Guest blogger Gary Runn has served with Cru for over 30 years. For the past five years he and his family served in Florence, Italy where he focused on leadership development for the national ministry. He currently serves as National Director for Leadership Development of Cru City in Austin, Texas. He’s also my brother-in-law and blogs at garyrunn.wordpress.com.

We live in dynamic times regarding culture and the mission of extending God’s kingdom. New leadership paradigms and fresh learning are necessary elements in stewarding well the resources that God has entrusted to His people.

In a previous post on this blog, Ken Cochrum has argued for Shared Leadership. I think Ken is correct in his estimation of what it is going to take to lead in ever increasing complexity. Ken quotes Marshall Goldsmith in defining what is meant by shared leadership. At the heart of the definition are three key components: maximization of resources around you, empowerment of others to contribute well and opportunity for true leadership out of expertise. This is not leadership by committee. This is leadership at its highest level that can navigate the complexities and steward critical resources towards the best possible solution-all the while raising the leadership culture around them to new heights. But ultimately what a leader does will never outpace who a leader is. This style of leading requires some growing character qualities to ensure both a good environment and a good result. It requires letting go of one’s ego — the exaggerated sense of self. I will suggest three character qualities for your consideration.

Humility
For the Christ-centered leader humility is always required. But in a command and control style this can be feigned and expressed in measured doses. If a leader is aiming for a shared leadership style this is the starting point and must prove consistent day in and day out. Humility is not thinking less of yourself — it’s not thinking of yourself at all. Humility is the character trait that allows you to get out of the way so others can succeed-again, shunning any form of egotism. Humility actually lends itself to bold ideas because there is nothing personally at stake. The mission and God’s agenda are the only things at stake. Humility is what allows the leader employing this style to empower others. Humility by definition does not have to be the epicenter of power. It rightly shares power with qualified others. A right estimation of self and God is at the epicenter of humility.

Determination
The error of a command and control style of leadership is that it is extremely limiting. You are limited to the best and worst of who you are. But the potential error of a shared leadership style is a watered down, fluffy solution with no visible impact. You could end up with leadership by committee and greatly reduce impact. Determination is needed to keep God’s agenda and organizational calling in the forefront. The idea of shared leadership is to get to a better, more impactful solution through partnering efforts. But this requires a leader who can keep connected efforts on track and moving in the right direction. This is knowing when to provide accountability, correcting insight and a refocused vision.

Authenticity
This one might surprise you. But good partnership requires safe relationships. There has to be a leadership environment where divergent opinions can be freely expressed. The best way I know to create safety is if the leader demonstrates true authenticity. This means that the leader is able to admit mistakes, weaknesses, and limitations. This also means that the leader can freely encourage and praise the contributions of others. People readily follow gracious, authentic leaders. Leaders should always be conscious of the working environment around them and the development of leaders around them. An authentic leader fosters a safe, energetic collaboration environment.

Where are these traits nourished and grown? At the foot of the cross. Our constant recognition for the grace of the gospel is the soil for growing these qualities. A helpful fertilizer is regular feedback from peers, superiors and those you lead. A deadly weed is letting egotism run rampant. Shared leadership in all of its varied expressions is the way forward. Will you strive to become this type of leader?

Which group has a higher success rate in collaborative work: B-school grads, kindergartners, or CEOs?

Watch the video to find out. “Build a tower, build a team,” declares Tom Wujec in this fascinating explanation of why multiple iterations are one key to successful collaboration efforts. Unfortunately, most of our training in strategic planning has taught us to plan-plan-plan, assess options, choose the “best” alternative, and execute on that one idea. Annual budgets are then set, personnel reassigned, and we forge ahead while hoping for the best.

In a dynamic networked world, we don’t have to lock ourselves in to such linear plan/produce models. Rapid try/fail/learn/try again cycles are winning the day. This rapid learning approach seems less forced and more organic to leaders in many cultures.

