Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands (3 page)

the problem with
T-shirts

RECENTLY I READ SOME
statistics on the Internet that said inorder to stay aligned with a company’s vision, people need to be reminded of that vision every twenty-eight days. I’m not sure how they came up with twenty-eight days; seems like a strange number to me. But suffice it to say, people need to hear about the vision on a regular basis in order to stay motivated.

Great leaders think about vision—a lot. But the problem is that most of us are thinking about it more than we are talking about it. And if vision is that important, we need to be constantly asking ourselves,
What’s our vision,
and how are we doing at communicating it?

In many organizations, once a vision statement is crafted,it’s often written on a piece of paper and put in a notebook, only brought out again a couple of times a year at new employee orientation or in a leader’s speech. Occasionally it might make its way onto a mug or a T-shirt.

Nothing inspires cynicism in an organization faster than a T-shirt.

Vision doesn’t belong on T-shirts. As leaders, our job is to breathe life into the vision and fill the words with meaning that stirs people in the deepest parts of their souls—the parts that long for meaning, significance, and transformation. We need to come up with creative, compelling, and repetitive ways to talk about the vision, and then we need to make the words come alive. Sometimes we even need to say those words in different ways so that people can see every facet of the vision, like the shifting colors of a kaleidoscope.

Vision is about stirring and provoking, reminding and imagining. It’s about showing people the wonder of an improved future and infusing them with hope. Vision is about creating a reason to believe again.

Vision is primarily nurtured through the stories we tell and the heroes we create in our organizations. A couple of years ago, our consulting team was working with a large school district on the East Coast. We were in the second day of a two-day off-site conference, with about a hundred and twenty people around tables in a large room. As is true with any school district, this one was facing huge challenges: increasing ethnic and economic diversity in its student population, budget cuts, and mounting expectations in test scores.

As part of an exercise in vision, we asked people to stand up and tell a brief story or mention a hero who reflected the district’s vision of “providing a place where every child can succeed.”

Vision is primarily nurtured
through the stories we tell
and the heroes we create in
our organizations.

The principal for one of the larger high schools in the district stood up and talked about a young African American boy whohad just graduated the month before. He had spent six years, from middle school through high school, in the district, but he stood out from the other kids because he was homeless—by choice.

Although this boy had received numerous offers of housing from friends, he did not want to be separated from his mother, so for nearly six years he woke up every morning in the backseat of a car. He walked across the parking lot to a nearby Wal-Mart, where he washed up in the restrooms. Then he took two city buses to arrive at school before the first bell rang. He ended up graduating with a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation scholarship, a full ride to a four-year college of his choice.

The story took two minutes to tell. But by the end, I was ready to quit my job and go to work for that school district.

Here’s the deal. No one goes into education for the big paycheck. That two-minute story worked in a powerful way to reconnect those overworked and underpaid educators to the core reason that had brought them into this line of work in the first place. You could see it all over the room: tender smiles, nodding heads, people clearly reener-gized and ready to return to the issues of diversity, budget, and test scores with a renewed sense of purpose and hope. The story was a creative and compelling way to remind people of the vision.

Two minutes.

Some of my most memorable intersections with powerful vision have come in educational contexts. Perhaps it’s because there is no question that something more than money motivates educators. Another time, we were working with a large school district in the Los Angeles area. Once again we were focusing on the topic of vision, but this time, we had divided the group into teams: administrators, principals, psychologists, teachers, etc. One team in particular worried me: the facilities and maintenance employees. I wasn’t at all sure that these guys in their jeans and T-shirts would be able to deeply engage in a discussion about vision. After all,their primary responsibilities included cutting the grass and cleaning the bathrooms.

I can be an idiot sometimes,but that’s for another chapter.

Vision is about stirring
and provoking,

reminding
and imagining.

After I explained what I wanted the teams to do, I walked over to “help” this table. I kneeled down and said in my best consulting voice, “So, what have you got for me?”

