4 Minute Read…
Here’s a question I’d love for you to ponder:
How does your learning breadth affect your learning depth?
As a leadership coach, I’ve spent the last eight weeks focused on other leaders and organizations. My breadth of exposure is rapidly expanding. Of course, many are clients, but I’m intentionally paying attention to all sorts of leaders, churches, and organizations.
It’s only been eight weeks on the new job, but I’ve already learned so much.
One Critical Lesson:
Every leader can quickly and unintentionally become insulated from the outside as they attempt to lead on the inside.
That statement might seem obvious. Let me explain.
I worked for one of the best church organizations on the planet for nearly 13 years. Leading alongside the team at North Point Ministries (Andy Stanley, Lane Jones, Rick Holiday, Bill Willits, Jeff Henderson, Clay Scroggins, Joel Thomas, Adam Johnson, Andy Jones, Al Scott, Tensley Almand, and more) felt like the equivalent of a master’s degree in church. These guys are great.
What I didn’t realize along the way is how easily I became insulated from the broader leadership and church world. This segregation was not intentional. Protecting myself from other churches and industries certainly wasn’t encouraged by my peers at North Point. It’s just one of those natural leadership drifts within any organization.
We get so focused on leading well within our organization that we only pay attention to our organization, automatically limiting our exposure to other leaders and organizations.
It’s completely unintentional. And it’s insanely dangerous.
If you work at a church, the rhythm of your job is directly working to keep you insulated, too. Every seven days (which feels like four), you have a huge event to plan, coordinate, and orchestrate. I bet you’re doing it with too few staff and volunteers, as well. The management demands of the church remove much of our leadership time. And learning time.
Over my 13 years with North Point Ministries, I rarely even made it to see our other campus locations on a Sunday. Honest moment: of the seven campus locations of North Point, I’ve seen three on a Sunday morning. That’s it. Not even half. That’s ridiculous. I could have learned so much more had I experienced how our other locations executed ideas and ministry.
It’s a leadership reality:
It’s all too easy to remain inwardly focused to the neglect of outward learning opportunities.
As an independent leadership coach, I’m now outside of all organizations. My primary job is to coach other leaders. I’m certainly pulling from my experience and knowledge capital, but what’s been wonderful to see is how much I’m now learning from other churches and marketplace organizations along the way. My learning breadth has immensely expanded my leadership depth.
Insulation is a problem every organizational leader must face. Your default is to remain so focused on your stuff that you neglect to pay attention to all the other fantastic stuff.
Insulating your leadership learning directly affects your personal and organizational growth. When you neglect to expand your learning community, you become more critical than curious. And the longer you remain insulated, the more critical of others you become.
I cannot encourage you enough to regularly and intentionally step away from your church, organization, and even industry to consciously learn from others. Engaging your mind with different perspectives has an immediate and lasting effect on your leadership growth.
Here are three reasons why:
1. Different Is Intriguing.
Now that I’m consistently meeting leaders from different spaces and places, I find my interest is automatically peaked because different is intriguing. I am asking more questions than simply evaluating executions. Stepping further outside to learn from other industries forces the issue – mostly because I can’t thoroughly critique an industry I don’t fully understand. Think about it. Curiosity squashes criticism.
2. Different Drives Innovation.
Some of my favorite ideas have come from interactions with leaders and organizations outside the church. For example, I read a book on screenwriting. I have no desire to write a movie script. But as I began to understand the systems and approaches to movies scripts, it generated new ideas and possible innovations for me as a communicator. I’m preaching and speaking a lot these days. Learning from other communicators outside the church industry is driving new innovative thoughts.
3. Different Highlights Principles over Practices.
Lastly, leadership principles are transferable. Seeing principles executed in non-familiar settings can help us see the same things in new ways. It elevates the law behind the execution. It helps us bring fresh eyes to old lessons. Sometimes that’s all it takes for us to discover a leadership breakthrough.
Bottom Line:
The breath of your leadership learning determines the depth of your leadership growth.
Even more, the answer to your most significant organizational problem might be found outside your organization.
How can I help?
Helping ministry and marketplace leaders make things better and make better things is why I created Transformation Solutions.
Go right now to mytransformationsolutions.com and sign up for a free, 15-minute conversation to decide if working together works for you.
