- Hey, shout out to our YouTube community. It's been said, "What got you
here won't get you there," and that's more true
today in your leadership than ever before. Before we dive into
today, I'd love to know where you're watching from. If you could just type
in the comment sections, hey, I'm in this part of
the world and tell us, that would be so much fun to know where you're coming from and
I'll give you the introduction today, with the pace at
which our world is changing, if you're not adapting, tweaking, and modifying your leadership approach, you're likely getting left behind. To date, we're talking
about leading with agility and we're gonna learn
how to correct quickly. (upbeat music)
A few years ago, I got my private pilot's license and I learned that when you're
a pilot, there is a joke and the joke goes like this, how do you know if someone is a pilot? And the answer is, don't worry
about it, they'll tell you. And it's very, very true. So if I haven't told you,
I happen to be a pilot. And after I got my private
pilot's license, I then went and studied for my instrument rating, which is probably more difficult than getting your pilot's license. And that gives you the ability
to fly in what's called IMC, which stands for instrument
meteorological conditions. And that's when you fly solely based on reading the instruments instead of using external visual references. Now, with a little bit
of research, I found that only about 50% of all the pilots actually
get their instrument rating. And of those about 15% are current, which means only about 7% or so of the private
pilots can actually do what's called flying in the soup. What does that mean? That means that you can fly in the clouds without any external visual references. And believe it or not, flying
in the soup or in the clouds can be very, very difficult. Pilots die in the soup. JFK junior is an example. When you're in the soup,
when you're in the clouds, you're blind to the normal indicators. You can't see the horizon,
you can't see the ground. So you don't actually know where you are and your body starts to lie to you. And you might think that
you're turning one way when you're not, think
that you're descending when you're not and your body has a way of lying very, very quickly when you can't see the normal indicators. What do we do in leadership? Today, I wanna talk to you about learning to read and interpret and trust the instruments,
just like you have to do when you're in the
soup, no matter what you feel, no matter what your body
tells you, no matter how afraid you are, you need
to believe by faith that what you're reading on the
instruments is trustworthy. And I'll tell you right now,
whether you know it or not, you're flying in the soup, you're leading in the soup, you're leading in a different environment where it's so much more difficult to accurately gauge what's
going on in the world today because there have been so many massive changes
over the last few years and you know it, you feel it. And that's why I wanna tell
you, if you aren't adapting, tweaking, and modifying
your leadership approach, you're probably getting left behind. Let me give you a short list of a few of the changes in the world. This is not exhaustive,
but it's a running start. What is different today
than just a few years back? We've got globalization, the world is shrinking and moving faster. We've got technological
innovation, we've got the rise of AI, who knows where this is going? We've got the increasing
distrust of leaders. People used to typically
trust those in leadership. There is a tendency and a bias toward massive
and quick distrust today. You've got the emergence
of the cancel culture. You know that you could
say one wrong thing, take one misstep, and you
could get canceled today. You've got the deeply
polarized opinions and values and besides, if you've noticed,
this is an election year, you've got remote work dynamics
playing into account today, and that was different than in the past. You've got the important focus
on diversity and inclusion. You've got the ongoing overload
of information you read and hear and see what feels
like almost everything, bad news, complicated news
from all over the world. You've got the prevalence
of mental health issues. When I started in leadership 30 years ago, that wasn't really even
a phrase or a concern, now it's everywhere. You've got the waning
resilience of team members. It seems like people are
falling apart faster and faster and you've got the anti-work
culture and quiet quitting. The world is very, very different. No wonder you might be tired, no wonder you might be a
little bit discouraged. You're flying or you're
leading in the soup. And I wanna talk to you about a little bit of a different way to think. How do you fly in the soup or
how do you lead with agility and correct quickly? And this talk's gonna be
a little bit different. Normally I'm gonna be
kind of really structured, but what I'm gonna do is be
a little more free flowing and talk about what I'm seeing and what I'm sensing in my
current place of leadership and then you can kind of adapt and adopt it to where you are. Three big thoughts and then we're gonna look at
six things that I'm addressing and you might be addressing as well. Three big thoughts, how
do we lead with agility? Number one, you need to
learn to read, interpret, and trust your instruments. Learn to read, interpret,
and trust your instruments. Number two, you're gonna
need to make constant, nonstop, small, corrections. And number three, I call it
this, you need to learn to feel and flow, feel and flow