The head of the department said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot over the past twenty-five years,” and the rest of the guys around the table chuckled. I assumed he was having a hard time figuring out this vision thing, so I continued, “Well, tell me what you have been thinking.”

To this day, I still carry a scrap of paper in my wallet on which I’ve written what that man said next:

“We work to create and maintain an environment thatinspires greatness.”

“Excuse me?”

As he repeated that sentence (that glorious sentence) the laughter around the table returned, and stories started spilling out.

“Yeah, yeah, we don’t just plant flowers, we create gardens that inspire greatness,” one of them said playfully.

As if trying to top that, another said, “When people use the bathroom, they will look around the facility with a pride that comes from cleanliness and working parts all in order.”

“Everywhere people look, everything they see, from the grass to the classrooms to the restrooms, will inspire them toward greatness because of the physical environment of the schools. From the teachers to the students to the parents, even the FedEx guys that make deliveries on our campuses . . .” I was getting the picture.

Wow. After I steadied myself from having been bowled over, I stood up from my kneeling position. Then I bowed down to them.

I returned to the front of the room and told the entiregroup what had just happened. I said, “These guys are rock stars! If the facilities and maintenance guys can come to work every day understanding that their job is about more than trimming shrubs and cleaning toilets, that it’s up to them to create an environment that inspires greatness, then everyone in this organization should be able to figure out how to tie his or her job to the vision.

“You all ought to bow down every time you cross pathswith one of these men. We are not worthy to look directly into their eyes; we ought to give them sunglasses so we can pass by,” I finished with a smile.

The next time we worked with this district, the superintendent told us we had created monsters! The maintenance guys now strutted through the campuses . . . and well they should.

Heroes like this shape the culture of an organization, giving its vision form and substance and breathing life into it. They turn an organization into a living entity, taking it out of the “institution” category and plopping it squarely into the “organism” category.

It is good for us to think about organizations as living things, because doing so moves us away from the idea that it’s us—people—against the organization. We need to realize that the organization
is
the people.

The right heroes help us fight the encroaching celebrity culture that can destroy even the best organizations: that not-so-subtle elevation of jocks and cheerleaders that leaves everyone else feeling like second-class citizens, minor contributors, or page-3 news.

We need heroes to give flesh and bone to the vision, helping people see what’s right in front of their eyes. And the best heroes make everyone else in the organization realize that “hero-hood” is not reserved for the select few, but that they, too, can become heroes. And maybe, just maybe, vision is a collection of heroes that point us all in the right direction.

I have attended a lot of meetings where sales and marketing people are given awards. They get the verbal accolades and the nodding approvals; all the while the data entry person who made the success possible—or at least had a lot to do with it—sits unnoticed in the corner. Good leaders make sure no one is overlooked. That might sound like it’s too big a job. Well, it
is
a big job, but it’s not too big. It is imperative, and one of the primary ways of realizing vision. And it is the right thing to do, which is so much of what leadership is about.

Much of a vision’s power lies in what it taps into. Done well, vision connects to that part of us that desperately wants to be involved in something deeper, something with meaning and significance. Vision releases ongoing energy in individuals and organizations that perpetuates and fuels itself. Vision lifts heads, stirs souls, and tapshearts. It creates and fosters and strengthens and stimulates. It engages passion, which is a profound source of motivation. Vision brings out the best, where before, good enough was good enough.

Right now, our firm is working with an agency in a nearby community that’s been ravaged by violence and is struggling to overcome the legacy of destruction left behind. For years, this area had the highest murder rate per capita in the state, and for a while, in the country. It is difficult and sometimes discouraging work. Two steps forward, five steps back. Recently the community experienced shootings for thirty days in a row. Thirty days, every day a shooting—some fatal, some not.

