4 Insights from the 2012 Chick-fil-A Leadercast

This last Friday, I had the privilege of attending the annual Chick-fil-A Leadercast produced by Giant Impact. The theme this year was “choices.” As leaders, we make hundreds of choices a day. Choices that not only affect us personally but our families and those we lead. It was a killer lineup of speakers including Andy Stanley, Pat Lencioni, John Maxwell, Urban Meyer, Tim Tebow, Soledad O’Brien and more. While each of the talks probably deserve a separate post, I’d like to hit some of the highlights from a few different speakers and give you a handful of my personal insights for my leadership at CARE for AIDS. Hopefully, these will resonate with you and have application in your own leadership context.

1. “What would my replacement do?” Andy Stanley kicked off the day by giving us three questions to add to our decision-making arsenal. His first one was, “What would my replacement do?” I don’t think my job is in danger, but if someone with more experience was brought in, what is the first thing he or she would do? When I hit a dead end or my strategies and tactics seem tired, this is a great question that brings objectivity and focus to a matter that could often be clouded by personal bias or attachment to an idea or strategy.

2. The Law of Awareness.  John Maxwell shared with us a few laws with us from his upcoming book The 15 Laws of Personal Growth. He said that in order to grow ourselves, we must know ourselves. Mainly, we need to have awareness in three areas:

Requirement – What is required of me?

Return – What gives me the greatest return? (staying within your strengths)

Reward – What is rewarding to me?

Aligning those three answers creates passion. As we begin to coach our staff on their personal development, I will really be focusing on creating alignment in these areas.

3. “Flip the hierarchy.” I could write a whole post on Angela Ahrendts’ talk. She is the CEO of Burberry and assumed that role shortly after the organization’s 150^th anniversary. As you can imagine, she had to make some radical changes to bring Burberry into the modern and social era, but one of her strategies was really mind-blowing. She created a committee of the youngest, most innovative minds in the company and gave them the liberty to create the vision and strategies that would help Burberry succeed in this social age. Then, the executive team was responsible for executing that vision. What a radical idea which is so counter to the typical corporate culture! It has worked for them in a big way. To read more, visit Great Leaders Serve for a complete post on her talk.

4. “The real competitive advantage is a healthy organization.” The final speaker of the day was Patrick Lencioni. He said that there are two sides to any business: being smart (marketing, strategy, etc.) and being healthy (culture, values, etc.). He stated that in this day and age, being is healthy is the real competitive advantage because any organization can be smart. We as leaders have to create cohesive leadership teams through vulnerability and be very clear about the values and beliefs that drive our organizations. We must over communicate those values and reinforce them whenever possible. This was a good reminder that, in this scenario, redundancy is not a bad thing.

Do any of these principles resonate with you? How can you apply these lessons in your organization or family? If you also attended Leadercast last week, what were some of your takeaways?

New Team Member Announcement!

Over the years, God has brought some of the most talented individuals into the path of CARE for AIDS, and I am pleased to announce that we have added another tremendous team member to our U.S. staff, Kyle Flora. He will officially be joining our team next month, and he will assist us in extending our reach to new donors and ministry partners as well as by leveraging his background in media to help us develop in the area of communications. I will let him tell you more of his story once he gets settled, but I wanted to share some principles with you that were reinforced for me during this selection process.

Kyle interacting with our clients at Central Baptist in Kisumu

Over the last few months as we were making this hiring decision, I used a framework for this decision that I learned from Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church. This model that he calls the “Four C’s of Team Selection” has had so many applications in my leadership journey, and once again, I found myself revisiting these criteria almost daily as I examined Kyle as a candidate. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this model, I think it will help you in making good hiring decisions in the future. To read more about this, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Bill Hybels’ book called Courageous Leadership.

The Four C’s of Team Member Selection:

Character – This one is first for a reason. It is so integral to the selection of a candidate, but it does not always receive the attention it deserves. The implications of lapses in this character will have a far greater impact than you can imagine. Does the candidate have a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and do they possess qualities such as integrity, humility, hard work ethic, etc.? These are traits that can be molded through good parenting or counseling, but we as leaders should not spend time trying to develop these in new hires. We need to select for character.

