Principles of Effective Leadership - Lesson 10

Dr. John Johnson
Principles of Effective Leadership
PC506-10
The Core Values of a Leader (Part 1/2)
Lesson Transcript

Dr. John Johnson [00:00:00] So, Sandy, what do you think? Are we ready? How do you feel?

Sandy [00:00:04] I think we are ready.

Dr. John Johnson [00:00:06] Think our hearts are there?

Sandy [00:00:08] Yeah, are you guys already? Oh, the hearts.

Dr. John Johnson [00:00:15] Dominique's going, “Come on, let's go. Huh?”

Dominique [00:00:17] Clock's running.

Dr. John Johnson [00:00:19] There you go, clock's running. Terry's going, “Let me know when you're all back.”

Terry [00:00:29] I got something I’m working on.

Dr. John Johnson [00:00:30] I'm working on something else here. One of the things I wanted you to do. I want to get to core values. I’m going to take a couple moments here. You're reading through both leadership moment and axiom, right? Right. Now, you all bring this. I'll put you on the spot here a little bit. Tell me an axiom I want you to share with me the one that you want. Yeah, I like that. That's good. Got to remember that axiom. You like it?

Speaker 5 [00:01:04] I like it. All right. Very deep, concise.

Dr. John Johnson [00:01:09] Concise.

Speaker 5 [00:01:10] Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. John Johnson [00:01:12] And there you go. Okay, so give me one. I'm going to. Start. Sandy, I'll start with you. You look great.

Sandy [00:01:22] Everybody. I like number five.

Dr. John Johnson [00:01:24] Okay.

Sandy [00:01:25] Keep the picture.

Dr. John Johnson [00:01:26] When you point out one, maybe point to like one paragraph or a couple things you underline or start.

Sandy [00:01:35] Mm hmm. What I notice is on the page 31 God brings. It's in the little.

Dr. John Johnson [00:01:43] Oh, okay.

Sandy [00:01:44] When God brings clarity and certainty to our readers, life, everything changes for the better. Couple of years of no vision for where I'm going. Yeah. In my countenance. Change the process of writing and say. Yeah. Inspire people to say yes. That's where we're going.

Dr. John Johnson [00:02:05] Yeah.

Sandy [00:02:06] And I wanted to tell people when I had a vision, I wanted to share. Mm hmm.

Dr. John Johnson [00:02:11] Yeah. Good. That's very good. Somebody else. What Acxiom stood out for you.

Speaker 5 [00:02:22] Is the value of a good idea.

Dr. John Johnson [00:02:24] At which number?

Speaker 5 [00:02:25] That's number ten.

Dr. John Johnson [00:02:27] Okay, Page.

Speaker 5 [00:02:29] Page 42 through 44.

Dr. John Johnson [00:02:32] Okay. What did you start there, Adam?

Speaker 5 [00:02:35] I started on 44. It's kind of closer to the bottom, up from the bottom. Basically, they had, you know, this was the sports guy coming to speak to the church, and they had the service all planned out and everything. And everything was fine. It was going to be okay, but there was nothing spectacular about it. And they had 20 minutes left of their meeting and they just said, you know what? Let's make this one last volume push to make it that much better. And so they came up with an actual decent idea and being the best part of the service. I just like the fact that, you know, you know, they might have everything squared away. It might just be, you know, routine or good praise. It's valuable to stop and say, okay, let's let's push for the next 10 minutes and see if we can make this thing just out of the ballpark.

Dr. John Johnson [00:03:27] I like that. Yeah.

Speaker 5 [00:03:29] Just not being satisfied and still pushing the next level.

Dr. John Johnson [00:03:34] Yeah, kind of using what God has given us. And that's creativity and imagination. Not letting that sit on the shelf.

Speaker 5 [00:03:45] Not being lazy.

Dr. John Johnson [00:03:46] Yeah, that's a big part of it, isn't it? Yeah. Some people have is a strength. What is it? Ideation. That's just their strong suit. They like to think of ideas. A great balancer is Belsky book Turning Vision into Reality that ideas at the same time have a high mortality rate. There are IDEO people, but what we have to do is to make sure ideas can get into reality.

Speaker 5 [00:04:18] Make the clarification that, you know, it can take potentially 50 bad ideas before you have a good one.

Dr. John Johnson [00:04:25] Yeah, but sometimes the reason a lot of ideas are bad ideas is because no one takes the time to think of the action steps required to get there. So they just kind of die as a slow or quick death. Who's got another axiom?

Sandy [00:04:45] I'm a writer. Number one, this really hit home.

Dr. John Johnson [00:04:48] Language matters in my life. Yeah, You wrote me about that. Yeah. Yeah.