They are working to create avenues of nonviolence in this community. They’ve started programs in the schools and the neighborhoods to target susceptible kids and intervene in this seemingly endless cycle. The agency does good work. The people there teach classes, they counsel, they offer music and art lessons, they host a weekly family night, and they try to “reprogram” the community mind-set that sees violence as a way of life.

The young staff that so passionately leads this organization tries to be relationally available to the people of the community 24-7. What they do is so important, and in this area, they are the only ones doing it. They frequently gather as a group to remind themselves of their vision. They tell stories of the successes and celebrate every step in the right direction. When discouragement seeps in, as it does on a regular basis, they return to their vision. They remind themselves of the truth and hope of the words. Their heroes are those who are living out the vision. When they get weary of doing good, it is not the strategy or logistics or budget that breathes life back into their understandably worn-out souls. It is the vision. It is the stories.

Not the vision on a T-shirt, but the vision as it is lived out in the flesh and blood of those within their God-blessed reach.

stone
Ships

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD
the phrase “There is no such thing as abad idea”?

Maybe there is.

Here’s what leaders know about bad ideas: From time to time, they happen; and the fear of them can keep organizations from doing the risk taking and creative thinking necessary to keep those organizations innovative and growing. When the fear of a bad idea is big enough, it paralyzes people.

We talk a lot of the need to take risks, to think outside the box, to try new things. We know we need to keep organizations fresh and growing and that can’t be accomplished by only doing the same old things.

But while we talk a good game, most of us also feel theundercurrent in those words: “Feel free to succeed.”

Stone ships.

In many organizations, mistakes are met with awkward silences, punishing behavior, and a distinct sense of being marginalized and labeled. The embarrassment becomes a legacy rather than an event.

On the other hand, “successes” are applauded and extolled, heroes are created and parties are thrown. We learn pretty quickly which side we need to be on.

Now, before I go on, let me make clear what I’m not saying. It’s obviously not a good idea to fail on purpose, to let bad ideas go unchecked, or to abdicate discernment in exchange for creativity. What I
am
saying is this: We need to create environments in our organizations where creativity and new ideas can flourish.

We all want to avoid stone ships, but our fear of them keeps us doing the same things in the same way, year after year. And everyone who leads well will have a few stone ships in his or her past, and maybe one or two in the future.

Leading an organization requires a collaborative discussion about vision, reality, and strategy. And while I am not one for linear leadership, this is one discussion that needs to at least begin in that order.

The leader starts by orchestrating a team dialogue about what the future might look like: How might our organization flourish in the future? Where are we going? What are the ways in which new life must be breathed into what we are doing?

Beyond the central leadership team, these discussions then need to move out into the organization. People from various areas and departmentsneed to participate in the conversation about what the future might look like and where they want the organization to go. These discussions, in and ofthemselves, have the potential to release the energy inside people. The dreaming creates it, and the invitation to the conversation releases it. Good leaders know that an entire culture can be ignited by the discussion about what’s next.

Leading an organization
requires a

collaborative
discussion about vision,

reality, and strategy.

Many leaders are afraid of opening up this type of dialogue. But sometimes fearing the wrong things can actually hurt us. And
not
having these widespread discussions ought to make us afraid.

Collaboration is not abdication. Collaboration releases the energy and passions and unique contributions of people made in the image of God. It is a dynamic force that most leaders often vastly undervalue and therefore underutilize.

Collaboration is not a promise; it is an invitation. Hearingpeople does not mandate that you will always follow what they say. But it is a significant way for you to value and engage people. It brings issues to the surface that need to be tackled (which is one reason most people prefer to avoid it), but more importantly it creates a shared vision that ignites the imagination and efforts of the entire team.

Vision is a team sport. It is not a solo endeavor. Far too often, leaders present their vision to a group and then get confused when the progress seems slow or people are reluctant. Very few people are motivated when they are handed a vision. Most want to be part of determining and shaping that vision. And when you invite people to the table with you to do that, you deeply honor their dignity and the image of God embedded within them.