in your leadership. Let's talk about 'em one by one and then we're gonna
look at six big changes that I'm addressing. Number one, you wanna
learn to read, interpret, and trust your instruments. Now more than ever, you
wanna read everything about the culture in the world today. You wanna know everything
about the culture in your workplace. You wanna be asking questions, you wanna be studying the numbers, you wanna be studying
the data, you wanna try to interpret exactly what
you have in front of you. For example, I am a pastor of a church and in our world, back in 2019, attendance was such and such. 2020 COVID hit and our physical attendance of people worshiping in church
buildings went way, way down. Now here's what's crazy. Over the next few years,
attendance was building back up. This will be the first year that our attendance will likely
exceed where it was in 2019. Attendance was down, but
what's crazy is our giving or our revenue was way, way up. This is bizarre, this is confusing. It's almost unsettling to me as a pastor because giving is generally
a reflection of the number of people that you're
reaching and the depth of the engagement or
discipleship you have going on in their hearts. When you have more people coming and you've got great
engagement, giving goes up. When you have fewer people coming or lesser engagement, giving goes down. Suddenly we have fewer people coming and more giving coming in and
this is very disorienting. What do we have? And the answer is, I'm not quite sure. How do we interpret that? Maybe one thing is that the frequency at which
people attend is way down. Maybe we're reaching way,
way, way more people online. I don't know what it is, but what I have to do is study
it, analyze it, interpret it, and try to understand it. What I know is it's very, very different than hat we had five years
before, massively different. And so I need to change
how I think, how I act, and how I lead in this situation. I'm flying in the soup. Other examples is that at our church, teams and people seem to be working sometimes a little bit less, meaning we might have fewer services, but more people are struggling at times going, "I'm exhausted, burned out." The workday in many parts of the country where I live is shorter, meaning school starts a little bit later and ends a little bit earlier. So parents are having to come to work a little bit later or
leave a little bit earlier. The workday is shorter and yet people are dealing
with mental health issues, marriages are struggling,
people are burned out. And so I wanna try to understand
like why, what's going on? What do I need to understand? How do we respond to help people succeed both in their homes and in the workplace? I'm flying in the soup. I'm not sure what you need to
study in your organization, but there is something . For you, it might be studying
why something is working. If something's going great, you wanna know why it's going great because like my friend Andy Stanley says, "One day, if it doesn't grow, great, if you don't know why
it's working when it is, you won't know how to
fix it when it's not." So you wanna study like
why is it going great? You might want to understand
why your revenue is up or down. You might wanna look very
carefully at employee retention. Do you have an issue there? You might wanna look at analytics or returned items if you're in retail or returning customers, whatever
it is you want to learn, study, understand what's going on, and especially when it comes
to the health of your team. As it goes with your team, so
it goes with the organization and I would suggest that you really genuinely
care about your people, like deeply care about your people and dive in full force to understand how are they actually doing. Because based on my observation and those I'm talking to, our employees today are likely struggling more than they were five years ago. So what do you wanna do? You wanna ask questions
and you wanna listen. You want to be a student. We're not assuming we know
because we don't really know because we're in the soup. I recommend different surveys. We use the Gallup Q12
Employee Engagement Survey. We'll link to that in the notes. We use the emotional intelligence test. You wanna use any kind
of self-awareness test. You wanna study or ask questions. You wanna understand how
are your team members actually doing because
it really, really matters 'cause you care for them. So number one, you wanna
learn to read, interpret, and trust your instruments. Your feelings may tell you one thing, your instincts may tell
you something else. You wanna read and understand what are the numbers telling you? What are you hearing? You want to trust your
instruments, you wanna understand, interpret what is going on. Number two, you wanna
make constant, nonstop, small corrections. Why? If you're flying in the soup, remember you can't see the ground and you can't see the horizon. You've got no reference. So to use an aviation example,
when you're in the soup and like literally you can be
in the clouds for 30 minutes, an hour just flying, yeah, crew's out and you can't see anything. And so you wanna make sure
wings are level at that point. And then there's three big
things you want to manage, especially when you're coming in for a landing and you're in the soup. You wanna manage your
speed, your direction, and your altitude. Your speed, you don't
wanna be going too fast 'cause that could be bad for the wings. You don't wanna be going
too slow or you could stall. You want to be managing the direction. If you're coming in for the airport, you wanna aim for the airport. If you're just a couple of ticks off, you're
