In this fast-changing world requiring more leadership, all this talk about leadership could lead to fatigue from so much talk about it. In a recent convo with Sam, I think he’s right, there are no easy answers (or reprieve) to leadership, it’s just plain hard. Leadership is figuring it out in your own context. Tons of air time about leadership principles and motivational inspirational pep talks. Not quite enough about self-care; not quite enough about how a leader doesn’t have to look strongly confident 24/7 and it’s okay to ask for help and where to get support. Other thoughts on leadership fatigue –
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In this Seattle School talk, Dr. Dan Allender identified the reasons why most people are leaders, the top 5 issues leaders face, as well as some personal reflections on how to care for one’s self in the midst of leadership fatigue.
Can I make a confession? I sure get tired of leading. Though I currently do not occupy an organizational C-level leadership position, I confess that I sure get tired of having to initiate more frequently than I’d like. Sure would be nicer if it’d be more 50/50 where someone else initiates with me vs. my initiating with them. I don’t like the weight of having to make decisions with its consequences affect myself and others. Some people eat stress for lunch. I’d rather eat dessert.
Being a conference junkie and having gone a few rounds with ‘em, my top-of-mind advice is to go to a conference with a team & don’t go to a conference alone. There’s so much more value to attending the conference together so you get that team-building value, time to be off-site, time to gain perspective away from the normal context, time to learn together, time to take ideas back home together, and hit the ground running.
Too often, people go to a conference alone, get all jazzed about an idea, but have the hardest time getting the idea across to the others since the people back home didn’t hear and experience the conference. Talk about hitting the brick wall. Yeah, there’s some value for getting inspired and/or recharged. There’s so much more value when you can take ideas home to implement and turn it into reality!
That’s why I love the way Sticky Teams 2.0 is encouraging teams to come. Registration fee is $269 (early bird rate ends 9/2) and the registered person gets to bring 2 others for free! And the conference organizers, who I got to meet earlier this week, are anticipating the event to sell out soon. Only 130 seats left at the time of this writing. (Aside: I like seeing that real-time seating countdown.)
And, I’ll be there myself. I’m doing a breakout session on social media –
DJ Chuang | How to Go from Potential to Mastery in Social Media
There’s more to social media than putting a Twitter and Facebook icon on all your communications. But it doesn’t have to overwhelm you or take up all of your time. Learn how to increase your social media proficiency, become the master of your online reputation, and expand your ministry impact worldwide.
Would love to connect with you there! And in addition to my session, you might also want to hear Mark Driscoll and Larry Osborne
Asians are 5% of the population.. yet less than 1/3 of 1% of executive positions.. less than 1% of board positions.. even though Asians are better educated and make more money than any other group in America..
The title of that peer-reviewed paper: Leadership Perceptions as a Function of Race-Occupation Fit: The Case of Asian Americans, was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology [Vol 95(5), Sep 2010, 902-919]. Co-authors are Lynn M. Shore of San Diego State University, Judy Strauss of CSU Long Beach, Ted H. Shore of CSU San Marcos, UCR graduate students Susanna Tram and Paul Whiteley, and Kristine Ikeda-Muromachi of CSU Long Beach. Here’s the methodology used:
The researchers sampled three groups of individuals — 131 business undergraduates from a large business school on the West Coast, and one group of 362 employees and another of 381 employees in the Los Angeles region — and asked them to evaluate an employee. In one experiment participants received identical information about the employee’s expertise as an engineer or salesperson, but some were told the employee was Asian American and others that he was Caucasian American. In a similar experiment, participants assessed the employee’s leadership attributes.
What’s my take? I’m reluctant to write a long essay here, as this blog post is already long. I’ll say this: yes, there are stereotypes and overgeneralization. Yes, there’s a ton of diversity under the “Asian American” group. Yes, there is systemic racism. Yes, there are misperceptions. Yes, there are Asian cultural values (and other cultures too) that impede some people from expanding their cross-cultural capacity to take on a bigger role in a multi-cultural society (or corporation or organization.)
I do think there is way too little airplay on Asian American issues and real life Asian American stories. So the problems persist. An occasional article or roundtable won’t do much to effect change.
One thing that must happen is for Asian Americans to learn the stories of more Asian Americans to represent Asian Americans. And more of those stories have to be told online and not just offline.
For those of you keeping score at home, this is episode number 5. In this episode of the Multi-Asian Church Podcast Series, Ed Choy and I talk about developing Asian American leaders in the context of an multi-Asian/multi-ethnic churches. You’ll need to listen more carefully, since the background noise at this episode’s Starbucks (in Dallas) was louder than last week’s Starbucks location (in Newport Beach).
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Episode #5: Leadership Development
(24:45; mp3 download link 11.3mb)
The conversation continues. In episode 4 of the Multi-Asian Church Podcast Series, Ed Choy and I discuss leadership, and how can church leaders better develop and connect with Asian American leaders.
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When it comes to churches, there’s a sociology to the number of people and group dynamics. There’s much more going on than a generic spiritual gathering.
