Until about a week ago this question had never crossed my mind.

My son Travis brought this issue to my attention. He’s in his third year at the University of Florida in Gainesville. This is the same Gainesville where a local pastor of a very small church has garnered worldwide attention by staging a Koran burning on September 11th. September 11th also happens to be Travis’ 21st birthday, so he’s trying to figure out how to constructively engage in this drama while demonstrating the love of Christ.

We need some voices of sanity to speak into this chaos. Enter Jimmy Trent, leader of the CRU ministry team at UF. Jimmy just posted a fantastic, well-reasoned and Christ-honoring response to this pastor’s warped sense of faith. He begins by saying:

I am saddened that Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center is leading an outrageous act of burning Korans on September 11th. I am saddened that this may result in harm to Americans worldwide as General David Patraeus stated Monday. Ultimately, I am saddened that Jesus is being misrepresented to millions while news outlets across the world continue to pounce on this story as it unfolds.

Trent continues:

I believe that as Christians, and as Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU) at the University of Florida, we do have a radical message and we are called to communicate that in a radical way. We differ from Jones, though, in both our message and our method.

Our message is radical. We are all sinners and enemies of God deserving hell, we all need to be saved and only Jesus can do that (John 14:6). Is that radical? Absolutely.

Our method is radical. We love as Jesus loved in that, while we were still sinners and enemies of God, Jesus died for us. We now give our lives to love our friends and enemies alike, not hate them (Matthew 5:43, 44). Is that radical? Absolutely.

Way to go, Jimmy. Thanks for taking a stand and answering the question above with a resounding “no.”

Why movements?

Because Jesus working through a team of like-hearted followers to win, build and send new generations of Christ-centered multiplying disciples is THE way that The Way told us to get the job done. Loving God, loving people, and launching simple, organic movements that multiply over and over and over again leads to the fulfillment of the Great Commission. If that sounds too simplistic, maybe it’s just because we’ve overcomplicated things in the past few centuries of church life.

Here are three links to get your creative movement juices flowing:

Floyd McClung interview on simple church-planting movements (and his new book “Follow”) on Steve Addison’s blog.

Tim Keller’s recent straight up blog post on Movements in which he coins the term “spontaneous generativity.”

Crazy Man dancing and starting a movement. This one’s been around for awhile but is still lots of fun.

Go. Make disciples. Grab some friends and change our world.

Recently I was reviewing the Google Analytics report for my blog and realized that many popular posts are no longer easily visible. The nature of blogs makes it easy to bury treasure from past posts. Not that all of these are treasure, but they have generated lots of traffic. I hope that some of these topics serve you well.

Four On-Ramps To Personal Leadership Development

How To Engage Younger Leaders

Tips for a Great Sabbatical

Leadership Reading List 2010

My Ride Across Florida 2010

Humility Stinks

A Second Look At 2 Timothy 2:2

How Do We Lead Gen F?

Downloads

If you’re a blogger, how have you found ways to keep some of your best content fresh and visible?

Recently I listened to a wonderful 10 minute HBR interview with 85-year old leadership guru Warren Bennis. Opening question: What are two or three of the characteristics of really great leaders?

1. Great leaders build great teams. “You can’t win this contest without a lot of help. It ain’t just one man.”

2. Great leaders have good judgment. Great leaders have the ability to select people who have the capacity to get things done AND play well with others in the sandbox.

I am impressed with Warren’s insights into the crucible of war and the crucible of age, sacrifice, generosity, respect and what he calls “leadership grace.”

Warren’s final question was: “If you want to be a great leader, you need to….”

How would you finish that sentence?

I have the unique privilege of serving as an executive in a very cool global organization. We’re doing a global restructuring this month (ok, this year) to stay true to our roots while leaning into the future.

One of our focal points is learning to share leadership through highly effective teams. Unfortunately, some of our old cultural baggage has translated this shift as “we need more meetings, with more people, so that everyone can have a voice in everything.” That’s not really what anyone wants, and it is certainly not what we need. That’s why I’m excited about Michael Hyatt’s review of Rework. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve entered Hyatt’s online contest here to win a copy next Monday. If I don’t win a hard copy I’ll probably Kindle it. (Michael, if you’re reading this, please don’t let this disqualify me from the pool of potential winners, ok?).

