Who You Influence: 5 Types of Followers

by: Sam Rainer III

1

Tweet

Either people are on board with your leadership or not, right? Nope.

There are degrees of influence and different types of followers. The mantra of “get on board or get off” does not take into account the numerous types of followers and differing levels of leadership influence.

Most definitions of leadership allude to influence as the key driver. But I do not believe leadership and influence are synonymous—leader and follower exchanges are more complex than mere influence. However, leaders do influence followers. And the influencing process is made complex because followers are not a monolithic group.

Knowing how to influence begins with an understanding of who is following you. In her work, Followership, Barbara Kellerman identifies five types of followers based upon their level of engagement with the leader.

The isolate is completely detached. No influence exists between leader and follower. A formal relationship of power may be in place, such as between a congressman and constituent, but an isolate does not know or care about the leader.

The bystander observes the leader but does not participate in any interaction. These followers make a decision to stand on the sidelines. A small amount of influence occurs in this type of relationship. The bystander’s decision to withdraw, however, points to a position of neutrality about the leader.

The participant is more engaged and clearly favors or disfavors the leader. These followers are willing to invest time and resources in support or opposition of the current leadership.

The activist has strong emotional feelings about the leader. They act on these emotions and work hard to support the leader (or to undermine the leader). These followers are highly engaged with leadership and are often closely connected to many of the activities in which leaders are involved.

The diehard is the most engaged with leaders. These followers are willing to die for the cause of their leaders, often exhibiting deep devotion. Conversely, diehards who oppose the leader would die in order to remove the leader. A diehard forms an all-consuming identity around the leader and his or her causes.

As a leader, I would like to think most of my followers are supportive diehards. But it’s not the case. Most likely, it is not the case in your leadership role either. Understanding the types of followers (and who is in each camp) is critical to knowing how to influence. Believing people are simply on board or not will cause you to place too much distance between bystanders and participants. Focusing too much time on supportive or opposing diehards causes a leader to lose sight of the masses. Good leaders understand that knowing how to influence includes understanding the complexities of who to influence.

Read more from Sam here.

Tags: Leadership Engine, Sam Rainer, Staff, Staff Development

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Creative Leadership: Avoiding Fatal Mistakes

by: VRcurator

0

Tweet

Leadership is hard. It’s a lonely role, you face crushing uncertainty with elevated stakes, and you’re expected to deliver not only on your own work, but also to corral the creative minds of others and parade them into the promised land. (Oh, and did I mention that it’s often thankless?)

Todd Henry, founder of Accidental Creative, a consultancy that helps organizations generate brilliant ideas, warns of the following traps that even the most experienced leaders fall into:

Deferring

This means that you’re pushing important decisions into the future until you are more certain about the right direction. While this initially seems wise, it has a ripple effect through the organization as others wait for you to act so that they can determine their own course of action.

Blaming

When things go awry and your team comes to you for answers, it’s easy to shoot arrows at the people above you. After all, if it’s really not your fault it’s a natural instinct, and it feels like a way to maintain the trust of your team.

Bending

Creative work is highly qualitative. It’s difficult sometimes to determine whether the product fits the original objectives, and it’s often a matter of opinion.  You have to make your expectations clear to the team, and you must be diligent in demanding they hit the metrics.

Hovering

You’ve hired great people, yes? Then don’t smother them by constantly hovering over their work. It communicates a lack of trust, and it may ultimately lead to a dependence on your feedback, or worse to under-performance or under-thinking.

These are just a few of the (many) traps that creative leaders fall into. Leadership is about establishing the playing field, setting the rules, defining success, and unleashing your team to do what they’re wired to do. Avoid these common traps so that you don’t stand in the way of your team’s brilliance!

Read the full post here.

Read more from Todd here.

Tags: Leadership Engine, Staff, Staff Development, Todd Henry

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Can I Be An Effective Pastor If I Don’t Like Management?

by: Sam Rainer III

0

Tweet

Pastors are not managers, at least in a corporate-business-world-publicly-traded-company-sort-of-way. But pastors are shepherds. And shepherds manage sheep.

Leading a church involves management. Perhaps you’ve had the privilege of attending a meeting discussing the finer details of administering the Lord’s Supper. If so, you probably recognize the importance of the managerial role in the church.