Sandy [00:04:55] To me, it just parallels what Christ in Christ spoke in parables and said. I think you're saying 15 to disciple something about I used to use figurative language and now I am speaking to you plainly. And I'm very right brain. And I think a lot that there's some very powerful truth in a word picture. So I think that's kind of what it was a little similar to that idea was we can capture people's imagination through the a well-chosen word. He uses the word weight bearing. I take notes. I don't underline so I didn't underline specific points, but he had an illustration of having a vision test in the weekend. So to cast a vision, you have to capture the heart of the people. And he used the word unprecedented and unleashing convey his Ministry for discipleship. He was casting a vision for a new discipleship paradigm program. He coined the phrase a slogan calls it, of their particular vision for discipleship. And so the word unprecedented. And then went, Shane As a writer, I find there are state standards or national standards. One of the national standards of teaching writing is you help children choose colorful words. You start with a clear idea, a good organization, and then you choose colorful words. And that's your adjectives and your verbs. You know the different parts of speech, but haven't really kind of grabbed it and.

Dr. John Johnson [00:06:35] Good. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Ten.

Terry [00:06:41] First I go to the forward by cloud. Hmm. These. They heaved. They want to truly raise the responsibility of their leader. I do not mention Harold yet. I'm very impressed. Because the FA were like this. There is the leader's responsibility in the leadership. Mm hmm. It is. It does cause the vision and mission to have a tangible result in the real world. The leader of means. Look at the reality. You always see the reality. And in the real world, have a problem. If a leader just have a dreaming in the image in his imagination, were they doing something? They won't let any people do any better situation under their word. Right now. I recognize some people like that, this son of a son. First of all, very idealistic and not practical for the country. Right. We see that the sooner or later the country will go to some direction. His values from now that a leader is also responsible for this, the spirit of his or her follow the thing that people to experience more help, more road, more success. I remember I will learn. Some will say that the true leader is the leader who create leader of leader and others he himself like George W Bush. I don't see have any ability himself, but he had very, very good ability. He bring up some good men. He was George W Bush. He bring up all who upon they put in the in the national station. Many good people, many good leader and moderate in politics. So I respect those kind of leader. The leader need a vision. This the big in chapter five. I know you bring up the vision of the leader, the leader not to have a vision. He see through the history, sees through that cloud of the uncertainty, the cloud of the war, the cloud of the trouble in politics. You see the vision. We need that kind of people, especially for this great country like America. We need that. One more chapter full.

Dr. John Johnson [00:09:37] Well, I'm going to I'm just going to give you one shot. Everybody gets one shot, so we'll come back for more. But that's good. That's good. And thanks for reading the forward to, you know, sometimes we can read right past forwards of books, but sometimes those forwards pre faces are really, really important parts of books. And they set the context that we were just How am I thank thank you.

Terry [00:10:01] I read more on this than we.

Dr. John Johnson [00:10:03] Yeah. And we're going to get there. Anybody else want to share.

Dominique [00:10:08] Chapter to the big ask And we Yeah. Alluded to this in our early discussion that I'm kind of afraid to ask people in the church because I, I figure they're going to go, what are we paying you for, preacher man? You know, And now Hybels, as shamelessly as I did publicly, privately and prayerfully, I thought that was a great outline on yeah approach asking is then also in the next paragraph he said When handled properly, people are actually quite flattered to be asked to be significant things for God. Yeah, and so that was encouraging to me. And if I need to, I need to do that. I need to ask people to use that.

Dr. John Johnson [00:10:46] Yeah, that's a great chapter in it. We tend to want to hold back and well, I don't want to if we really believe in what we're doing. Well, we're not afraid to ask anything. Yeah, Yeah. I remember Rick Warren. I always remember the statement he made. He said, people don't give to a great need. They give to a great vision. And that's always helped me a lot because a lot of times in ministry we're saying, oh, you know, the needs are really great here. And I don't know if we're going to be able to make payroll and, you know, meet. And generally people that do respond to that don't necessarily respect you, but they'll they're sympathetic. It's like if a pastor says, oh, man, it's really hard. We couldn't have a chance to really put together this message like I would have liked to. People may listen and they'll be sympathetic, but they won't respect you back to give. What people do like to give to is when you say, God, there's a great vision here. We've got a great opportunity here.

Dominique [00:11:48] That is so true. And I've seen it actualized in our church because we do this mission in Sudan. In fact, I'll be going over in November with one of my guys. And what we do is we have desert auctions to raise money for it and the people go nuts like last time out hundred dollars for like a plate with seven brownies on it. But it's because they believe in the cause. Yeah.