I’m going to try this Marshmallow Challenge with my teams the next time we have some development time. I wonder what we’ll learn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_yKBitO8M

Enjoy these if you haven’t already. Please retweet, share or forward any favorites. Thank you!

Why Leaders Use Social Media

What Is Shared Leadership?

Steve Jobs’ Legacy: Real Artists Ship

Guest post: Bring it!

What’s Your Failure Tolerance?

Leaders speak.

It’s our job. We use words …

• to create and express a compelling vision of the future
• to inspire and encourage people around us
• to speak God’s Word to various audiences
• to engage others with questions and observations
• to “write the vision and make it plain … so that he may run who reads it” (Habakkuk 2:2)
• to empathize, respond and express love
• in countless other ways to move people on to God’s agenda

Success, said Thomas Alva Edison, is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

This week at MinistryNet 2011 in Bangkok is making me more aware of this axiom. Yesterday nearly 200 participants broke into workgroups of 5-8 people. Each group was tasked with working a specific problem from an innovation or collaboration angle. It’s not easy. I visited three groups and observed lots of starting, stopping, reframing, challenging and offering. It’s a healthy process that our organization desperately needs in order to stay near the cutting edges of social media ministry.

Janakan Arulkumarasan, CEO of Onoko, is here with us. His company writes Facebook apps. They keep the focus tight, only allowing 10 days from start to finish for a new app. Their philosophy: Just get it out there, then polish it later. Their teams create about 150 apps per year, only one of which might be popular and go to 30 or 4o million downloads. The other 149 are scrap.

This got me thinking. Am I willing to endure that rate of innovation failure in order to achieve success? I do it in some areas of my life, for instance, when I’m learning an 8-bar guitar solo. Picking out all the notes and getting the timing just right can require dozens of practice reps until it sounds right. But sometimes in ministry I naturally feel that if I’ve prayed about something and attempt to try it, God should make it work just right the first time. That’s flawed thinking. And bad theology.

What’s helped increase your tolerance for failure en route to success?

Guest blogger Andrea Buczynski is a teammate, friend, and VP of Leadership Development and Human Resources for CCCi. I invited her to share a recent ‘aha’ in her own leadership development.

When I was growing up as a young leader, it was common to look to the leaders above you for answers, resources, and different approaches. They had a broader view. They were exposed to other leaders, and I was not. So they were my conduit to more knowledge and different ways of doing things.

For many years this paradigm has framed my view of leadership and the critical role of coach as a resource distributor. A simple question someone asked me a few weeks ago made me ponder this in new way.

“How has the advance of technology affected leaders?”

I found myself talking before I even knew what I was saying. I shared my own experience and then said this, “That is no longer true. People don’t need their leaders to resource them in the same way that I experienced in the past. Even now, I will Google something I don’t know about before I do anything else. Information is available so widely. No one would depend on his or her leader for information. In many cases, people that I work with are way more knowledgeable about what is going on in certain areas than I am.”

Have you ever just said something and been surprised by it?  I was.

And then I started thinking.

If that is true, then the need for a leader to engage with team members, whether distributed or local, actually increases. Self-resourcing people can get into mission drift relatively quickly. There are thousands of sources of ideas. New ideas multiply and grab attention in ways that conventional means do not. And they can take you places that you can’t see ahead of time.

If you’re the kind of leader who assumes that “no news is good news” or that people will call me when they need me, you’re making a bad assumption. Because things can be all quiet and you can be thinking that things are going well when drift is happening.

If leaders are no longer the primary resource sharers or generators, then what do they bring to the people they lead? I have to think that it’s the interaction, affirmation, correction, encouragement and clarity that people are looking for that is the essence of the leader/follower relationship. Are we accomplishing what we are called to accomplish?

What do the people you lead really need you to bring? Are you bringing it?

Follow Andrea on Twitter or Facebook.

The longer I live the more I appreciate the value of having the right tool for the job at hand.

This morning Omar is tiling our master bathroom. In less than 90 minutes he removed our old toilet, stripped off two ancient layers of linoleum, pulled up all the baseboards and cleared away all the old glue.

