One night last week my 6 year old son, Aidyn, was doing his homework. One of his assignments was to write 3 sentences.  Anything he wanted.  One of the sentences he wrote was…

“I want to be a winer.”

He meant winner, of course.  And while the “winner” and “whiner” may not differ much in spelling, they differ big time in other ways.

A whiner focuses on the problem.  A winner focuses on the solution.

When there’s a problem, a whiner would rather quit.  A winner would rather overcome.

A whiner views a failure as the end.  A winner views a failure as a learning opportunity.

A whiner would rather get sympathy for their circumstances.  A winner would rather receive praise for their perseverance.

A whiner prefers the discomfort of their current circumstances.  A winner prefers to change their circumstances.

If you offer advice, a whiner will tell you why it won’t work.  A winner will look at how it could work.

What other differences are there between a winner and a whiner?  And which are you?

From time to time every leader has to deal with people on his or her team that are not performing up to expectations.  Someone is dropping the ball and forgetting to do things.  Someone is not getting tasks done on time.  Someone’s work is not up to standard.  It could be a number of things.  Then you’ve got to have one of those difficult conversations bringing the issue to their attention, trying to find out what the underlying problem is, and then making changes so performance improves.

But what if the person under performing is you?

What if you are the one who is keeping your team from meeting its goals?

That’s the situation I find myself in now.

As my company, OurChurch.Com, has grown, we’ve added staff to do member support, sales, graphic design, web design, and search engine optimization.  But I still wear two hats, that of CEO and primary software developer.  As we’ve grown as a company, both of those roles have continued to grow.

As CEO, I do weekly meetings with each of our senior staff.  As we’ve added staff, I’ve added meetings.  Several years ago I began leading semi-annual strategic planning meetings (and implementing those plans).  Three plus years ago I started writing the Christian Web Trends blog.  Last year I began doing weekly marketing meetings and exhibiting and speaking at conferences.

As my CEO responsibilities have grown, they’ve squeezed more and more time away from development.  Deadlines have been missed.  Projects have sat on my to do list for months.  When we would gather as a team for those strategic planning meetings and assess our progress, it was obvious I was not getting my stuff done.  It’s been frustrating and embarrassing.

How can I hold the other members of my team accountable, when I am missing more deadlines than I’m making?

So, what do you do when you’re the person hindering your team?

Here’s what I think:

1. Admit it to yourself. You know there’s a problem.  Your team is not meeting its goals.  The longer you live in denial about what the primary problem is, the longer the problem will continue to plague your team.  It’s time to be honest with yourself.
2. Humbly take responsibility for your failings. Chances are other people on the team have already known you’ve been holding things up but didn’t want to say anything.  Blaming others, not saying anything, or creating a double standard for yourself will destroy your team’s trust in you.
3. Develop a plan. Some possible solutions might include restructuring your schedule to put more time or more of your most productive time into the area that needs it, delegating to/training another staff member on some of your responsibilities, or hiring someone who can do the work better than you can.
4. Stick to the plan. Restructuring your schedule, training others, and hiring all take time and effort.  The challenge with implementing the plan is that it will initially call for even more from you at a time when you feel like you have the least to give.  Find a way to do it.  If you don’t, in 6 months you’ll find yourself in exactly the same situation, except you and your team will be even more frustrated.

I’m in the process of doing this now.  We’ve hired a new software developer to take most of the development work off my plate.  She starts Tuesday.  It took a lot of time to review resumes and conduct interviews.  It will take even more time to get her up to speed on our development projects.  But I am making the time because it’s the only way to move forward.

Have you ever felt like you were the biggest impediment to your team meeting its goals?  How did you handle it?

[image by eqqman]

I wanted to let you all know about a great opportunity at OurChurch.Com’s Christian Web Trends blog.  We are facilitating a group blog project for Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s new book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve reputation and Earn Trust.  Basically, a bunch of us bloggers are joining together, each taking a different section of the book, blogging about it, and then discussing it by commenting on each others posts.  And there’s room for some more bloggers to join us.

If you are a leader in any capacity – at work, in church or ministry, or in the community I think you’ll learn a lot including a lot of practical ideas that will help you improve your leadership and influence.  And if you’re a blogger, it’s a great opportunity to connect with other bloggers and introduce your blog to a bunch of new readers.

For more info or to sign up see the announcement on the Christian Web Trends blog.

Last week I had the opportunity to lead a workshop at the Lutheran Educators’ Conference on how schools can use their websites to communicate more effectively while at the same time saving time and money.  Twenty-five to thirty teachers, administrators, and technical directors participated in the workshop.

One cool thing about it is that the participants actually contributed about half of the content of the workshop.  Rather spending the entire 75 minutes talking about what I know about school website, I invited the participants to share their insight.