Dr. John Johnson [00:12:11] Yeah. And again, if you can elevate it one more step from men. There's a great need over here to if we do this, this is what we could accomplish in terms of where we want to see God work out into building the kingdom. That's great. That so I'm a real proponent of seminary. Sometimes it mystifies me that we struggle financially because I like to tell people, well, you know, top of the world, this is a healthy church. And the hope of a healthy church is its leaders. And that's where what we're about is training tomorrow's leaders. I don't mind saying so. Can you tell me a better investment? I don't know of one. We ready to move on? Let's talk about core values. And I would like to for time permits, I'd like to talk at least about chapter one of housing, because I think that's one of the great chapters in the book, just learning about leadership. So what I'll do with core values is I'll talk a little bit about core values and then we'll stop for a minute and then we'll process together, you know, just in what tin brought out. If you go back to Axiom and you go back to the preface there, Claude makes this point the leader's third responsibility and the toughest of them all is self leadership, the commitment to constant improvement as a leader. Few things are more tragic than seeing zeal, talent and a God given goal fail because a leader neglected to get better. And that gets back to two core values. One of our most challenging aspects of being a leader is we think about the challenges of who we're leading, where we're trying to go, what our vision and all. But really one of our greatest challenges is self leadership, as he puts it here, leading ourself. Part of what I do in the introduction is raise this question Is character essential? Because there are a lot of leaders. That character seems to not be so great. Steve Jobs is a great leader, but in many ways he's not. In terms of just his character. People who've worked under him, what he's like isn't necessarily always very, very good character. So the question is, can you be a good leader, a great leader, even without the character side of things? And there's kind of a debate about that. It depends on, again, how we define leaders. If we say a leader, someone who has followers, has influence and leads towards that direction, a lot of people meet those criteria, but aren't the most ethical people in the world or people we admire for their core values. Starting with someone as extreme as a Hitler, He had a lot of influence, had a lot of followers. He had his mind cop, his direction of where he wanted to take people. Alexander the Great I List. Here is another example for us. In a course on Godly leadership, we'd say, you know, really, really, truly, though, however, great, great leaders have a certain gravitas about them, They walk in the room and you just sense it, not because they have all this power. There's just something of substance to their lives, something that says I want to follow. And that really, I think, gets back to character. And Stanley and let's put it this way, you can lead without character, but you won't be a leader worth following in the final analysis. So at a certain point, a leader has to decide who they are, what they want to become, and where they will invest their best leadership energies. Will it be to lead people or will it be to give my best energies to leading myself? Because let's face it, all of us around this table here, when it comes to leadership, again, that's going to be our big challenge is leading me decisions I make watching over my heart. What am I paying attention knowing that I can take people no further than I take myself? Right? We can fool ourself for a while, but the reality is we can only take people as far as we go. If we don't go very far in our own selves. We can't take people beyond that. That's just a myth. I've been imagining. What I give on page two are. People in all kinds of different leadership fields who all recognize the importance of character. SPURGEON In a sense, says we are our own tools and we have to keep them in order or warn business. Who said in the corporate realm. Character is the key to leadership or in the military realm. I like Schwarzkopf. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without strategy. And then Gergen, who in the political realm who studied all these presidents and has worked with them and watched them, you know, makes this point that a leader has to have a true north. I like that statement. A true north. You know what he means by that? That sort of like a compass, that a compass isn't going to direct you in the right way if it doesn't have the right reading. With a true north and leaders have to do that gives example to people like Clinton, who you know, as much as in many ways I've always liked Clinton. I like his mind. I like I think he's been one of our brightest presidents. Or Nixon. I always liked Nixon, even though he wasn't one you would, from a personal side gravitate to. But he was a great strategist. But what a Nixon and a Clinton lacked, to a certain extent, was a true North. Just something in the compass bearing something in them. So the question then is what are core values? And what I define it as here are inner beliefs, the things intrinsic in us, what a person is in the dark. What it is behind closed doors, not what people think we are, but what we know we are and has little to do there. Fourth, personality or image. Kind of the bottom line what we stand for, what you fight for, what you believe in, in the very deepest parts of your soul. And why establish these things? Because they will shape our leadership. We can't get away from that. It will shape how we treat people, how we make decisions, how we use our time. They also inspire followership. Paul was followed and embraced because he had these core values. We see that in Acts 20 when he gathers the elders together. They follow them because they they saw his character acts 20, 20, 32 to 37. What are the criteria for legitimate core values? I give some guidelines here. They go deeper than us. They are constant. They engender commitment. They are real, tangible. All of that leads to the question. So what are those critical core values? I mean, there are a lot of different values one could list here. And if you read leadership books, you'll see a lot of different ones. But what I've tried to capture from a lot of my reading, studying scripture, looking at leaders, asking this question, what are the critical core values here? The seven that just stand out that I keep coming back to? I don't list these necessarily. And what's the most important to the least important? They're all like pieces of the pie. They're all valuable. But I will say just two seems to be, especially in Scripture, what seems to always stand out and what makes a great leader, what defines great, great character. And as I've defined here, it's a leader who's fair minded, impartial and passionate to do the right thing, who again thinks about his followers and asks the question, Is this fair? You know, works hard against injustice, hates injustice, calls for justice, wants to distribute things rightly. If you study Proverbs and Proverbs, I take it, is the leadership manual of Scripture. I may have said that earlier, but the reason is, is because it's clear. It's evident as you read through Proverbs, that it was written largely to the leaders of the day, to the up and coming future presidents, if you will. We see language throughout Proverbs. That is the king speaking