Vision, by its own nature, is the “what” question every organization must answer.

What are we all about?

What are we accomplishing?

What defines success for us?

All these are important and even primarily important, meaning, without clearly answering them, the following questions do not matter. But once that’s done, every organization must answer the next and critically important question, “how are we going to do that.”

In my experience as a consultant, organizations that are stuck often understand their “what” but have been stopped on their tracks by not answering clearly the “how.” These leaders can see where they want to be and can imagine what that preferred future looks like, but they cannot figure out the proper steps that will get them there. It feels like the times you found yourself on a busy highway where you can see your destination from your car, but you cannot figure out the right path to get there. After all there are too many options, too many ramps, access roads, and exits and a clear path to your destination is nowhere to be found.

Take a look around your organization. It might be a ministry, a business, a church even a legacy not for profit. Your vision statement might be framed on the wall for all to see, but if your strategy to get there is not clear, then chances are you are not going to make it. Being busy and being effective are not synonymous.  Your organization might be trying a lot of “new stuff,” throwing things up on the proverbial wall and hoping they stick.  While that will keep everyone busy, you will not move you forward. Without a clear “how”

How well has your organization defined its “how”?

Don’t underestimate the power of emotions. Anger, frustrations, outrage, and shame are powerful motivators. People who are emotionally charged lose perspective. What was once an annoyance suddenly becomes a cause worthy of their personal crusade. I have seen otherwise reasonable people hurl vicious personal attacks, most of them untrue, when they become emotionally charged by an issue.

Don’t overestimate your ability to appease them. Conciliatory leaders tend to want to spend time with their detractors and reason them back into a resolution. In my experience, that seldom works. Often the emotionally charged are also unreasonable and will continue to sabotage the process.

Don’t let them grow. Much like a cancer that spreads to nearby cells, unhappy people attract more unhappy people and will recruit those whom they can influence. Once you realize that the emotionally-charged situation is not going to be resolved by reasoning and dialogue, cut your losses help them find the exit door. If the vocal minority has more staying power than you do, send out your résumé and pack your bags. Your days are numbered.

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Know your audience and prepare accordingly. There’s nothing more damaging for a leader than to to walk in a leadership ambush. Understanding the dynamics of the issues and the players involved in a potentially emotionally charged meeting will help you navigate a tough crowd.

If you don’t effectively deal with the vocal minority, you will eventually lose your supporters who will slowly back away from your leadership. This becomes a leadership death spiral where the longer you cater to the detractors, the more you ignore those who need you the most.

Have you ever dealt with a vocal minority? What happened?

Do what only you can do for your organization. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. Once I was the technology expert for my company–doing everything from troubleshooting network connections to installing printers and drivers. Granted, there were only 3 of us in the early days. Today I don’t even know how to use the fax machine or get a conference call started. I had to let those things go or I could never do the critical tasks only I can do for the organization.

You are hired to get the job done and not to be busy. Some people justify their salaries by the sheer amount of activity they create. You were not hired to be busy; you were hired to be effective. You must have a firm grip on your supervisor’s expectations of your output and make sure you do that.

Become an owner. No matter what position I had in any of the jobs I’ve ever worked in, I always felt that the success or failure of the organization was dependent on how well I performed. As your sense of ownership in your organization grows, your sense of entitlement diminishes.  After all, you don’t ever hear owners say, “that’s not what I’m paid to do.”

Set expectations early and often. Whether it’s an assistant, a second in command, or a volunteer, you need to set clear and measurable goals from the beginning. A critical mistake managers make is to provide someone with a written job description at the time of hiring and that never gets updated or evaluated again until things are not well. Job expectations are tied to specific projects. If you can’t measure the small stuff you will never be able to assess the big picture. Take time to define a win for each project and evaluate them at completion.

Hire well. It’s easy to get married, but painful to divorce. Find the 3Cs: Competence, character, and chemistry. Spend the time to hire the right person. Avoid the rush to “fill a position.” The wrong person in your team could be costly. As a matter of fact, the wrong hire at a key position could cost your job and in the case of small businesses, the business itself.

Find the right distance to manage from. Micromanagers are too close; this lowers trust, disempowers subordinates and destroys their motivation. Absentee managers are too far away; they provide insufficient guidance, don’t keep track of work being done, and aren’t there to listen and provide answers to questions that come up. The optimal distance is in between. Provide direction and guidance, let your subordinates know you’re keeping track from your own vantage point, and check in with them periodically.

Which one of these have you found most challenging in your experience?