A church hierarchy assumes management. And most churches—even congregations with smaller staffs—are not completely flat. For instance, I’ve never seen a church intentionally give the same level of authority as the senior pastor to the student pastor. Maybe some might be better if they did (of course, some might devolve into chaos.). Even at the most basic level, churches require management. Who pays the bills? When does the meeting start? Who is responsible for snow removal? Who fills the baptistery? What is our policy? Those are basic managerial questions. Most churches are more complex.

Some senior leaders in the church gravitate towards being more like a senior writer or senior analyst. These leaders are recognized for their intellectual contributions but do not have managerial oversight. Many teaching pastors have this type of role in the church. Other senior leaders prefer to manage the minutia and deal with people issues. Many executive pastors have this type of role. Most pastors, however, must both teach and execute.

The vast majority of pastoral roles include management. So, can church leaders be effective if they don’t like management? Yes, but they must compensate in these ways.

Be self-aware. One of the core problems of bad management is poor managers often do not recognize their weak managerial skills. When you’re self-aware about your weaknesses (and willing to admit them), then you’re more likely to receive help from others. No pastor can (nor should) do it all. And all pastors should be self-aware of what they can and cannot do.

Discern what to delegate. Just because you’re naturally good at doing something does not mean you are able to manage others doing the same thing. Some pastors delegate their responsibilities too quickly. Others delegate the wrong responsibilities. And some tasks should never be delegated. Delegation with discernment makes up for a lot of managerial weaknesses.

Don’t fear being the doer. Some people prefer doing tasks. Others prefer managing people who do the tasks. If you cherish a few tasks, then don’t give them up. Keep doing them. For instance, a pastor might enjoy locking the church after the evening service as an opportunity to prayer walk.  Or, if you’re an artistic type, there may be certain creative tasks that are difficult to manage. Good church leaders know what select tasks they enjoy most and keep doing them, sparing their followers the inevitable and overbearing micro-management that would accompany overseeing others doing them.

You don’t have to like management to be an effective pastor. But shepherding a congregation does involve managing sheep. All pastors should both teach and execute. Few master both. If you’re weaker at managing execution, then you can compensate through self-awareness, discernment, and doing the tasks you enjoy most.

Read more from Sam here.

Tags: Leadership Engine, Sam Rainer, Staff, Staff Leadership Roles

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Is Innovation a Part of Your Organization’s DNA?

by: Tim Kastelle

0

Tweet

It’s been a brutal period for retail firms since the global financial crisis hit.  Despite this, I’ve spoken recently with the CEOs of four different retail firms (Lorna Jane, Unit, Di Bella Coffee and The Cloakroom) that have all more than doubled their sales in that time.

[Note from the Vision Room Curator: If you’ve read the first paragraph and think this doesn’t apply to your church because it’s about retail, you would be wrong. Read on for three common factors of retail stores that can also be applied in your church.]

What do they have in common?  A few things.  All four CEOs are founders, all of them are very passionate about what they do, and all four firms have innovation embedded in their DNA, as Phil Di Bella put it.

This is expressed a few different ways. The common factors among them are:

• A strong culture of experimentation.  Experimenting is central to innovating effectively.  All four firms are great at this – having an idea, and trying it to see if it works.  If it does, they scale it.  For this to work, you also need to support the experimental approach with a strong learning culture – there’s no point in testing ideas fail if you don’t learn from the ones that fail.
• Their passion is driven by a shared purpose.  Phil appears to be personally affronted by mediocre coffee.  Lorna and Bill are committed to helping women live healthier lives, Paul and Ian want Unit to change the sports they support, and Andrew and the Cloakroom gents are deeply committed to helping men dress well.  More importantly, this message is shared by everyone that works at these firms.  I’ve spoken with people on all four shop floors, and the message is very consistent with what I’ve heard from the top.Here is how Nilofer Merchants puts it:
  In the social era, purpose precedes scale. And as we discussed in part two of the series, shared purpose allows many communities to engage with you — without you having to invest resources in controlling their actions. When TED unleashed TEDx, they created a force multiplier. Shared purpose aligns people without coordination costs.
  Purpose is also a better motivator than money. Money, while necessary, motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. Purpose does.
  
• Their people are empowered.  This goes hand-in-hand in with the previous two points.  Even if people have a shared purpose, and the organization has a culture of learning, you can still kill innovation if there is no autonomy.  To take advantage of purpose + experiments, everyone needs to feel as though they are allowed to test out ideas as they have them.

Lorna Jane and Unit are also both exceptional at social media – I saw the social media tracking boards at Lorna Jane last week, and they are amazing.