to the prince, saying one day when you're in this role and what stands out is justice. This is right there at the top of what it calls them to be to do. What you might underline here is Proverbs 31, the prayer of King Lemuel if you ever want to do. Father's Day sermon, for example. I think it's one of the great text. This is a mother speaking to her son and basically her son, who is the king. She calls him above everything else to be a man of justice. You know, do what's fair. Always look out for the oppressed, always call for justice. It's what we want people to do. I mean, what Excuse me? What? We want leaders. We need leaders to do, right? They need to be the ones who say this is not right. This is not fair. You know, right now with the Gulf spill, to a certain extent, what do we want in leaders? We want leaders to do what's right. And where we see victims, we want a leader that's going to say things are going to be made right here. It's a big part of what leaders do if they have this as a core value. The obvious second one is integrity. We want this in leaders. Ancient Near East Wisdom emphasizes this. This Hebrew word to mom, to mom has the idea of again, whole or sound or finished complete. The antonym is the Hebrew word self, which means to twist or pervert. I like this quote by Alan Simpson, who says he was introducing Gerald Ford one day and he said, If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters. That's a great statement in it. If you have integrity, then it doesn't matter what the results are, where it goes, what happens At the end of the day, You can look in the mirror and say, I believe I did this with integrity. Then it doesn't matter, You know, like a hard decision we've made at church. Ultimately, I have to look in the mirror and say that I do this with integrity. If I did it, then it doesn't matter. Even if it goes well, if it doesn't go well, and I did it with integrity, it doesn't matter either. It's, as one put it, the linchpin of leadership, not pieces of integrity. Here are some words we're used to our honesty. Leaders are truth tellers, Quess and Posner, who wrote this leadership challenge, which is a leadership textbook used in many different institutions. They did this huge research of core values across many different cultures, and it's just a huge survey. They asked this question What do you value more than anything else? And number one always came back to truth telling honesty. It's what is important to people. So what we need are leaders who act with ruthless honesty, which means a leader never lies to himself, always encourages accountability, acts with candor. Here's a bit of a dilemma. There are times a leader can't be so candid, can't be so honest. And therein is sometimes the real challenge. You want to say something, but legally you're bound not to. You'd like to explain why you make a decision, but it would betray confidences. It can almost smell and feel like you're being a bit dishonest, and yet you know that you're still trying to deal with integrity. I found leadership sometimes puts me in awkward positions, I want to say, but I can't say I want to say. But I don't think in the long run it would be the most helpful thing. While I believe in honesty with all of my heart is critical, a critical core value, I found that sometimes a leader can't say everything. And there. And it's hard, isn't it? You know what? I'm. You know what I mean? Authenticity is another word. A leader who has integrity is a leader who's who's real. He or she is not trying to be somebody they're not. And as you get, you know, you go through your journey and chapters. You've got to be who you are in that journey. If you're 60, you can't try to act like 30. You've got to be who you are. And people want us to be who we are. So I put here, a leader does not trim his principles or her ideas to please, does not cut conscience to fit this year's fashions. I like that. First Peter five caused leaders to prove to be examples. Authenticity. It means follow through. Will I keep my commitments? The leaders have to think about this one. Sometimes, if you have a history of always being late or you, you're always bending things a little bit. There's responsibility leaders are given in terms of follow through and consistency. You have to be sensitive to or can question a lot of things. Purity, steadiness, are other words of put here. And then I have this quote that I really like. Integrity is like oxygen. The higher you go to, less there is of it. Sometimes it seems like also the system is set up that the higher you go the in it's like sometimes you ask yourself if a person ever gets to be president of the United States, can they ever get there by keeping their integrity? How many things do you have to do behind closed doors or behind the scenes? You wonder sometimes. A third core value is loyalty. Loyal to one's calling, one's family, one's mission, one's staff. Loyalty is a huge core value, I think, in leaders. And again, it starts with being loyal to what you believe God called you to be, God called you to do. It's being loyal to where you'll put your time and who you will invest in. We live in a day right now where loyalty is not a big deal. I mean, people move from if there's a better deal. Pastors can use ministries to climb ladders to other situations. There's not loyalty like there used to be. But it's at the very heart of what God calls us to be part of it is being committed to the people we lead. You know, it's being honest. Sometimes we'll hide behind language when we leave a people like, well, God called me over here. It takes us off the hook and people might feel really betrayed. We owe it to people. We lead to always be honest with them. To be honest means to say honestly, I'm ready for a new challenge. I think, honestly, I've taken you as far as I can go. I remember a pastor. I worked with him, use the language when he left his church. He said, God's called me to this new work and we've entered into this marriage. And I remember thinking that was really unfortunate language, because in a sense, what you said to these people, you just divorced them. But sometimes we like to use God language because it gets us off the hook of having to explain, because it puts people in the position of having to argue with God. If I say to Terry, if Terry says John, I'm not sure really if you're going the right direction. And I go, Well, Terry, you know, this is where God's called me. End of discussion, in a sense, is what I've done with that statement. Unless Terry's wise enough to say maybe something like this. John, don't take this personal and don't misread what I'm going to say. But can we live? Got out of this for a moment and talk about this. That's all part of integrity. It's all part of loyalty. It means standing by those who are attacked, because sometimes those we work with will be attacked and we stand with them. It sometimes can mean something like this. I don't always agree with the decision, but I'm part of this team or he's the leader and I work under him and I don't always understand, but I don't have all the facts. It's praying regularly for those we lead because that's part of loyalty. Those are some pieces. Okay, I'll stop there for a moment. Those are three values. So just to get started, thank you for a little bit. Thoughts. Justice, integrity, loyalty. What do you think of those three, though, so far seem to be the right core values of those three. Which one seems to sometimes get compromise more than any other one as you observe leadership?