Old School Board. No these are not school board members who are old, but old board members who have lost touch with anything current. “Social media? That’s just an0ther fad.” I have seen more dynamic ideas die during ministry presentations due to board members’ inabilities to grasp the importance and significance of communicating with digital natives. If your board has more people in their 70s and 80s than people in their 30s and 40s you might be in trouble, serious trouble.

IT Terrorist. This is the guy who holds all good ideas hostage on the fear of “It’s a security issue why we cannot do that.” or “We would have to revamp all of our systems to be able to do that.” Those words send fear and trepidation down the spines of ministry leaders as well as CEOs everywhere. I find that often they either don’t know what they are talking about or if they do, they don’t want to go through the hassle of changing. And in either case, the organization loses.

Insecure Leader. No great idea can come from any other person but himself. The insecure leader will hire poorly because he is threatened by talent. And if he makes a mistakes and manages to bring someone on board who’s smarter and better than he, he will marginalized the poor guy until he’s ready to quit. If you have an insecure leader working for you, watch closely his direct reports and watch the talented ones leave.

Incompetent saboteur. He’s not incompetent at sabotaging ideas. He’s just incompetent period, and therefore, will sabotage any idea that threatens his job. His thinking is more like “Why try and fail, if I can stop the idea from even getting off the ground!” He’s always the guy giving you all the reasons your next idea will not work. Unfortunately, the savvy saboteur will agree with you in a meeting and undermine your efforts later on.

Ego maniac.“If it’s not about me, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” That’s the egomaniac’s modus operandi. His personal agenda trumps the win for the company and his team. While he might be a superstar, his self-interest will end up doing more damage to your team than good.

What other professional type would you include in this list?

Understand where their pain is. What do they “think” they need from me? Sometimes what they need and their perception of the need are not the same. Regardless, you must always start from their perspective, no matter your assessment of the situation.

Speak their language. I met with a CPA firm not long ago. I knew better than to talk about “the customers’ stories intersecting the company’s storyline thus creating a rich new narrative.” That kind of talk would have me escorted off the premises.

Alleviate their pain with your solution. After you understood what their felt needs are and figured out how they want to get the information, then it’s time to connect the dots for them. But you can only do that by starting at their pain point and using the language they are accustomed to hearing. Most people lose the deal at this point. Contextualization is not just a missional term, it’s a business one as well. The right solution presented in a way that’s foreign to your audience will get voted down every time.

What other help would you offer to creatives working with non-creatives?

That was a difficult lesson for me to learn. As a young manager, I remember coming to the realization that a good friend I had hired for a leadership position in the organization I managed was misplaced. While he had the temperament and personality for the job, he lacked the organizational skills to be effective at a  high level. No amount of training or coaching would bring him up to par. I agonized for months about what to do, even though intuitively I knew he could no longer lead that program.

In the meanwhile I saw his performance continue to falter, his team flounder, and the entire organization under-perform.

I was frustrated.

His team was frustrated.

He was frustrated.

By the time we parted ways there was a lot of collateral damage done. I sacrificed the well being of the entire team on the altar of my friendship. At the end I barely saved the friendship. Everyone lost on that one. Everyone.

I learned then that my role as leader is to protect, resource, and guide the entire organization forward. What’s right for the team is ultimately right for everyone, and that applies to myself as well. If I made decisions that are best for one team member, but not for the whole organization, we all lose. While this is a lesson you can learn for yourself, I hope you trust me on this one and save yourself a lot of grief.

Have you ever been in a situation where the wrong person was allowed to stay on to the detriment of the entire team? What happened?

I like control. My family refers to me as “Captain Schedule” when we go on vacation. However, being a control freak has its advantages. After all, if you control everything, you can never blame others for a failed project, a bad hire, or even a flat soufflé. As an entrepreneur, I benefited in the early days of my company from having a good grasp on everything that was going on…from cash flow projections, to hard drive storage capacity, to the details for every project of every client.

While it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the reality that one person can deal with only  a limited number of moving parts, it’s extremely difficult for those of us who have a need to feel in control to step back and look at our own situation through an objective lens. Instead of changing the way we operate, the control freaks of the world try to figure out ways to be more productive, to sleep less, and to get more done than anyone else around us.

I still like control. It’s part of how I’m wired.  But today I have built a team of incredibly competent professionals whom I’m proud to work alongside. I strive to make the contribution that only I can make and stay out of their way, for the most part. Letting go has been difficult and I’ve made several mistakes along the way, but here’s what I’ve learned:

Hire slow. Fire fast. In order to give up control of anything that’s dear to you, including the very business that’s your livelihood, you must trust someone in three critical areas: competence, chemistry, and character. Never, ever compromise on these. I wrote more about the three “C”s as I call them here. But the moment you realize you made a mistake, take care of it quickly. Nothing erodes an organization’s morale and performance faster than a disgruntled or incompetent team member.