Hyatt summarizes: “The authors’ simple premise is that work does not have to be as complicated as we make it. We gunk it up with too much planning, too many meetings, and too much process and paperwork. What we really need to do is to stop talking and start working.”

Have you read Rework? What were you moved to start, stop, or change?

Leaders tend to be people of action. Doers. Agents of change. That’s good and necessary because we all know that talk is cheap. Effective leadership is all about turning vision into action, right?

For me, problems arise when my bias toward action becomes a treadmill of ceaseless activity. This tires everyone out and inevitably leads to a loss of focus, loss of presence, personal fatigue and mission drift. This is when I become vulnerable to the temptation of lesser things: quick fix ‘solutions’ (sinful or otherwise) for urgent problems that mask a waning intimacy with my Source of power, life and strength.

In our overloaded media-saturated world, reflection is becoming a lost art.

This week I’m up at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, enjoying a wonderful week-long intensive focused on the Servant Leader’s Inner Life. Our readings and conversations reinforce the absolute necessity of cultivating habits of reflection. Justin, our prof, opened the week by asking us to think about two leaders who have experienced personal or professional failure due to lack of attention to the inner life. This launched a 90-minute discussion (we had no shortage of examples) around what may have contributed to these failures, and what personal habits may have helped prevent them, had they been in place.

As if on cue, my friend Sam in Nigeria sent me a link to a column entitled “Your Most Important Conversation” by Gordon MacDonald. Gordon is one of my favorite writers because he knows what it’s like to fall and he writes with authentic, grounded spirituality. This quote caught my attention:

Withdrawal for inner conversation parallels the priority flight attendants express when passengers on a plane are told that, if the oxygen masks appear, they should put theirs on first before helping others. Counter-intuitive, especially for mothers, but thoroughly logical.

Writer Anthony Bloom described his father as a man who knew inner conversation well. When he felt the need to do his own soul-work, he would sometimes tack a sign to his front door: “Don’t go to the trouble of knocking. I am at home, but I will not answer the door.”

This is not easy for those of us who are people-pleasers. We are suckers for knocks on our front door.

Are you a sucker? Servant leaders are called not to please people, but to please the Lord by meeting people’s real needs as they are revealed through interaction and reflection. In my experience,  the busier my schedule, the more I need to carve out space to think, listen, pray and reflect. Think Jesus in Mark 1, pulling away before dawn when everyone was looking for him.

What habits help you practice reflective leadership?

Sometimes I’m not sure what I want to write about, or if what I write will really make a difference. During these periods I’m learning a simple lesson: Write anyway.

Anyone who has mastered a skill, a sport, an instrument, painting, speaking or writing will probably offer you the same advice: Stay at it. Research streams consistently tell us that it takes about 10,000 hours in a complex activity to become an expert. That’s roughly five years of working 40 hours per week at something. OK, inhale. Exhale. My experience shows that depending on the complexity of the task and how deeply ingrained I want it to become a habit, it will probably take three to six months to get over the hump, then another year to really feel like I know what I am doing. This has proved true for changing my diet, learning a new job, making a new exercise program a part of my life, doing doctoral level research, and leading teams.

This morning I was in a conversation with someone who wants to start blogging. I offered him the same advice I had received three years ago when I began writing www.OnLeadingWell.com. I knew I wanted to blog regularly but feared I would lose motivation. These three questions helped me focus:

1. What am I passionate about? This must be something I naturally think about, read about, live out and and discuss with friends late at night.

2. What am I knowledgeable about? I have more than a handful of blog posts in my head on this topic AND I could write about it regularly.

3. What do I want to focus on and continue to learn about, perhaps to a point of mastery? I will add value for my readers only if I provide them with ideas, inspiration and resources that they might not have the time, perspective or connections to find on their own.