Dominique [00:31:10] Just. Hmm.

Sandy [00:31:14] Time to represent all the groups, and maybe not intentionally. Aware.

Dr. John Johnson [00:31:22] It's a challenge to be impartial, isn't it? We're kind of partial by nature, so pushing ourselves to a place of being totally objective, you almost wonder, can I really be? I'm always going to have a certain subjectivity to my life, a certain partiality. I have to ask myself sometimes in leading a multiethnic congregation. Am I willing to try to think as hard as I can and as equal as I can about how maybe a Korean sees this issue as an angle? It's a little bit much of what you're getting. Yeah.

Sandy [00:32:00] Prejudice.

Dr. John Johnson [00:32:02] As much as it is the reality, we all have a certain prejudice. When I was young, I had a certain prejudice towards older people. Now, as I'm getting older, I'm starting to have a certain prejudice towards younger people. And I have to stop and go. Wait a minute. Where's that?

Sandy [00:32:19] In fact, let your parents read windows to Harry Potter. Hmm.

Dr. John Johnson [00:32:24] Yeah.

Sandy [00:32:25] Right. I heard you. What you're aware of is that little tip. But there's a lot of things you're aware of psychologically, subconsciously.

Dr. John Johnson [00:32:34] That you don't see. I mean. Yeah.

Sandy [00:32:38] I think loyalty is a difficult one to follow and maybe start to disagree with certain of your followers, and then you kind of realign yourself to go with others. Hmm.

Dr. John Johnson [00:32:51] There have been a couple of times in the last few days there's been a piece of me that says, I think I'll just go somewhere else. Then I go, No, I'm loyal to these people. You know, loyalty is through thick and thin, and there will be sunny days and stormy days. Our culture tends to we have too many easy outs. That's why loyalty, I think, is becoming rare and rare in our culture. Divorce is so easy. People leave churches at the drop of a hat, and Noah is sometimes called really over that you're leaving. But maybe our culture has trained people to do that. If the average pastor leaves every two and a half years, that's the average. Well, it becomes hard for pastors to say, well, really, when you leave the church, somebody might say, well, you do. Whether it's marriage, you know, sports. I mean, wherever we look, it's rare to see someone that says through thick and thin, I'm here, I'm committed, I am loyal. You're going to have to work awfully hard to make me not stay with you. That's just pretty foreign to us.

Dominique [00:34:12] One of the ones I see filled out a lot, though, especially within Christianity and especially within the ministry, is authenticity. And I think that's because I'm not going to use the term Christianity, though, when I say Christian, because I think Christendom has built into it a lot of fallen standards, superficial standards. Yeah. In order to be well thought of within Christian and a lot of people think they have to act certain ways, have a Christian bumper sticker on their car. It's not based on actual God intersecting with human. It's a spirituality based on trying to generate appearances. Mm hmm. And so I just see that a lot. I go to pastor's conferences and I just keep going saying the same things and.

Terry [00:35:02] Loyalty. We look at the history of human. Many pairs managed to pass the ball over some time, not loyal to the veto, but to the fact. But if the leader is not while the ball is done because nobody would buy it.