gonna miss the airport. And then you wanna manage your altitude. If you're too high, you're
gonna overpass the airport. If you're too low, you're gonna crash into the ground or the tower or whatever. And so you're managing speed,
direction, and altitude. The same is true in your leadership. You're managing the speed
at which things get done. You're managing the direction
at which your organization is going and you want to
be at the right altitude so you understand and can
interpret what's going on to lead well. Now, when you're flying a plane,
this sounds kind of crazy, people, it's counterintuitive,
I had to learn this. You pitch for speed and
you power for altitude. I would've thought before I
was a pilot that if you want to go faster, you give more power. You actually don't do
that, you pitch for speed. If you wanna go faster, you go nose down and you pick up speed. If you wanna go slower,
you actually go nose up and that slows you down. Then you power for altitude. If you wanna stay where you
are, you leave the power. If you wanna go higher,
you add more power. If you wanna go lower, you
actually pull the power back and then your nose up to let it slow down and then you start to sink. You pitch for speed and
you power for altitude. If you are on an inbound landing, you're actually following
what's called an approach. And I don't wanna nerd out, but there's an ILS, an
RNAV, a VOR approach, all sorts of different approaches. And there are different
systems of giving you kind of like an invisible track in the sky to follow all the way down to the runway. The beautiful thing about
many planes today is you can actually program in an approach and you can put it on autopilot. And for the most part, the
plane will follow the pathway all the way down. But to be a good pilot, we
wanna be able to fly it by hand. And so we train to do this. And when we do, it is
impossible to describe to you how many small
changes you're gonna make on the way down. It's gonna be dozens, it could be hundreds of very,
very small quick changes. What you're doing is you're
gonna nose up just a bit, nose down just a little bit. You're gonna ailer on right, ailer on left, you're
gonna add a little power, pull a little back. Nonstop, you're tweaking because you don't wanna
be too high, too low. You don't wanna be to the
right, you wanna be to the left. Back to your leadership,
how does this apply? If you feel like you're making constant, nonstop small corrections, you are very likely leading well. This is just based on my observation. If you are not making constant, nonstop small corrections,
then I'd say it this way in aviate, the plane's
about to get away from you or your leadership organization
could be drifting faster away from you than you realize. What you wanna do is
you wanna make constant, nonstop small corrections. And we're gonna talk about
six areas to do that in. Number one, learn to read, interpret, and trust your instruments. Number two, make constant,
nonstop small corrections. Number three, learn to feel and flow. Learn to feel and flow. What you wanna do is you want
to obsess about what you see, but at the same time you
want to intuitively kind of feel what's going on. So we're reading the numbers
and we're interpreting, and what you wanna do is
you wanna see problems early and you want to solve them quickly. The moment you start to see a problem, you wanna recognize go, okay,
this is an issue, I see it, I wanna solve it quickly. Don't over-react when you
see it, don't over-correct. What you wanna do is you wanna
read it, you wanna feel it and you wanna flow with it. When I'm hand flying down on an approach, I don't ever wanna over-correct, I don't wanna wait too long. Immediately when I see any
indication of being off, small correction, small
move, little bit more power, little bit less power, little
nose down, little nose up. We're feeling and we're flowing it. We're not jerking,
we're not over-reacting, we're not under-reacting,
we're catching it immediately. All that to point to this,
what are some examples of how you're likely leading
in the soup right now? I wanna give you a few of them and show you six different things that I'm working on in
leading with our team. And here's why this is
a little bit different. I'm actually gonna talk about
both sides of a similar issue. If I'm descending on an approach, there are times when I have
to go nose up to slow it down and then I have to go nose
down to to speed it up. And I may do that eight
times on the way down because I'm adjusting, I'm
adjusting on both sides. If I'm coming in in a
crosswind, I may have to ailer on left or right, I
have to turn the plane right or left over and over and over again because I'm correcting on both
sides to stay on the pathway. Now more than ever now,
more than in three decades of leadership, I find myself correcting on both sides of an issue. If you find yourself doing this, I think you're probably leading well. Let me give you the areas. First thing is this, when it comes to work ethic, work culture,
I'm having to tell people two things on both
sides of the same issue. I'm having to lead and tell
people, you need to work harder. And I'm having to tell people
you need to rest better. Both sides of the issue. Some people need to work harder, a lot of people need to rest better. To be real honest with you,
when we hired a bunch of kind of new staff members, we had to go over more today than before, what a baseline work week is. And not to sound demeaning in any way, but we had to say, hey, a full-time job starts at 40 hours a week and let's go through your week. If you're coming in at nine,