Competence – Our work is too important to settle for less than the best available talent. More importantly, we need to seek out proven talent and a track record of success. Despite being a smaller organization, we have set our sights high in this arena, and God has honored that by providing exceptional leaders with a wide array of gifts and abilities.

Chemistry – So much of your time is going to be spent with this new person that they need to have a positive effect on you. They should give you energy as opposed to draining you of it. They should encourage you and build you up as opposed to being critical or negative. The better that they can relate to you and the rest of the team, the easier it is to collaborate effectively and achieve more.

Calling – This is the newest addition to Bill’s criteria, but I believe it is so important. Without a calling, the rest of the criteria don’t matter. Can you detect a sense of purpose and passion that can only be from God? Especially in the work we do, our team members must be willing to make personal sacrifices. That includes time away from family and maybe even passing up more financially lucrative opportunities. Without the calling, it wouldn’t be long before a team member begins to lack motivation and passion, and as a result, their character, competence, and chemistry would all diminish with it.

Do you agree with this set of criteria? Would you assign more or less value to any of them?

Creating a Culture of Coaching

At CARE for AIDS, we talk a lot about addressing the issue of HIV/AIDS in a holistic manner. That involves caring for the physical, spiritual, emotional, relational, social, and economic parts of a person. Lack of wholeness in one of those areas can affect all the others. Our clients’ lack of physical strength prevents them from working to earn money for their families. The lack of emotional support leads to feelings of hopelessness that deteriorate physical health. They are all related.

So, why don’t we invest in our leaders in the same way?

Helping someone develop professional skills and competencies is a must, but it is not enough. I recently had the privilege of working with a life coach named Greg Salciccioli. We spent the first 9 MONTHS of our one-year coaching relationship working on my life plan, which focused exclusively on areas of my life outside the workplace. This included examining my physical health habits, my relationship with Lindsay, my personal finances, and many other topics. All of those areas, if not managed well, will eventually spill over and have a negative impact on my leadership.

Having a coach has helped me in three big ways:

1. It is structured. Some would argue that too much structure in coaching is a bad thing, but the process allowed me to focus intently on one area of my life at a time and it provided a framework of questions, assessments, and scripture to help with my growth. Those are not things that an informal accountability partner can offer.
2. It is objective. It is easy to get defensive when someone you know is asking you hard questions, but when someone is asking you in the context of a coaching relationship, your guard is down. Then, when they give advice or counsel, it is easy to accept it knowing that they have your best interests at heart.
3. It is accountable. Accountability is hard among our peers. We want to love and accept them without having to confront the difficult issues. Coaching allows you to write down the specific action steps you want to achieve and then the coach expects those to be completed before the next meeting. Unlike my buddies, I know my coach isn’t going to cut me any slack.

After this process, it became clear to me that our Kenyan staff could also benefit from having coaches. Kenyans are very relational, but when it comes to personal matters, they are very private. As far as I know, none of our Kenyan leaders have ever been in a relationship that was structured, objective, or accountable outside of the professional realm. So, I began working with Greg, my coach, to develop a custom system that will be launched in the next few months that will do just that. If our clients are expected to grow and develop in a holistic manner, then we need to have the same expectation of our staff. In the next couple years, I pray that all of our staff is engaged in a coaching relationship with someone who is encouraging them to be the best Christ-follower, husband, father, and leader that they can possibly be. But not just that, I pray that they will also be trained on how to coach others inside and outside the organization. The more effective our leaders are in all areas of their lives, the more effective we will be as an organization in caring for those that are HIV-positive.

I will keep you updated as we begin to implement this new coaching program. If you wish to learn more about professional coaching or get coached yourself, please visit Greg’s website at www.coachgreg.com or buy a copy of his book The Enemies of Excellence here.

Have you ever been in a coaching relationship? How did it benefit you? If not, how do you think you could benefit from being coached?