Dr. John Johnson [00:35:31] Yeah, but I think that might explain why there is less loyalty to leaders today is because there aren't a lot of loyal leaders. Talking to a guy not too long ago who pastor came, a new pastor in town all ramped up about vision where we're going to go, challenged people, eventually move them to this building project. They're going to build this new campus to all of this. And as they're right in the midst of it. And then, of course, a pretty mounting debt with all of it, he said, you know, I'd love to stay with you into the next chapter, but I think I've got you started in God's Called US to. And they were just devastated. It was kind of like, well, you know, now there's going to be the pain of pain for all this work. And I think God's calling me somewhere else. That's the pain to. Let's look at a couple more here. So we've looked at loyalty. Here's, I think, a real important core value, and that's diligence. Or maybe another word here is responsibility. And that is great. Leaders take responsibility. Integrity plus diligence equals believability is how one puts the equation. And the reason I put diligence as one is because when you go back and study proverbs, you can't miss it. The diligence is a key. He keeps coming back to this often as a character quality. You know, you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. If you have diligence, you're going to be guarding yourself and the organization you lead from entropy. A lot of times when I see organizations that get to entropy and status quo and they begin to diminish, it's because a lot of times the leaders are lazy and the reality is, speaking in the pastoral world, there are a lot of lazy pastors who just coast. But I give some of the character qualities here. They have a nose for stale air. I like that in that true great leaders, diligent leaders have a nose for stale air. When things begin to become mechanical, when they begin to fall into this trap called incrementalism. You know, incrementalism is the CEO of PepsiCo. One day he gathered some of his best and brightest young superstar leaders emerging. I remember because I read his talk because I had a guy working for PepsiCo in Europe and he came back and he gave me the copy of the talk and what it is. He stood up and he said, here's the great challenge is not to fall prey to incrementalism. And then he defined incrementalism. Incrementalism is small changes to small things. And it's easy for leaders to begin to fall into that small change. That's a small thing. So what does that look like for you?

Sandy [00:38:35] Didn't advance your goal?

Dr. John Johnson [00:38:37] Not really. You know, here's what small changes to small things as it's coming to the end of the day and going. I got through all my emails or the inbox is emptied out and you're going home going, Wow, I feel so good. I got this done. But then you stop and realize that there's just a lot of small changes to mostly a lot of small things. Now, the obvious opposite of incrementalism is big changes. Two big things, right? A diligent leader, somebody who has diligence as a core value in their life, is interested in big changes to big things. It's not that we're going to do that every day in every moment, but it means that we keep our eye on that. I want to be part of big changes, too. Don't you? Who wants to make small changes to small things. And the reality is a lot of people live that way. You ask them, what would you do? You know, So how's your week? It's been pretty normal week. But what did you do? You know, the same. Small changes to small things, right? Maybe you didn't make any changes. So that means we have this nose for stale air. We encourage innovation, dreams, passions, encourage excellence. I think sometimes in our spiritual world, we we shy away from that word today as if it's a bad word. I don't think it's a bad word, do you? Is there any reason why we shouldn't strive for excellence? Like, let's say Nordstrom's strives for excellence should be different in the church. I mean, I think those are good questions to ask ourselves. I think we sometimes get concerned, kind of judgmental. I think sometimes people will use that kind of language to spiritualized laziness. Well, you know, I'm not into trying to be successful. That sounds so corporate might be a cover for how we don't really want to work hard at being really, really good at this or measuring performance leaders who have this as a core value establish metrics. See, this gets really kind of dicey for especially in a course on godly leadership that tends to avoid results. Now, you know, yes, it can go to an extreme. We're measuring what's our attendance versus last year's attendance, how many baptisms, all these things. But sometimes we can let the pendulum go to the other side, which we don't use any metrics to measure ourselves in ministry. And the problem with that is that how can you then over time, know if you've really accomplished anything? I believe a leader who has diligence as a core value forces himself or herself to think about metrics for his life, her life, as well as for those you lead the book, you will see that you will read if you haven't already. Collins on Good to great in the private sector what he addresses this very issue and that is we know how in the profit world the metrics they set up right they measure things like what sales services, all these different metrics. But the problem is in the nonprofit world, how do you set up metrics? How do you measure if you're doing really great ministry, say that's hard, right? We kind of go back to well, Paul said, you know, one plants, one water, but it's what everybody says. First Corinthians three, Scott caused us to grow. So, yeah, you're asking me to do what only God can do. So we don't measure those things. Well, okay. I mean, yes, there's a certain point to that. But again, don't let that carry you too far. We do need to every now and then establish some metric to measure if we're being effective. So what you'll find in Collins is he makes this point here. The key way to measure, to have a metric in a ministry, for example, is ask yourself this question What is the purpose, what your purpose statement? And then ask yourself this question How are we doing with relation to our purpose? Makes sense. So like a village, we have our purpose. We'll talk about this when we get to mission. Our purpose is to worship God, teach the scriptures, love one another, reach the last people. Collins would say, Okay, so there's your metric. Are you loving one another? So what things have you established to measure that? Are you worshiping God? That gets a little harder. So we have to go back to, well, what is worship If worship is a combination of price, know falling in love with God and later go from which we get liturgical people serving one another, we can measure that to a certain extent, teaching the scriptures. There's some way to measure some of that reaching lost people. Yeah, there are ways people like him would say, You got to force yourself to measure those because you got to be honest with yourself. If the measurements are not very good, well then you need to stop and reconsider what you're doing. You've often heard this phrase The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Right. That is insanity. But a lot of times we do that. Metrics force us to say maybe we should do it different or This phrase is so helpful. What got you here won't get you there. It's good, right? It forces us to constantly stop and ask yourself, okay, what got me here isn't what's going to get me there. The problem with leadership sometimes is we go, Oh, this got me here. So it will get me there. Not necessarily. That's what makes leadership hard. Let me put it this way. It's what requires diligence. So they diligently resists bureaucracy. They value time as a precious asset. They view sloth as nothing less than a character flaw. Okay, talk about this for a second before we take a break. Diligence. Are we very good in ministry at establishing metrics? What's your guess? Adam, You worked in a church. Anybody ever say, Adam, I want to establish some metrics or we have some metrics for you to measure ministry by headcount.