Good leaders create momentum not just in the executionof the vision, but in the discussions leading up to the vision. I see a lot of leaders who spend enormousamounts of energy trying to rally the troops and get people fired up to implement the leaders’ vision. Even from simply a practical point of view, they would save themselves a boatload of effort if they engaged people from the beginning rather than after the vision was decided.

Vision is a team sport.

This process of determining vision can seem like it takes too long, but I would submit that exactly the opposite is true. Pushing people is a lot more work than running along with them. When you ask them the questions and involve them in shaping the future, you treat them like partners, not subjects.

We spent nearly a year shaping our vision at Axis (to state the obvious, we did not set aside our regular ministrywork while we were doing this). We involved not just our leadership team, but scores of key volunteers and regular attendees in the discussions. We began by gathering groups of people and asking three questions:

1. What is going so well in the ministry that you’d like us not to touch it for fear we might mess it up?

2. What is broken and either needs fixing or needs to be shut down?

3. What are the things we are not yet doing that we ought to consider for our future?

People were honored to be invited, excited to be asked, and full of ideas to the point of bursting. Those three questions and the opportunity to talk about them together catalyzed an energy within the group that was palpable. We probed their answers, took notes, and paid off our promise to keep them updated.

We took our staff and interns away for a couple of retreatswhere we considered the information we had gathered at these group events. We prayed, we talked, we listened. And after considerable time, we wrote:

Axis strives to be a vibrant, authentic community of Jesus followers who seek to impact our world by helping our friends discover Jesus and serving our neighbors in need.

Community. Evangelism. Serving.

I remember being in the living room of a friend’s house overlooking Lake Michigan when about twenty of us looked at that statement on a flip chart. There was a brief silence as we saw it and took it in, then an excitement began to fill the room with an immediate sense of “Let’s get started!”

We weren’t looking at months of “rolling it out” to people who would be hearing it for the first time, but rather we were trying to steer the energy and direction of people who had been an integral part of creating it and who were already chomping at the bit to get started.

Personally, I would rather lead people I have to pull back and steer a bit than those who need a constant fire lit under them. Welcoming collaboration from the start is a significant way to create the former situation.

But vision is just the first part. Next comes reality. Realityisn’t nearly as much fun as vision, but it is quite necessary. In fact, my mentor Max DePree says that the first job of a leader is to define reality. Max and I may disagree just a bit on the order, but suffice it to say that vision doesn’t happen without considering your current reality.

It takes a lot of courage from a leader to accurately assess current reality. One of the reasons that is true is that to a large degree, the leader is responsible for the current reality. Only new leaders can avoid that responsibility, and sooner or later we all have to get comfortable with owning our failures as well as our successes.

Assessing the current reality almost always involves bad news. It includes hearing about what is not working, what or who has lost effectiveness, and ways in which people have felt marginalized, used, and overlooked. Current reality includes details about systems or programs that no longer deliver what they were originally intended to, as well as places where the organization is stuck.

This is one of the reasons why leadership is so much work. The vision is full of possibilities and optimism. Reality is more often filled with disappointments and difficulties. And a leader needs to stand between those two things.

It is so much easier to choose one or the other. Tension implies pulling—and when does that feel good? The tendency to move to the either/or is often driven by the desire to avoid that pain. But leadership doesn’t allow for that luxury. It requires the orchestration of opposites. The space between the vision and reality creates a gap, a painful gap. And leadership is about bridging that gap. More on that later . . .

In Axis, we soberly and honestly assessed our current reality. But before we did, we coached ourselves on the importance of engaging in this part of the discussion with a ruthless honesty. If we held back, we knew we would not come to the correct conclusions. If protecting feelings was our highest value, we would miss the truth. Fortunately, our enthusiasm for moving toward the vision helped us garner the necessary courage to do what needed to be done.

Our discoveries were painful, but interestingly, they were also remarkably freeing. In the face of our vision, the very things that initially seemed scary and hard to admit became great tools for overcoming the obstacles that were blocking our future.

