises … Sull & Spinosa … HBR
Critical initiatives stall for a variety of reasons—employee disengagement, a lack of coordination between functions, complex organizational structures that obscure accountability, and so on. To overcome such obstacles, managers must fundamentally rethink how work gets done.
Most of the challenges stem from broken or poorly crafted commitments. That’s because every company is, at its heart, a dynamic network of promises made between employees and colleagues, customers, outsourcing partners, or other stakeholders. Executives can overcome many problems in the short term and foster productive, reliable workforces for the long term by practicing what the authors call “promise-based management,” which involves cultivating and coordinating commitments in a systematic way.
Good promises share five qualities: They are public, active, voluntary, explicit, and mission based. To develop and execute an effective promise, the “provider” and the “customer” in the deal should go through three phases of conversation. The first, achieving a meeting of minds, entails exploring the fundamental questions of coordinated effort: What do you mean? Do you understand what I mean? What should I do? What will you do? Who else should we talk to? In the next phase, making it happen, the provider executes on the promise. In the final phase, closing the loop, the customer publicly declares that the provider has either delivered the goods or failed to do so.
Are the promises you make to one another as a team public, active, voluntary, explicit and mission based? What about with your congregation?
I’ll tie this together with some new insights from Larry Osborne after the ad.
You can read the full article here.
Wherever you find yourself on the leadership journey, don’t do it alone.
LeadWell Cohorts
There is significant power in the gathering of true peers that leads to leader and organizational health and accelerated results.
Join with a group of other leaders of growing churches for a one year experience that includes a mixture of in person gatherings, video resource calls, personal and professional coaching and access to some of the leading senior pastors as mentors.
The next groups are forming now including senior pastors (under 40), second generation megachurch pastors, senior pastors finishing well (55+) and executive pastors. If you are interested in applying for a spot, email me at greg@ligongroup.com or select a time to talk that works for you here. Note that registrations paid in full by June 15 will be discounted $500.
Phooey on the Funnel … Larry Osborne
Last Thursday I hosted around 60 leaders during the most recent Leadwell Accelerator, a 90-minute experience provided by my consulting practice, Ligon Group. My long-time friend, Larry Osborne from North Coast Church was one of the guests. As per usual, Larry dropped 20 solid minutes of wisdom. He covered a lot of topics including his insights on what must stay the same and what must change as we engage this new pandemic impacted world.
One of the things that he argues must change is the church’s use of the internet as a funnel to get people through the doors of the church building. At North Coast, they see their internet audience as falling into one of three categories:
Consumers of Content
Connected
Committed
Content consumers account for about 50% and they are ok with these folks “just being there.” Another 40% are connected meaning they attend a lot and make an occasional financial gift. And the committed account for 10%. In the allocation of resources, both time and finances, North Coast focuses on the committed 10%. Why? Because these are the folks that are committed to truly being disciples.
Some of you may feel as if this approach is a little insider. But I refer you back to Seth Godin and the authors of the Harvard Business Review article. Preaching to the choir and promise based leadership make sense. After all, it seems to mirror the way Jesus led.
Email me your innovation experiments and stories at greg@ligongroup.com.