Speaker 5 [00:45:45] Head count, attendance.

Dr. John Johnson [00:45:46] Yeah.

Speaker 5 [00:45:47] When it came to camp, time of the kids got say.

Dr. John Johnson [00:45:51] And those are fair measurements. People say, well, I'm not into numbers. I can be a bit of a cover sometimes if half the people are coming to your ministry as last year. That might be a metric to to pay attention to. But what would be other metrics that we should be using? That gets harder, doesn't it? I found in leading my staff to establish metrics. It's a very hard exercise. What should we measure? What are we willing to measure?

Sandy [00:46:29] How do you measure life?

Dr. John Johnson [00:46:31] Yeah, we say something like this. Well, we're not a status quo ministry. We're here to see people grow. We believe that life transformation is the most important thing. It's what we're about. What does that mean? Well, see, we can hide behind that, can't we? Because that's vague enough. Nobody can pin you down until maybe you say something like this. Well, we established ten marks of a transform life. Looking at Scripture here seems to be ten marks. Eight marks, whatever. But here marks a transform life. A heart for prayer, let's say. Or sacrificial giving. Whatever those are. Well, now we can start to measure those. And we should. Or should we? Or can we? If we should, Why should we.

Sandy [00:47:28] Encourage ourselves as leaders to do better?

Dr. John Johnson [00:47:35] Yeah. Or maybe surface where there are the weak links.

Speaker 5 [00:47:39] Let's, you know, one attributes about the start or end.

Dr. John Johnson [00:47:43] Yeah. Yeah. Hebrews 1317 says obey your leaders as those who what must give an account. Obviously God establish some metrics. James three when not many of you become teachers lest you incur the what? No, no. It's okay to be a teacher. It's not a sin. Let not many of you become. That would scare everybody away from being a teacher. But let not many of you become teachers, lest you incur the what stricter judgment. What does James mean? In a sense, he's talking to a certain extent, to leaders. If you sign up to be a leader, it's sort of like when you go to the airport and some people go through this one TSA line and some like for a while I was on this watch list. Don't ask me why. I guess John Johnson is a common terrorist name, but I had to get documentation of proof of who I was because every time I went to the airport, I could never check in. They'd have to go back and check things out. I don't know. Maybe it's because I traveled to the Middle East quite a bit. So there have been times they go, Oh, no, not this line. This line, you know, which means more thorough search. That's what James is saying. We we will be in the different line as leaders. So the point is, God has established some metrics, stricter judgment. Sounds like metrics, doesn't it, to you? Seems to say that if we don't establish metrics for our ministry, how will we know where we stand? I'm just throwing out ideas to you as leaders, and this is part of back to the core value of diligence. It takes a diligent heart to do that.

Dominique [00:49:54] I picked up a resource a while back. It's been really helpful to me. It's called Strategic Thinking for Leaders. It's not a Christian book. It's just a book on strategic leadership. And it has this like a thread going through the whole book, these five questions like Where do you want to be in five years? What is it you're doing now that's keeping you from getting there and stuff like that? But one of the things that says it is there is never start a board meeting or a planning session with existing problems. Always start with those questions. What do I want to achieve? What is it we're doing wrong? What can I do differently about Well, that would revolutionize my board meetings because every morning we're going to the board meeting. It's like all the urinals not working right. You know, the men's room. And it's like every meeting. It's like, come on. Can't we transcend these things and get the bigger picture first and then figure out how the urinal fits, you know, into the bigger picture?

Terry [00:50:55] Well, yeah, I'm.

Dr. John Johnson [00:50:55] Sure we're back to incrementalism, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. Are we going? Okay, so what are we going to do tonight? Small changes to small things. Are we about how are we going to be incrementalist or say? I mean, but it gets back to diligence again, doesn't it? A diligent leader is going to say, No, we are about bigger things, but that's hard work. What are the bigger things? Or we're going to start measuring things. We should be measuring. Well, what's that going to mean? Like seminary here we have established as a faculty what we call core outcomes. You know what that means? I mean, we've established what are the core outcomes we want students to get to so that we can say if a person carries this piece of paper that says Western grad, we're saying they meet these core outcomes, they can do this, they can sit at a board, they can well, hopefully they can lead. At least they know something about how to lead. Why? Because this is one of the core outcomes. This is what we're training for. Now imagine a church. Just think how rare this would be. Imagine the church that says, Well, why should it be any different for us in a sense? Why aren't we establishing core outcomes for our people? Well, where they graduating? Where are they graduating? A Graduating into eternity. Back to Hebrews 1317. Obey your leaders who as those who must one day give an account. It was part of what frustrated George Barna about the church as he was doing all of these measurements about the church one day, he said. And this is what turned him off to a lot of contemporary institutional church, he said. I don't think they're trying to measure anything. I don't think they're serious about where they're trying to take people. They're just making sure the worship service is going to run properly, that there's bread and, you know, grape juice poured and teachers are taking kids through their lessons. But is anybody stopping to ask this question? Where are you taking us? Pastors are going to start a new series in Second Corinthians. Well, that's fine, but where is all of this going? I'm not saying I've mastered it. What I am saying is one of the hardest things to do in a church is to get the church to think directionally poor outcome. What are we trying to become? And then on occasion, measure Are we getting there? Did we make progress? But see, this struggle is that you use language like this and some people will go, Oh, there he goes again, sounding all corporate on us. Doesn't he understand this is a church? And sometimes I want to go. Yes. And actually, we should be way ahead of corporations on this stuff because what we're doing matters a whole lot more than profits on a sheet of paper. I began to get really convicted about this is when I was pastoring in Europe, and most of my people were corporate people. I watched their lives. I watched how careful they were to think about where they're going with the corporations that they were doing, how serious they took their accomplishments. And when I started to use some of that language, some people would go, cheese, you know, the church shouldn't be about efficiency. And I remember thinking, really? Well, no, I mean, we're led by the spirit. And, you know, the spirit is messy and. Okay. Yeah. That there's a certain truth to that. There are things that I would think that God does that aren't effective on the surface. Joseph in prison in a Slave and Potter First house from 17 to 30. Are you kidding? God, man. Those were great years. He's sitting in a prison. What a waste. That's not efficiency. Of course. God, then of course, goes. No, actually, it's great efficiency. If I let him try to be efficient. How you define efficient, he'll never be a great leader. So it's a balance. You're trying to balance that with the reality that. No, you know, come on, everybody, we should hold ourselves accountable.

Dominique [00:55:29] I think it's important, though, that we don't confuse excellence with slickness because there's a whole lot of people in the generation younger than me that really got tired of the Hybels Dog and Pony show.

Dr. John Johnson [00:55:42] Yeah.

Dominique [00:55:43] And said, I want that was real. Yeah. So have an excellent service, but let's focus on something besides entertainment. I think a lot of pastors that are getting all sorts of stuff because they're still trying to have this really slick produced show instead of a worship service. Yeah, and I'm finding a lot of younger people really are hungry for that. They're hungry for a meeting well done by the meeting of just companionship and input into their lives. Yeah.

Dr. John Johnson [00:56:09] For maybe another way to say it, Terry, is what? What I think we all want is excellence, integrity, Authenticity. Right. That you can say now, this isn't just some slick production. There's a real oddness here. But there's also a carefulness to do it well instead of shabbily. There are tensions there in that sometimes. Do you let this person sing who's a train wreck? But hey, they want to sing. Are we about trying to be slick and polished? Well, we don't want to be slick, but if we're going to do it, we'll do it. Well, if we're not going to do it well, we're not going to do it. Lots of tensions, but it gets back to this core value. Anyway, things to think about, right? Things to think about. Now, let's take a break here. Let's come back in about 10 minutes and then we'll work through the rest of these core values and see if we can't get a little bit into core skills.