you're leaving at three, and you doing that for
four days, the day off, and you kind of add up, how
many hours does that come up to? And some people are like 31, okay, that's actually not a full-time job. And so we had to coach people that a full-time job starts at 40 hours. And in ministry there're gonna
be times when we do more than that because of the
unusual demands of caring for people at unusual hours. Then at the same time,
we've got some people that you need to kind of raise the bar. You got other people that are
like, they're going so hard, so hard, too hard, too
hard, and they're exhausted. What's happening, they're
gonna come in and say, "I'm tired all the time,
I'm about to burn out." Some of them are, but a lot of them are misinterpreting
where they are. And you need as a leader to
read, interpret what's going on, and to help them to succeed. Some people are not tired. If they were tired they could
take a nap, take a vacation. Many people are not tired, they're depleted and there's a difference. If you're tired, you could take a nap. If you're depleted, you need to refill. And so we need as leaders to
help our team members learn how to refill. For many people, it's not that they don't have enough time off, but they're not using their time off to replenish their energy
or their spiritual fire or their marriage or whatever is. And they've got exterior
problems outside of work that are contributing to marital
problems, parenting issues, and professional issues. And now more than ever, we
are holistically discipling or training people to be successful. So we're correcting on
both sides of the issue. Some people need to work harder, some people need to rest better. The second thing is this, I
find that I'm doing this more and more is that we have
to communicate earlier and communicate longer. If we wanna lead something
to change, we need to say it earlier before we expect it to change. And we need to keep saying it longer in order to create change. In the old days, back when the world was a
little bit less complicated, we used to just come into a staff meeting with our team and say, okay,
here's what we're gonna do. And everybody would kind of do it. Now we're finding as if we do
that one time, it doesn't tend to move the needle as much. So what we have to do is we
have to start communicating earlier before we even go public and then communicate longer. What we're doing now
on really big changes, part of it's because of the size. When you have more people, you have to work harder to change. But we start with our top leaders and then we go to the
next group of the leaders and then we go to the whole
staff and then we repeat it. What happens is I'll start
with our top four leaders and we'll say, here's
where we're gonna go. Then we meet with our top 20 leaders or so and say, here's where we're gonna go. Then we have a meeting
where we have 100 leaders that come in and we pitch it to them so they all understand
we're all on the same page. Then we bring the whole staff together from all the different
locations and we tell it to them and then we repeat it for
quite a long period of time. For about 18 months, we talked about three
things in our organization. We talked about reaching
people, creating margin, and simplifying processes. What are we gonna do? If you ask anybody anywhere on our team, what are we working on? They will all tell you,
reach people, create margin, simplify processes. Reach people, I told you
that attendance was down. Well that's a big problem
'cause we're a church and we exist to reach people. Jesus told us to go into
all the world preach gospel. So if we're reaching fewer
people, that's unacceptable. We wanna reach people,
that's number one for us. Two is create margin. What does that mean? In a for-profit business,
you wanna create profit. And we're not a for-profit
business, we create margin. And what we do is we use
that to fund ministries. How do we start three New Life
church locations in a year and pay for it in cash? We create financial margin that we then put into new ministries in order to reach new people. It's a very important part
of our spiritual strategy. Then we simplify processes. What we found is that we know
growth creates complexity and complexity kills growth. And our team had grown to
almost a thousand employees and we were slower. So we determined we have
to simplify processes. So for 18 months, 18 months at every meeting,
reach people, create margin, simplify processes. That kind of long-term
focus would've been unheard of 10 years ago. But what I've found is you
have to communicate earlier and communicate longer. And over the past year, our numbers and spiritual impact reflected
significantly that focus. Had we not worked for
a long period of time, we wouldn't have seen
the incredible results. I'm gonna encourage you to communicate earlier and communicate longer. Number three, you're gonna need to lead with faith-filled optimism and cautious pessimism. Faith-filled optimism
and cautious pessimism. People need to know that
things can get better and that we're gonna make a difference. In my terms, I would say that God is working and God is moving. And at the same time,
the world is complicated. And so we gotta be very, very careful. It's an election year,
the economy it appears to be booming in some places, and yet there's a lot of
indicators that are going, like debt's outta control
and interest is still high and it's an election year. To me, it feels a little bit unstable. So what we wanna do is we wanna lead with faith-filled optimism. And yet, wait a minute, we