Byte size ownership. One of my early mistakes was to dump too much too soon on a new hire. That’s not fair to them, nor to the entire organization. Start small, correct the mistakes, celebrate the victories, and move forward to bigger and better things. Building trust is a process, and one you cannot short change.

Don’t abdicate your responsibility. Know what you must know. As a leader, I must not relinquish the responsibility for the organization’s well being, including financial, directional, as well as operational. While I might not be deep in the details, I must have a solid grasp of these essentials. “I did not know things were this bad,” is not an indictment on an organization, but on its leader.

Motivate. Do not control. Control is an illusive drug. Controlling people is not only wrong. It’s downright impossible. I prefer to motivate people and find ways to resource them with tools that will make them want to do their best. Highly motivated, talented people don’t need to be micromanaged, or coerced into better performance. They have an inner drive that needs to be guided, nurtured, and deployed. If you are having to stay after someone for them to perform, you have hired poorly.

Are you a control freak or do you just go with the flow?

Most of the churches I work with will start a new teaching series the weekend after Easter. It’s a strategic move because we know that most people like being a part of something new. A fresh teaching series will give your Easter guests a compelling reason to return during the next few weeks, where, we hope, they’ll enjoy it enough to stay. When planning for a new series, keep in mind that compelling titles and strong graphics are great tools but if you want to maximize your outreach potential, you should try to create an emotional tie between the series subject matter and your audience even before the series begins.

Hollywood does this well. One of its most successful tactics to promote a new film is through a compelling movie trailer (which quite often is better than the movie itself). Your church could do the same. Create your own video trailer: a two-minute promo or “commercial” that will present the heart of your new teaching series. Show it during your Easter services and reinforce it with any other visuals you might have, such as posters, cards, or stage props.

Don’t let the trailer idea intimidate you. You don’t need to have a big budget or expensive equipment to create a persuasive piece. If you have a small church and resources are limited, consider doing something simple but effective. I once worked with a start-up that produced a simple man-on-the-street video. It featured the pastor asking one question to random people in his community: “What’s the most hurtful thing anyone has said to you?” The video set up a new series that dealt with relationships. The outcome was powerful. Some of the answers were funny (a woman told him that a neighbor once called her a hemorrhoid!), while others were very poignant (a son recounted how his father told him that he would never amount to much). The video didn’t cost a lot to produce, but had a strong impact.

What’s your church doing the Sunday after Easter? 

“Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.”

Achor goes on to support this statement with case studies and illustrations. Even if he didn’t, the truth in it resonates with me. How can I be an effective critic without becoming a negative person? That’s tough. In the past few years, I have been conscious about how negativity can affect every area of my life and how easily I can find fault with everything around me. Here’s how I’m fighting it.

Not a critic, but a servant. That’s perhaps the most difficult of all the shifts I have had to make over the years. I’m not hired to be a critic, even though some of my observations might come across as criticism. I’m ultimately hired to serve an organization, a cause, or a person. My contribution is not only to point out what’s wrong, but to help find a solution.

First the positive. No matter the circumstance or dilemma I’m dealing with, there are always a lot of positives to recognize.  It’s easy to focus on the 20% that needs to change than on the 80% that’s working well.

A kind heart. Difficult conversations are a lot less painful when they are encased in gracious language and attitude. I remember as a young professional watching a well-known consultant use condescending language as he reported his findings to a group of leaders. It didn’t make him look good or smart in my eyes. It made him come across like a big ugly jerk that I wouldn’t want to ever hire or emulate.

Do you agree with Achor? How do you keep from being negative?

I can’t quantify the percentage. But I know that the great majority of the successes I have seen in my professional career both in business as well as in ministry have been directly tied to my ability to keep going and not accept defeat. I have talked with others who have successful businesses and churches who share the same trait: perseverance. Since most entrepreneurs are usually “all in” and there is not a “Plan B” in place, we tend to keep going until something happens.

None of us knows when our next break is going to be–the meeting with a profitable new client, the phone call with a large order, the exchange with a wealthy donor. But we all know that if we are not there, none of them will ever come to fruition. So we continue to push forward, to persevere even when there are no signs of spring. In business, as in life, perseverance pays dividends. Be aware, however, that perseverance is not glamorous and often not fun, but absolutely essential.

Think about your life. Where do you need the most encouragement not to quit?