When we tackled the first two bathrooms in DIY projects it took us the better part of a day on each one to accomplish the same results.

Omar has been doing this for 17 years. He has just a few tools, but they are the right ones. It’s amazing how quickly a job can get done when one has the right tools.

I’ve experienced this in my hobbies of cycling and music. Pulling the bottom bracket on my Cannondale road bike or smoothing out the worn frets on my Taylor guitar would take forever without the right wrench or luthier’s fret file. Trying to do the job with the wrong tool would probably result in stripped threads or a scratched fretboard. I’ve discovered it’s worth the money to invest in the right tools. Avoiding those kinds of problems also makes it a lot easier to walk in the Spirit.

The same is true at work. When I continually get stopped by not having the right tool or knowledge of how to use that tool, I have one of two good options. The first is to schedule some time in the calendar to become proficient in the tool (such as Excel or Twitter or a new phone’s OS). Eventually I can ignore the tool and focus on what I want to do. The second option is to support and follow a team member’s lead in letting them do what I cannot do or choose not to learn (such as our complicated financial reporting software) so we can get on with the mission.

I guess a third option would be to continue being inefficient, frustrated, unproductive or irrelevant.

Thanks, Omar, for the great life lesson today.

“Real artists ship.” — Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

That was one of Steve Jobs’ early mantras for his team of geniuses. What did he mean? Jobs meant that it doesn’t really matter how beautiful your dreams are, how simple your lines are, or how ergonomic your next product is in your mind’s eye. Real artists ship. They produce. They deliver.

Delivering great products will be one of Steve Jobs’ enduring legacies. Did you know that Steve delivered the Apple II computer in 1977, when he was a 22 year old college dropout? Like Michael Dell and Bill Gates (two other college dropouts who began to change the world before they reached 25), Jobs seemed to me an eccentric positive deviant whose ideas were initially resisted by the establishment. Cultural inertia tends to norm everything to average: average grades, average products, average levels of initiative. Jobs inspired and delivered, redefining “normal” for millions of people. For example, I find it totally normal to have my entire music and video collection of 5,913 items in my pocket, going everywhere I go, every day. That wasn’t true ten years ago.

Here’s a thought in the same spirit: Real leaders lead. Real leaders make stuff happen. They don’t just daydream, strategize, plan, and cast vision. Real leaders deviate from the system. They reset their culture’s “norm” needle. They make deadlines and hit targets. Not perfectly, and not every time. But often enough to build legitimate expectations and set new standards among their followers. Things are different after they leave.

Nehemiah was another leader who delivered. Burdened by reports of the desolation of his hometown, Jerusalem, he inspired and motivated hundreds of ordinary citizens to refortify the city’s wall and gates. He endured attacks from external foes and dissent from within. Yet “the wall was finished… in fifty-two days” (Nehemiah 6:15).

Real artists ship. Real leaders lead.

What is stopping your dream from shipping?

This paper is not going to write itself.

October arrived four days ago. With a November 1 deadline looming for the first three chapters of my 150-page dissertation, I reached the sobering conclusion that:

This paper is not going to write itself.

For the next few weeks (27 days to be exact) my early mornings, late evenings and weekends will have a singular focus. This is painful. It’s also helpful. The process helps me clarify ideas that have been rumbling around in my head for several years. The deadline is a gift. To enjoy it, I must act now.

What challenge are you facing?

That new exercise regimen isn’t going to work out by itself.
That strained relationship probably won’t reconcile itself.
That agenda for the upcoming meeting won’t plan itself.
That afternoon with a spouse, child or good friend won’t just happen by itself.
That huge project isn’t going to be broken down into workable next steps and delegated by itself.
That time to rest and Sabbath won’t simply appear in the overloaded calendar.

Leadership is character in action.

What is God leading you to do? Act now.

What if we tried a fresh, 20-century-old approach to church?

It might look like this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aI6soIIWKI