When times get tough, it is easy to go for efficiency. Stefan Lindegaard outlines what happens when you focus on efficiency at the expense of innovation:

No one wins this battle. The employees are taken as hostages, the customers or end-users lose out on the benefits of innovation and in the long term the shareholders will suffer. The latter is true because there is actually one winner. That is the competitor that decides to become competitively unpredictable through innovation and gets this right.

These are tricky times for retail (and for many other sectors as well). In addition to widespread economic problems, Tom Fishburne’s latest post addresses one of the factors unique to retail:

Fishburne describes what happens when a retail store focuses on efficiency at the expense of innovation:

The last time I shopped at Best Buy, I ended up buying at Amazon, but not because of price. I really wanted to buy from Best Buy, particularly after I’d invested the time to travel there and preferred to have the product the same day. But the store experience was so transactional and it was so hard to find a knowledgable sales rep that I gave up. Best Buy could have won me over with a better retail experience, but they dropped the ball. They were trying so hard to be like Amazon on price, they didn’t excel at what could have made them different.

What makes the successful retail shops different?  Passion.  Purpose. Experiments.

Innovation is part of their DNA.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Tim Kastelle

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Pay the Price for Growth

by: Mac Lake

0

Tweet

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t have a desire to grow. We know that growth increases our sense of joy and contentment. It increases our self-confidence and sharpens decision making.    And it produces a depth of wisdom and understanding that impact the quality of our relationships.  With all these benefits who wouldn’t want to grow?

The problem isn’t the lack of desire, it’s the lack of discipline.  Typically most people don’t grow until they are forced to by tragedy, loss or pressure. When life is good, or at least tolerable, it’s easy to put our personal development on hold.  The truth is growth always requires surrender and sacrifice.  If I want to grow in my relationship with Christ I must surrender the will of my flesh to pursue the desires of the Spirit .  If I want to grow as a leader I must sacrifice having an abundance of leisure time for the sake of having adequate learning time.  When I refuse to surrender or sacrifice I won’t have the margin to grow to my greatest potential.  Solomon wrote in Proverbs 23:23, “Buy… wisdom, instruction and understanding.” Solomon is implying that  growth is never free, we must exchange something we value for wisdom, instruction and understanding. Growth will always cost you something: time, money, energy, pain or greater humility.  And the funny thing is when you pay the price you value it even more.

What do you need to give up in order to grow up?

Read more from Mac here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Engine, Mac Lake

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

8 Nations of Innovation for Your Church

by: Rick Warren

0

Tweet

4. Elimination: What part could we take out to make it simpler?

Software designers who are truly innovative ask this question. Steve Case, who founded AOL, says we always overestimate the amount of complexity people will put up with. So at Saddleback, we ask what we can take out to make things simpler. When I moved here to South Orange County in 1980, I was 25 years old. I was starting a church in a place where land was going for a million dollars an acre. I knew I’d need 50 acres someday, but until then, we eliminated our need for a building. We went 15 years and grew to more than 15,000 in attendance without a building. We used four different high schools, camps, banks, parks and tents. In the first 13 years of Saddleback Church, we used 89 different facilities in Orange County. We became one of the largest churches in America before we ever had a building.

5. Reconstitution: What has died, but we could bring it back to life in a new form?

Ask yourself, “What worked twenty years ago and died?” What great idea from the past could you bring back, but in a new format? For 2,000 years the Christian church has done systematic training. Catholics called it catechism. But a few years back, it had pretty much died. We reformatted systematic training for the Internet age, and we’ve had thousands go through it.

6. Rejuvenation: How could we change the purpose or motivation for doing it?

Sometimes changing the how and why makes all the difference. There are probably 1 billion health plans in America. So why did we start emphasizing biblical health through the Daniel Plan? We knew that for people to fulfill their God-given destiny, they needed to be healthy. We helped people change their motivation for both losing weight and exercising, and we changed the delivery system by having small groups work together to encourage one another to get healthy. Listen to this: In 2011, the Saddleback Church family lost an average of 4,000 pounds a day! Why? We provided a new motivation and created a new delivery system for dieting.

Read Page 3

Back to Page 1

Tags: Developing Leadership, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Rick Warren

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

8 Nations of Innovation for Your Church

by: Rick Warren

0

Tweet

7. Illumination: How can we look at this in a new light?

When you’ve been working with something for a while, it’s hard to look at it with fresh eyes. I remember a number of years ago, our bathroom mirror cracked. Here was this big crack that went down the middle of the mirror, and it really bugged me at first. I told my wife, “We’ve got to change that.” Yet I didn’t. A couple of days later, I said, “That mirror really bugs me,” but again I didn’t change it. About six months later, it occurred to me I still hadn’t changed out the mirror because it no longer bugged me like it did at first.