• A school should put all info for prospective students on its website.  Can you name some of those things?
• A school should put all forms and policies on its website.  Can you give some examples?
• A school should put all school-wide communication on its website.  What are your school-wide communications?

Oh, and I bribed them for their input by throwing a Hershey’s Kiss for each suggestion. J

Not all settings are conducive to facilitating, but there are a lot of benefits to doing a workshop or conference this way…

1) The participants gain more knowledge. Even if you’re the most knowledgeable person in the room, you don’t know everything.  Other people through their reading and personal experience have valuable insight that everyone in the room can benefit from.

2) The workshop is more interesting. There are very few people who I could to listen to speak for 60+ minutes straight without starting to nod off.  And I know nobody would want to listen to me for 60+ minutes straight.  If you’re in the workshop even if you don’t say a word, you’re going to be more engaged by hearing different voices, listening to the interaction, and turning to see whoever’s speaking at the time.

3) It encourages the participants. The reason we go to conferences and workshops is because we want to learn how to change things to make them better.  Anytime you are trying to change things, there are challenges, there’s resistance.  When a person has a chance to share their ideas and what they’re doing and they see the nods from the other participants, it’s a great motivator.  It’s like everyone’s saying, “Yeah, you’re on the right track. Keep going.”

For centuries, the lecture has been king in almost every learning situation – the classroom, conferences, even churches.  In part that was because knowledge was not easy to come by and it was also relatively stagnant.  Your teacher could lecture on American history because she had studied it for decades and it hadn’t changed since she was in school. You pastor could lecture on the book of Revelation because he went to seminary and can read the original Greek.

But things have changed.

Sure there are still situations where lectures are the best way for people to learn, but facilitating is often a better option.  Because of the explosion and distribution of information, it’s virtually impossible for one person to have read everything or know everything about a particular topic.  And because things are changing so fast and individuals are constantly experimenting with new ideas, other people’s personal experiences and insight are tremendously valuable.

This is changing the way we learn.  In the last decade we’ve seen an explosion in the collaborative learning.  In college classrooms there is more discussion than ever before.  In churches small/life groups are gaining in prominence.

Next month I’ll be at the Catalyst conference, which though known for its speakers has been adding more and more break-out sessions or labs.  And later in the month I’ll be at the Cultivate conference, which has no lectures at all and sessions will be facilitating the collaborative learning process.

Where in your life – in your work, school, ministry, community – are there people with valuable insight who are not really getting the opportunity to share it?  Where could people benefit from less lecturing and more facilitating?

[image by billhectorweye]

Pollster and author George Barna posted a thought-provoking article this morning on the health care reform debate going on in the U.S.  He takes a look at how Americans want to address heath care and how Jesus dealt with the sick people he encountered.

First, according to surveys, the vast majority of Americans think health care deficiencies should be solved by the government more than any other entity or group of people.

Two-thirds of adults look to the government to solve issues related to poverty – including health care deficiencies. Just one out of every five adults believes that solving poverty is an individual duty, and a mere one out of 25 people assigns that task to non-profit organizations, and another one in 25 assigns it to churches.

Second, Americans help those who need health care, but only at arms length.

the most common responses are for people to give money, food, and clothing to someone else to get the job done. In contrast, the most personal responses are the least common. Relatively few Americans talk directly with the needy, tutor them, build homes for them, visit them, befriend them, or engage in other types of personal activities to address the issue.

Barna concludes that the predominant attitude in America  towards helping those without adequate health care is “it’s not my fault and it’s not my job, so let the paid professionals deal with it,” oh, and don’t raise my taxes to do it.

Barna then cites 7 principals that underlie Jesus’ health care strategy as found in the Bible.

1. Jesus healed people because He believed that good health matters.
2. Jesus invested Himself in their healing because He loved and cared for people.
3. Jesus healed everyone who presented a medical need because He saw no reason to screen some out as unqualified.
4. Jesus healed every kind of illness He encountered.
5. Jesus pursued them because He saw Himself as a servant.
6. Jesus allowed them to disrupt His schedule because He realized that people’s pain and suffering was their top focus in life.
7. Jesus expected His closest followers to heal others.

Jesus personally attended to the health care needs of the poor and disenfranchised and he called on his followers to do the same.  There’s nothing in scripture that says government programs can’t be part of the solution, but Jesus never passed the buck to the government when sick people were standing in front of him.

My first thought was, “Yeah, well, if I had the gift of healing and through God’s power could instantly cure people with blindness and leprosy (or if I at least some medical training), I would be more personally involved in helping those who need health care.”

Maybe there’s something to that.

But I also know that I have the same 24 hours in a day that Jesus had and a lot more financial resources than Jesus.

So, what’s your response to those with insufficient health care?  Who do you think should be helping them?  If you think it’s primarily the government’s responsibility, how do you square that with how Jesus’ approach?  And if you oppose a government solution, what are you doing to help those with health needs?

You can read the full article here.