gotta be really, really careful because things could change quickly. And so I'm leading on
both sides of that issue. Pitch up, pitch down,
power up, power down, leading on both sides of the same issue. Number four, especially
in ministry worlds, and I'd say this for
everybody, we're gonna need to love and lead with greater clarity and deeper compassion. We're gonna love and
lead with greater clarity and deeper compassion because there are more complicated
issues in our world today with gender question,
sexuality, mental health issues, marital breakdown, financial
issues, integrity issues. And when it comes to your staff and team or the people that you pastor or whatever is you want to correct firmly and pastor gently, we need
to lead with greater clarity. Here's what we believe
and here's what we expect and yet deeper compassion, knowing that people are
hurting and they need love. Two more, number five is in
our world, we're saying this, we're gonna think bigger and we're gonna focus on the one. We're gonna think bigger and
we're gonna focus on the one. We're gonna think bigger
than ever, bigger than ever. We have the ability now through
the YouVersion Bible app, we will impact over a billion people. That's bigger than ever. And yet for us, we never,
ever, ever want to be too big to forget about caring for the one. From my spiritual background,
we read about Jesus who would leave 99 sheep
to go after the one. So what we're saying over and over and over again here is
that we're big enough to impact the world, we're small enough to care for the one. We're big enough to impact the world, we're small enough to care for the one. You might want to think
bigger in your impact, but you also wanna care for people. Number six, we wanna steward wisely and we want to invest big. Steward wisely, I think
in this culture today, more than ever we gotta pinch pennies and be wise about everything. But in order to have a big impact, sometimes you have to swing for the fence. And so right now I find myself
again, pitch up, pitch down, power up, power down. I find myself on both sides
like, don't spin that. And yes, let's go big. Hey, let's be really, really wise and really, really careful. And yes, we've gotta put
the pedal to the metal now and do something significant. And it feels almost
schizophrenic, but it's not. In order to swing for the fence, you have to actually pinch pennies. It feels like in leadership
today more than ever before that I'm making constant, nonstop small corrections. And I would say most likely,
where you're leading, how you're leading, you
need to do the same thing. Quick application. Let's do some questions
to help you get better. Number one, learn to read, interpret, and trust your instruments. Here's my question for you. What are the most important metrics and cultural indicators you need to read, interpret, and trust? You may get around your team, the people that you work with, your key volunteers and ask yourself, what are
the most important metrics? What are the numbers you're studying? Cultural indicators, that
could be in your team's culture or in the culture at large that you need to read, interpret, and trust. Thought number two, we're
gonna make constant, nonstop, small corrections. You'll likely be leading on
both sides of the same issue. Maybe work ethic, for some
people who are saying giddy up, for others who are saying slow down. When it comes to spending, hey, we need to be more conservative, hey, we need to be more aggressive, okay? Here's your question. What are the primary issues that need constant
attention or correction? If you can't name two or three right now, chances are you're probably missing something important. What are the primary
issues in your organization for your missional success that need constant
attention or correction? And then finally number three
is learn to feel and flow. And this is where we just,
we study the numbers, we look at it and then we flow. We know what's going on and
then we trust our instincts to interpret and to flow with it. We're not over-correcting,
we're not jerking, we're not coming in, ah, this is wrong. No, we're just, we're just correcting. Hey, let's stop this,
hey, let's go this way. Hey, let's go this way and
the question would be this, what changes do you need to make to lead with a better flow? For me, sometimes I'll
emotionally over-react and I'll come in too strong. What changes do you in your
leadership need to make to lead with a better flow? We're not gonna over-correct,
we're not gonna under-correct. We're gonna see problems early and we're gonna solve them quickly. Alright, we covered a lot of ground and what I wanna do is
make a promise to you, I'm gonna work hard to bring
valuable leadership content. I'm gonna ask you, if you wouldn't mind, to share this content, invite others to be a part of the community. We're not monetizing
this, there are no ads. This is just my best attempt
to help you get better. Would you invite others to be a part of our leadership community? Be sure and get the Leader Guide, life.church/leadershippodcast. When you post, tag us and we'll likely repost you
to help others be a part of a leadership community. And I wanna tell you that
sincerely, I love you and care about you. I believe that you have more in you and I'm praying that you
would've the confidence to do everything that you're called to do to make a difference in this world. Your leadership matters more
than you know and guess what? You're getting better,
that's really good news because everyone wins when
the leader gets better. (upbeat music)
