My friend and uber blogger Tony Morgan asked me to answer some questions for leaders who read his blog. I am posting here as well...
Tony: One thing leaders should consider stopping?
Something good that is stealing energy and resources from the best...
For church leaders, this may be a program that yields little fruit or a meeting that is always on the calendar but never results in any life-giving ministry decisions. A lot of leaders stress better time management to their teams, but if teams are devoting energy to ineffective ministries or programs, then time management only makes the waste more efficient. And who wants more efficient waste? More efficient waste never changed the world.
For this reason, a "stop doing" list is actually more important than a "start" list because only when you stop doing something will you have liberated energy and resources for what matters more. As Von Goethe said, "Things that matter the most must never be at the mercy of things that matter the least."
Some may argue that all the waste has already been eliminated, that everyone is operating at full capacity on what matters most. But such an argument is actually a confession that additional capacity has not been developed. The person has just admitted he or she has stopped growing as a leader or stopped growing the people he or she serves. The truth is that when we grow our teams and ourselves, there is new margin because organizational capacity has been raised. In the same way, business process consultants articulate that whenever a process is improved, new waste is created through greater productivity. The art of leadership is focusing the newly created energy on what produces the most value, which leads to Tony's second question:
Tony: One thing leaders should consider starting?
Placing more resources and energy on what is the most fruitful...
Richard Koch in his book The 80/20 Principle builds the case that 20 percent of what we do accounts for 80 percent of the impact. According to him, if 80/20 thinking had not been in place when a strategy was designed, then the strategy would be deeply flawed. Once you have decided what needs to be stopped, take the energy and resources and reallocate them toward what is most fruitful. In most churches, the less fruitful ministries continually rob resources and energy from the most fruitful. Imagine the impact on the church and the community if the focus was less divided.
For a church leader, this may mean stopping a meeting so you have more time to develop leaders. It may mean eliminating a redundant program so that financial resources and the energy of volunteers can be focused in one direction for greater impact.
What You Think