We have an amazing adaptability. We just get used to stuff, and all of a sudden, we don’t see the problems anymore. We no longer see the critical issues like we should. So it takes some new eyes to come in and see what you need to do in a new and innovative way. Ask your congregation what they see. Ask them, “How could we do this in a different way?” Find out what innovations they suggest. And take a look at other churches and see how they do things differently from you.

8. Fascination: How could we make it more interesting?

Whatever you’re doing, try to figure out how you can make it more interesting or attractive. For instance, we wanted to create a sense of expectancy in our weekend services. We wanted our services to start with people sensing God in our midst and that lives were about to be changed. So we thought, “What would encourage this spirit of expectancy?”

We came up with several factors: having members praying for the services all week; having members praying during the services; having enthusiastic members bringing their unchurched friends to the service; having a history of life-changing services; music that celebrates the transformational nature of God; and a worship team that faithfully believes lives will be transformed during the service.

If you ask the right questions, they will lead you to the right answers. And the right answers will help you build a solid strategy for your ministry. Then believe that God will lead you to success.

Go back to Page 1.

Watch a video of this material here.

Read more from Rick here.

Tags: Developing Leadership, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Rick Warren

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

8 Nations of Innovation for Your Church

by: Rick Warren

0

Tweet

Great innovations come from great questions. The quality of your ministry will be determined by the kind of questions you have the courage to ask yourself. If you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers. If you don’t get the right answers, you won’t build the right strategy for your ministry. And, if you don’t have the right strategy, you’ll never get the results you hope for. It is critical for you to ask the right questions!

Asking the right questions is a skill you can develop. And you can get good at it. I want to suggest to you eight questions of innovation. These questions will help you innovate—no matter your area of ministry.

I call them the eight nations of innovation, but these nations aren’t geographic. They’re nations of imagination. I’ve used these exact questions to build Saddleback Church, the Purpose Driven Movement, The PEACE Plan, the Global PEACE Coalition and a number of other ministries.

1. Termination: What do I first need to stop?

You can have so many irons in the fire that you put out the fire. The great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter used to call this creative destruction. One of my mentors, Peter Drucker, used to call it systematic abandonment. When the horse is dead, dismount. This is a real key to success.

Here’s an example: For many years at Saddleback Church, we had a midweek Bible study, and we had a thousand people coming each week. Despite that, we decided to end the Bible study. Why? We weren’t satisfied with a thousand people. So we decentralized the study material and funneled it into small groups. And so today, because we terminated our midweek service, we now have more than 32,000 people in small group Bible studies all the way from Santa Monica to San Diego. There are cities all across Southern California where Saddleback small groups meet. This never would have happened if we hadn’t asked the question, “What do we first need to stop?” Asking this question helped us see the necessity of terminating our midweek service.

2. Collaboration: How do we do it faster, how do we do it larger, how do we do it cheaper—with a team?

If you want to start a movement, you need a team. Your team can include paid staff, but the real path to success is to create a team of volunteers. One of the secrets of Saddleback’s growth is that we’ve mobilized thousands of volunteers. A few years back, during 40 Days of Community, our church fed every homeless person in Orange County. We fed 42,000 homeless people three meals a day for 40 days. We couldn’t have done it without volunteers working together as a team.

3. Combination: What could we mix together to create something new?

One way to innovate is to take two existing things and combine them together. Years ago we combined the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the eight beatitudes of Jesus to create Celebrate Recovery. It’s now the official recovery program in 17 state prison systems, and used by tens of thousands of churches. More than 15,000 people at Saddleback have gone through Celebrate Recovery. Why? We combined two existing things and created something new and innovative.

Read Page 2

Tags: Developing Leadership, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Rick Warren

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

“Yes” is Great, But at Times “No” is Even Better

by: Michael Carroll

0

Tweet

At work, we want our jobs, assignments, projects and “stuff” to move along smoothly: achieving objectives, getting promoted, winning contracts. It’s almost a twitch reflex to want our jobs to behave themselves. And if we are honest, sometimes we may even secretly wish that the workplace could deliver a continuous, uninterrupted “yes”—“yes” I got the plum job; “yes” the budget was approved; “yes” the redesign has been accepted.