Our weekend service was one of the most important things we did each week. We began to see how these services had become predictable more than provocative. Now that we understood our vision, we realized that the services weren’t as focused or participatory as they needed to be.

Our small groups were mostly superficial and were notbeing led very well. Many of them were stagnant, and few were growing. We knew we needed to make the ties between our weekend services and our small groups much stronger and clearer.

Then we looked at serving. Okay, well, our current reality was that there was no current reality in the area of serving. There were some random acts of serving, but not much beyond that. Serving was not a force in our community.

Rather than being collaborative and interconnected, the areas within Axis were more like silos. The various teams that worked during the weekend services constantly struggled to find enough help, and few people in Axis were actively building friendships with people who didn’t know God.

The intersection of vision
and reality may

be one
of the greatest tests of
leadership.

Did I mention that reality hurts? Who wants to hear all that stuff? This intersectionof vision and reality may be one of the greatest tests of leadership. It is having sober eyes and an optimistic spirit, and refusing to choose between the two. It is the good news–bad news moment when you cannot allow one to dismiss the other. They are both true—where we are heading and where we are—but we have to walk through reality in order to move toward the vision. Without that, vision becomes a simple addiction to the emotional high of an imagined future.

Vision is hard work. Stinking hard work. And living in reality prepares us for that. It takes us out of the clouds and puts us in work boots. We dream and we struggle. We seek to bring the Kingdom of God into a world that is not yet ready for all of it. The tension between these two things is the realm of good leadership. Discouragement and belief: strange but necessary bedfellows.

One of the most painful things about a disappointing reality is that at one time, those things that are now not working originated under the banner of a glorious vision. There must be a continual monitoring of the vision against the current reality.

The disparity between the vision and the reality establishes a gap. And what fills that gap is strategy. Strategy answers the “how” question: How will we move from our current reality to our preferred future? Without a plan, the gap will remain.

Of course there will always be a gap, but strategy is about pointing the way and narrowing the gap. Strategy focuses on the two, three, maybe four main things that we have determined will significantly move us toward our vision. It builds a bridge between here and there, betweenthe real and the anticipated. And bridges are full of hope.

Strategy puts feet to the vision and, as such, breathes encouragement into an organization as it takes its first steps toward the future. Strategy gives us the potential to move our organizations from having a soft, benign presencein the community to being unstoppable forces in our world. It brings a focus and clarity to our flurry of activities and our wonderful random acts of kindness—and that unleashes power.

Strategy puts feet to
the vision and, as such,
breathes encouragement
into an organization as it
takes its first steps toward
the future.

Because there are thousandsof wonderful causes, we must do the work of determining what we will spend our great but limited resources of time, energy, and money on. We must ask, is the cause effective and sustainable? In doing this, we create the possibility of releasing those resources in remarkable and not-to-be-ignored ways. I think part of what Jesus meant when He told Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church is the kind of strength that can be created when God’s people come together focused on both the dream and the reality.

It is tempting to say yes to everything—particularlyfor those working in churches and nonprofit organizations. I once did some work with the leadership team of a small church with about a hundred and fifty in its congregation. We did a strategy exercise in which I asked the team to list the various ministries within the church. I finally stopped writing when we had filled up an entire whiteboard. This small church had seventy-five different activities going! That’s a ministry for every two people in the church. Easy to see strategic mistakes in someone else, isn’t it?

In Axis, our strategy very simply became large group gatherings, small-group gatherings, and serving opportunities. Just those three things. Other great ideas came our way all the time, but our strategy gave us the confidence to say no, thank you.

We decided that we would become a vibrant community of Jesus followers, we would become active in helping our friends discover Jesus, and we would serve our neighbors in need through these three strategic anchors. Everything that happened, then, in our large and small-group gatherings and through our serving opportunities needed to direct people to growth in those three areas.