The best blogs, the ones I find myself returning to over and over again, seem to share these characteristics. So, if you’re wondering what to write about, find a blank piece of paper and answer these three questions. Make some notes. Jot down random ideas. Draw a few pictures. Then put it aside for a day and come back and stare at it. You’ll find what you’re looking for.

Here are two great links on overcoming inertia when trying to write blogs (by Michael Hyatt) or books (by Matt Mikalatos).

So, what do you want to write about?

I just hung up the phone with a senior executive who asked me this question: How do we engage younger leaders?

It’s a great question, one that is repeatedly asked as the Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) reshape our churches, companies and organizations. Here are some tips that I have learned from others or from my own experience in positively engaging younger leaders over the past decade:

1. Give them a piece of the action. This generation is not willing to wait 5-10 years in a job to start making a difference or having a voice. Institutional loyalty is low, but willingness to work hard is very high – if the vision is compelling. Look for ways to appropriately engage them in setting direction.

2. Entrust them with real responsibility and chances for achievement. Pay and working conditions are probably far less important than the work itself. This generation (like most younger generations throughout history) really wants to change the world. Will we let them?

3. Mentor, don’t mother. This generation aspires to lead and has the horsepower to do so. Having grown up in online social networks, many already possess the knowledge, intellectual flexibility and the social awareness of emerging leaders. Their desire to exert influence doesn’t mean they want to stage a coup of older generations. Most long for a mentor – a stable, trusted elder relationship that doesn’t focus on “the good old days” but dreams about the future together.

4. Provide sufficient structure by limiting options. Option overload has brought this generation to brink of analysis paralysis. I was in a leadership workshop last week when the topic of structure and constraint came up. Some people hear the word “structure” and envision a prison cell in which all movement is stifled. Others view constraint in a more positive way, like riverbanks that give shape to a mighty river instead of allowing it to flood everywhere. Focus brings power and fruitfulness.

How do you like to be engaged?

Leadership is hard work. Good leadership is really hard work. Today’s dynamic, rapidly changing knowledge economy provides an ever-shifting landscape that requires multiple perspectives to navigate well.

Exit the know-it-all, do-it-all leader.

Enter the self-aware, in-touch connector that can share leadership by pulling people, resources and ideas together to get the job done.

What is shared leadership? Marshall Goldsmith describes it this way in an excellent post: “Shared leadership involves maximizing all of the human resources in an organization by empowering individuals and giving them an opportunity to take leadership positions in their areas of expertise. With more complex markets increasing the demands on leadership, the job in many cases is simply too large for one individual. Sharing leadership isn’t easy, but it’s definitely possible, and in many cases, highly successful.”

Goldsmith suggests ways to share leadership and maximize talent. Here are a few:

• Give power away to the most qualified individuals to strengthen their capabilities.
• Define the limits of decision-making power.
• Cultivate a climate in which people feel free to take initiative on assignments.
• Give qualified people discretion and autonomy over their tasks and resources and encourage them to use these tools.
• Don’t second guess the decisions of those you have empowered to do so.

As leaders, our job is to constantly move those people our organizations touch from strangers to acquaintances, from acquaintances to friends, and from friends to partners in our common mission. Sharing leadership usually provides the best pathway to true partnership.

How are you learning to share leadership?

More and more conversations revolve around the type of leadership required in our rapidly changing global culture. Many cite the “new skills” needed in this environment, such as trust-building, empathy, networking, and the ability to empower others. Though few will come out and label this package as such, it seems to me we’re really talking about servant leadership.

If that is the type of leadership in great demand today, what exactly is servant leadership?

Robert Greenleaf coined the term as he sought to answer this question in his 1977 classic, Servant Leadership:

The servant leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such, it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

Greenleaf’s insights echo the voice of the greatest servant leader who ever lived. In addressing his followers immediately after a nasty internal power struggle, Jesus had this to say:

“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10:42-44)

Jesus laid it out pretty clearly. There are normal leaders whose focus is all about who has authority and is in charge. These are a dime a dozen. Then there are those who have made the mindshift from “over/under” to “among” – great leaders who seek to serve. And for those who aspire to be the greatest? They must become slaves of all.

How do you define, or better yet, practice servant leadership?