On numerous occasions, I’ve been asked for resources about how to manage the changes when a church changes sizes, or how to get a church to grow past a certain size. What I’ve found are a few books that address this topic, and some articles too. The books are:
There are certain church sizes that seem most common, as if a certain group settles into a certain size stability equilibrium. Here’s some estimates of those sizes:
House Church= up to 40; Small Church=40-200; Medium-Sized Church= 200-450; Large Church= 400-800, Very Large Church [from Leadership and Church Size Dynamics by Tim Keller]
… completely different “orders of being” … a church of less than 35 members a “cat” and a church of 100-175 a “garden,” and a church of 225-450 a “mansion.” [quoting Lyle Schaller, in this article]
relational church= 15-200; managerial church= 200-400; organizational church= 400-800; centralized church= 800-1,500; decentralized church= 1,500+ [Taking Your Church to the Next Level, Gary L. McIntosh]
Small Church= 15-200 ; Medium Church= 201-400; Large Church= 401+. [via Gary McIntosh's Typology of Church Sizes (PDF), from One Size Doesn't Fit All]
“Most churches generally face growth barriers when Sunday attendance approaches 65, 125, 250 or 500.” [via Nelson Searcy's Break the next growth barrier]
A Conversation about Congregation Size (w Vern Sanders, Rusty Rabon, Barbara Arnold, Chip Stam) — in response to Monday Morning Email’s topic: “… our societal emphasis upon size, and the corollary that bigger is better…”
Barna Group Study, How Faith Varies by Church Size, via Ed Stetzer’s blog (Aug 2009): “The Barna Group released the findings of a new study that showed ‘congregational size is related to the nature of a congregation’s religious beliefs, religious behavior and demographic profile.’ Specifically the study showed ‘statistically significant differences between churches of 100 or fewer adult attenders and churches of 1000 or more adult attenders.’”
This FAQ from HIRR gives perspective on the whole: “The median church in the U.S. has 75 regular participants in worship on Sunday mornings, according to the National Congregations Study. Notice that researchers measured the median church size — the point at which half the churches are smaller and half the churches are larger — rather than the average (186 attenders reported by the USCLS survey), which is larger due to the influence of very large churches.”
Closing thoughts: 2 areas where church size makes a difference is the leadership structure needed and a perceived “growth barrier.” While the term “barrier” may be misleading, it’s a term that’s commonly used in “church growth” circles. Church size is not a reliable indicator of healthy spirituality or lack thereof; it’s often more of a correlation with group dynamics and organizational structure. To say it more simply, church sizes are not good or bad. And, some people have a strong preference for one church size, and may need to migrate when a size transition happen.
But there is a danger in using largeness as a standard to measure success. Size does not depend as much on spirituality as it may many other factors. … Most large churches claim that their size is a result of the ability to satisfactorily “minister” to the needs of a broad range of people. … While it is true that there are more large churches today than there were in the past, they still only make up a tiny percentage of the body of Christ… 90 percent of American churches have an attendance of somewhere below 200. The majority of churches, 55 percent, have an attendance of somewhere less than 100… only about 1 percent ever attain attendances of more than 700.
This is a watershed milestone kind of book for social media and businesses & organizations both non-profit and governmental. Millions of us have a good sense of how social media is connecting people individually in the informal social sense.
Not so many have figured out how to connect business goals with social media.
Now there’s a book to guide organizational leaders and managers to develop an effective social media strategy. There are a number of great examples mentioned in this new book by Charlene Li, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, citing case studies from Zappos, Starbucks, Best Buy, and more. (Apparently JetBlue didn’t make the cut.) Watch my video review:
At the time of this writing, the 8 free critical resources mentioned in the book’s appendix are not yet postedonline. Or, I haven’t found them on the open-leadership.com website yet. I hope and wish they’ll get it online very very soon. Can’t wait!
Aside: I first heard about the book during the Catalyst West conference, where Charlene Li was a main speaker. While I was mesmerized and transfixed on every word, dozens in the audience were stirring in their seats — maybe because they were hungry since the talk was right before lunch. I knew right off I had to get a copy, and I was able to get an advance review copy there, with a voucher for the real printed hardback edition. And it was delivered to my home yesterday. Yes!
This discomfort of not being in control is the reason why I wrote Open Leadership. It’s my attempt to help leaders understand how the rules have changed and how they need to adjust. At the core, leaders have to acknowledge that they are not in control and probably never really were. Instead, leadership is about establishing a relationship, and social technologies are redefining how relationships are formed, grown, and supported.
p.p.s. I actually had queued up a blog post in my Drafts folder before the book launched… Continue reading »
Where have all the mentors gone? It saddened me to hear that Kyle Reed asked a dozen people to be his mentor, and to be turned down and rejected. What’s up with that?
Kyle (on twitter @kylelreed) may very well be right, if a young person can’t find a mentor in their church for the Kingdom of God, they’ll find one elsewhere outside the church. So, add your comment below and get this conversation going!
Missional communities are the conversations du jour among church leaders, escalating during the past few years. Now there are gatherings (conferences) that revolve around how we can be more missional. (Several local and regional gatherings have already happened, though I haven’t been counting.)
A regional (free) unconference about missional churches is happening this weekend called Verge LA. I’ll be there most of today. Definitely want to hear Kevin Doi, currently scheduled at 1:45pm, and you can watch via livestream at ecclesianet.com. And, I’ll get to meet in person, JR Woodward, host of the unconference. (cf. my interview with Kevin Doi)
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I’m putting together a social media team for the Verge in Austin, those who will host online conversations around becoming & being missional communities, both before and during the Verge conference. Start those conversations via blog, Twitter, Facebook, podcast, Youtube, etc. Verge wants to empower and release conversations both online and on-site. Undoubtedly, (our hope is) the convos will continue even after the Austin gathering. Want to be a part of this social media team? Add a comment, especially if you’d like to win a free registration. One spot left.
And one more thing. I’ll be there, at both Verge‘s — would love to meetup with you on-site there!
Leadership is figuring it out in your own context. Tons of air time about leadership principles and motivational inspirational pep talks. Not quite enough about self-care; not quite enough about how a leader doesn’t have to look strongly confident 24/7 and it’s okay to ask for help and where to get support. Other thoughts on leadership fatigue –