And not only do we want “yes” from our jobs, we also want to deliver “yes” in return – especially when results are expected: “yes” we can deliver doubled digit growth; “yes” we’ll exceed the deadline and come in under budget; “yes” we can close the deal.

But, as we all know, work doesn’t behave this way. It’s far too unruly: deadlines are too tight, salary increases are too small, business deals wither. And often instead of saying hello to “Yes”, we find “No” at the front of the line offering personnel conflicts, career disappointments and project derailments. But rather than treating “no” as an annoying intruder on our journey to “yes”, maybe we could take a different approach—maybe “no” isn’t such a bad guy after all—maybe “no” is exactly what we’ve been looking for. And here are three reasons why.

Emphasizing “yes” can dull our edge

When we impulsively look for “yes” from our subordinates, colleagues, vendors and others, we tend to emphasize harmony over clarity; convenience over excellence; perception over results. Such seeming harmony can dull a team’s creative edge and mask issues that need our attention.

Are we emotionally confident enough to hear the facts rather than a “managed narrative”?

Do we rush past problems in order to get to a solution or can we linger and explore difficulties thoroughly?

Do we invite “no” from others when we sense that it is being held back?

When we appreciate the importance of “no”, convenience becomes irrelevant, our intelligent “edge” is permitted to clarify problems and getting a realistic picture takes priority.

Avoiding “no” represses candor and causes team problems

It is typical for team members to test boundaries and try to form reliable relationships and inevitably, such testing creates friction where individuals say “no” to certain group demands and limits. We all know what this looks like: Why does Sally get to lead this effort, why not me? Those budget estimates are way too low, but no one listens to me. I authored the sales plan, why can’t I present it? When we are uncomfortable with the emotions accompanying such conflict, we may tend to avoid the required candor, hurrying toward a false “yes” of familiar routines and politeness. When teams choose avoidance over candor, we can end up repressing feelings that later arise as simmering frustrations or at times active resistance. Too often, by avoiding “no” we disguise problems rather than solve them.

“No” creates much needed psychological space

Finally, when we are constantly chasing “yes” — trying to become smarter, faster, cheaper, and more profitable — we can at times speed past the very things that need our attention. Such speed to succeed can blind us, but “no” can slow us down and offer some psychological space:

Can we describe the top three difficulties our customers are having with the new release 4.0?

What is the employment turnover with our key sales folks and should it be lower?

What are the three main motivators for our medical affairs physicians and are we focusing in on them? These and hundreds of other similar business questions require us to slow down in our relentless pursuit of “yes” and consider “no” as an ally. And when we make friends with “no”, we discover psychological space and time to reflect, not just on where we are going but, as importantly, on how we are getting there.

So, in the end work is very much about “yes” — “yes“ I can take that stretch assignment; “yes” I’ll work extra hours; “yes”, the project is on track. But if work is all about “yes”, chances are we are avoiding some vital issues, and we may need to make friends with “no”.

Read more from Michael here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Engine, Michael Carroll, Staff

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

7 Warnings for Aspiring Leaders

by: Ron Edmondson

0

Tweet

Almost on a weekly basis I hear from a young pastor who wants to grow as a leader. He feels the pressure placed upon him and knows that others are looking to him to steer the church on a healthy course. Most of these leaders are humble, knowing that ultimately Christ is the head of the church. What they also know is that there are expectations of their position, decisions that have to be made which are not clearly defined in Scripture, and that seminary didn’t train them to make.

Sometimes it seems I’ve given the same advice many times; either reminding myself or to another pastor. The more times I share the same concept, the more it becomes a short, paradigm shaping idea that summarizes the basic issue the leader is facing. What isn’t always clear is that I’ve learned these concepts mostly by living these concepts. I’ve made more mistakes in leadership than I’ve had success. That’s what this post is about. These are some warnings I’ve observed first hand in leadership positions I’ve held. I’m trying not to continue to live them and I’d love to help other leaders avoid them.

Here are 7 warnings for aspiring leaders:

• What you “settle for” becomes the culture.
• Mediocrity isn’t created. It’s accepted.
• Your actions determine their reactions.
• Don’t assume they agree because they haven’t said anything.
• You’ll never get there just “thinking about it”.
• If you’re the leader, they are likely waiting on you to lead or release the right to lead.
• What the team values becomes apparent by your actions, not your words, no matter how well spoken they might be.

What warnings would you share with aspiring leaders?

Read more from Ron here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Engine, Ron Edmondson, Staff

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >