Why a Month Away from Leadership Saved My Leadership Life

As we continue with our Leadership Lessons series…

LESSON SIX: Brokenness and failure are necessary
KEY QUESTION: How did a month’s sabbatical away from my leadership role save my emotional world?

In this NEW POST, I get pretty personal.

I spent an intensive week in therapy to unpack some emotional issues and begin rebuilding my leadership life.

In this post, I walk you through some of that experience and give you seven specific actions you can take today to find more emotional health.

Brokenness and failure are not an end. They are ends to greater meaning. When we embrace brokenness and failure, we learn to live and lead with more grace. In a way, experiencing and embracing brokenness and failure is how we become leaders worth following.

Two Specific Ways You Claiming “Follower of Christ” Could be a Liability for Christ

REALLY QUICK: I relaunched a new site. Let me know how it looks!

In today’s NEW POST, I unpack our leadership issues with power and autonomy.

I suspect this post will ruffle quite a few feathers, especially the “Let’s Go Brandon” segments.

My only request is that you separate political ideology and biblical theology as you read. They aren’t the same, and they shouldn’t be treated as such.

Well… here we go.

Six Actions to Become a More Vulnerable Leader

The below is Lesson 4 from our Leadership Lessons series.

LESSON THREE: It’s essential to be real
KEY QUESTION: How can honesty and vulnerability increase your leadership influence?

Great leaders discover their strength in their honesty. The superpower of great leaders is vulnerability. That’s a buzzword these days. Everybody talks about openness, but too few leaders are genuinely vulnerable because real vulnerability exposes us emotionally. When people get to know the “real” you, they may not like you.

But, let me ask you a critical vulnerability question: How does it feel when people like the fake you?

People who love the pretend version of you don’t love you, which is emotionally painful. When I decided to become a more vulnerable leader, people rejected me, but they rejected the real me. I discovered that it is more emotionally taxing for people to love the pretend me than leave the real me.

In this NEW POST, I outline some things bad leaders do, how to become more vulnerable as a leader, and why I have vintage skateboards hanging on my office walls.

5 Strategies to Bring Your Best Back Home

We are looking at Lesson 3 from our Leadership Lessons series.

LESSON THREE: It’s hardest at home.
KEY QUESTION: How can we, as leaders, bring our best to the people who have our best interests in mind?

To be your best at home, you must reserve your best for home.

Here are five strategies to help you reserve a portion of your best for those you love the most.

1. Protect your calendar.
2. Know how you best recover.
3. Take time off.
4. Limit work outside of working hours.
5. Date your mate.

Check out the full article for all the details…

The Rise and Fall of YOUR Successful Organization

This is Lesson 2 from our Leadership Lessons series.

LESSON TWO: It’s dangerous to succeed.
KEY QUESTION: How can we make success less risky while keeping success as a priority?

Many things can take down your church or company, but none may be sneakier than success.

Here are seven deadly sins of organizational success:

1. A “good news” focus, where we excuse away the bad news and celebrate anything better than average.
2. Mounds of red tape that keep the staff from even asking to innovate.
3. The previous generation (or founders) make all the leadership decisions, and keep the organization tied to what once worked.
4. Unnecessary risk aversion, because the organization is too afraid to fail.
5. Doubling-down on what and how, not why.
6. Maintaining order at almost any cost.
7. Stewardship of the budget and expenses is replaced by decisions void of value.

In this NEW POST, I outline in more detail the above sins and propose solutions for each.

Five Healthy Solutions for Lonely Leaders

This NEW POST is Lesson 1 from our Leadership Lessons series.

LESSON ONE: It’s Lonely to Lead
KEY QUESTION: How can leaders reduce loneliness without abdicating their leadership?

The dynamic of loneliness is a tension that demands attention. As a leader, when we feel organizational isolation, we are tempted to resolve the tension by:
1. Abdicating our leadership.
2. Pretending our leadership presence is irrelevant.
3. Playing favorites to gain friends.

These unhealthy solutions don’t resolve the problem, but they do create other problems.

How can a leader solve the loneliness that is inevitable with point leadership?

In this NEW POST, I offer you 5 Healthy Solutions for Lonely Leaders.

Also, I’ll tell you how I’ve got this wrong and how I eventually fixed the problem in my own life.

10 Leadership Lessons You Can Learn The Easy Way

This is the first post in a leadership series. Make sure you subscribe to remain part of the conversation. 

HERE WE GO…

Fifteen or so years ago, I attended my first-ever leadership conference. This was my first exposure to John Maxwell.

What an incredible leader, pastor, and communicator!

During his keynote, he unpacked 10 lessons on leadership. I took a lot of notes. Now, 15 years later, I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing each of the 10 lessons.

In this post, I give you the list of 10. In future posts, I’ll unpack each one through my personal, leadership experiences. More, I hope these posts give you plenty of practical advice.

The life of a leader is full of lessons. Most are learned the hard way through experience. My hope is too allow you to learn from my previous experience.

See you on the blog!

An Easy Leadership Development Strategy You Can Put In Place Today!

This short post is for any leader working to develop the leaders around them…

We all know leadership development is important. We equally know leadership development often feels like an over-complicated strategy requiring processes, plans, and systems.

Perhaps that is needed. Or maybe there is something we can all do now to begin helping the leaders around us grow.

Not that we shouldn’t attempt to implement processes and strategies for leadership development. But we can’t allow our lack of strategies keeps us from doing one of the most basic things to help develop the leaders around us.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “great leaders ask great questions.” That’s true. Equally true is this statement:

“Great leaders grow leaders through asking great questions.”

Asking the growing leaders around you great questions is perhaps the most overlooked leadership development opportunity.

In this NEW POST, I give you 8 QUESTIONS THAT GROW LEADERS.

How can I help?

Partnering with ministry and marketplace leaders from innovation through implementation is why I created Transformation Solutions. I’m dedicating my time to helping leaders like you discover potential problems, design strategic solutions, and deliver the preferable future.

Go right now to mytransformationsolutions.com and sign up for a free, 15-minute conversation to decide if working together works for you.

7 Questions to Determine If Your Ministry Model Needs to Change

Have you ever experienced a “solution looking for a problem?” I love that phrase. It most commonly looks like a product developed by a company for a customer that doesn’t exist. Not in the Steve Jobs or Apple way. In the legitimate “we spent time and resources creating something that nobody will ever want or […]

Should You Stay Or Should You Go? A Fresh Look at Job Change.

How do you know when it’s time to go?

In the last week, I’ve had 5 conversations with leaders considering a job change.

I understand. I recently changed jobs myself!

As I thought about these conversations and my own job journey, I realized our search for job purpose and fulfillment is found when we exist in a mutually beneficial relationship with our company, church, or organization.

In this NEW POST, I unpack how purpose and fulfillment are connected to our job, and how our job is connected to our purpose and fulfillment.

If you are considering or believe you will eventually consider quitting your job, give this a read first.