Frank Blake, CEO Home Depot

I recently read an interview between SmartMoney and Frank Blake, CEO of Home Depot. Blake is credited with remodeling the 2,200-store home-improvement chain during a tough real estate market. The interview asked Blake what he looked for during his frequent store walks. He replied,

“I rarely make a specific store-related comment.  I don’t want it to be a career-ending thing when I walk into a store and it is bad.  I’m not so much interested in the individual store as what the individual store might say about larger issues.”

Instead of focusing on individual problems, Blake concentrates on the big picture issues.

This is a very wise strategy for pastors and other church leaders to remember. It is easy to react emotionally to a problem instead of asking, “How is our system broken and what needs to be fixed?” In my experience, ninety percent of the time the problem is a systems issue rather than a people issue. In either case, reacting emotionally rarely helps.

Think about it this way. We’re counseled to never punish our children when we’re angry. What would happen if we applied this principle to our leadership? What if instead of allowing a culture of fear to fester in our organizations, we used problems as opportunities for leadership coaching and systems improvements?

Click here to read the interview in its entirety.

I have a lot of teaching pastors that follow my writing. You are professional talkers. You spend most of your work week figuring out what you’re going to say. Then, you spend most of your time in front of your biggest audience on Sunday morning actually saying it.

Let’s not forget, though, you’re the professional. I am not. You know more than I do. Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you are effectively sharing that wisdom. I’ve tuned out a lot of smart people in my life. You can blame me for not staying engaged in your message. (I’m sure your problem is really my problem.)

Just in case you want my advice, though, I found this list in my archives. I wrote this several years ago, but the principles still apply. Here’s some advice to keep guys like me (who aren’t as smart as guys like you) stay engaged in your message.

10 Ways to Keep Me Engaged in Your Message

1. Be real. Let people see the actual human inside you. Most times that will occur through your personal stories.
2. Talk like normal people talk. I didn’t grow up in the church, so I don’t understand when you talk with a Christian accent.
3. Use humor. If you don’t make me laugh, I’m probably going to tune you out. By the way, the best humor is revealed through your everyday life.
4. Don’t tell me what to think. Lead me on the journey toward truth, but let me reach my own conclusions. In other words, don’t try to sell it.
5. Be honest. If I think you’re credible, there’s a better chance I’ll think your message is credible.
6. Avoid being too polished. In fact, I love it when you leave your prepared statements and share anything off the cu
7. Reveal your weaknesses. As silly as it may seem, it makes me smile when I hear about your mistakes. It helps me to respect the areas where you are gifted.
8. Be brief. Shorter is better. I’m probably only going to remember one or, at the most, two things that you say.
9. Make me smart. I don’t care how smart you are, but I like it when you make me feel smart. That’s easier when you use small words and make it easy for me to apply what you’re teaching.
10. Tell me why I should care. Help me understand why I should listen. If you don’t help me understand why it’s relevant to my life, I’ll to be thinking about my next blog post or my next tee time or my favorite 80s slow dance songs.

I’ve never had a seminary course on preaching, so I really don’t know anything about what it takes to prepare a good sermon. I think I’m pretty knowledgeable, though, when it comes to keeping people like me alert and engaged. Hopefully this helps you help people like me.

Big news!  We recently released the third eBook in the Leisure Suit series.  This book is called Stayin’ Alive: Build a Legacy of Leadership.  Among other things, this resource includes strategies and practical steps for:

• being intentional about leadership development
• developing dynamic leadership teams
• addressing leadership, vision or strategy gaps
• evaluating the health of your organization
• making uncomfortable but necessary changes
• investigating your personal disciplines and priorities

Like our other two previous eBooks, this resource is FREE.  We encourage you to share it with your teammates and friends.  The book doesn’t take much time to read and it includes relevant exercises and discussion questions that can be used the next time you connect with your team.  We want this resource to help you develop healthy conversations that lead to positive change.

We know that all of you are very busy so we wanted to provide you with a resource that can be used right away.  You don’t have to visit a bookstore or wait for the Amazon box to arrive on your doorstep.

Again, I’m grateful for the partnership with Church Community Builder.  Because of their generous contribution to Engage Burkina, this entire series is available to you for free.

Our team’s primary mission is to help leaders and churches have a bigger impact.  We don’t want you to be stuck.  We are praying for this eBook to help you take your next steps in your leadership and ministry.  Help us spread the word!  We want everyone to benefit from the entire Leisure Suit series.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to serve and lead many dynamic teams. In his book, Jesus on Leadership, C. Gene Wilkes shares six benefits of teams:

• Teams involve more people, thus affording more resources, ideas and energy than would an individual.
• Teams maximize a leader’s potential and minimize his or her weaknesses.
• Teams provide multiple perspectives on how to meet a need or reach a goal, thus devising several alternatives for each situation.
• Teams share the credit for victories and the blame for losses.
• Teams keep leaders accountable for the goal.
• Teams can do more than an individual.

President Woodrow Wilson once said, “We should not only use all the brains we have, but all that we can borrow.”  Today, I would like to introduce you to my team.  All of us are very excited about working together to help churches get unstuck.  

Paul Alexander

Paul Alexander is a ministry consultant at Tony Morgan Live. He is a pastor, speaker and strategist who has a passion for helping churches make vision real. For more than 10 years he has served on the senior leadership teams of some of the nation’s leading mega-churches. Currently, Paul is serving as the Executive Pastor at Sun Valley Community Church, a large multi-site church located in the Phoenix area. He has engaged in training on leadership and ministry strategies with Tony Morgan through coaching and consulting relationships. Paul has been married to his wife Lisa for more than 15 years. Together they have three children Kennedy, Mia, and Lincoln.

Regina Brown

Regina Brown is the executive assistant at Tony Morgan Live.  She graduated from Radford University with a degree in Communications.  Regina previously worked as an executive assistant at RE/MAX and served on the human resource team at WellStar Hospital.  Regina enjoys spending quality time with her husband and their two sons.  She loves to read, play the piano, write music and volunteer at her local church.

Jason Vernon

Jason Vernon is the director of marketing and business development at Tony Morgan Live.  He graduated from Liberty University with a degree in Marketing and a Master of Arts in Christian Leadership.  Jason also received an MBA from Lynchburg College.  After spending seven years as a marketing consultant, Jason left his role as the business manager of the marketing firm to focus on his ministry.  He is currently the lead pastor of the RTP Community Church in Durham, NC.  Jason enjoys reading, playing softball and spending time with his wife and son.

Jason Young

Jason Young is a ministry consultant at Tony Morgan Live. He is an architect of “surprise and delight” experiences. He has worked with LifeChurch.tv, First Baptist Church Woodstock, FORD, Chick-fil-A and other great churches and companies. He has a B.A. in English and Christian Studies, an M.Div in Theology and Greek and is completing doctoral work in Leadership Development. Jason recently sold his leadership company to build three new companies that will help churches and companies to create surprise and delight experiences, which are simply those heroic moments that delightfully serve guests creating epic stories that get repeated. Jason loves to spend time with his wife and two children.

Earlier this month, I wrote about Leaders Book Summaries.  The company summarizes books for busy leaders.  Each month, they review a couple of books and then send subscribers helpful 10-20 page summaries and a detailed 2-page super summary.

This week, I checked out their free sample summary and was really impressed.  The free sample was a summary of the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  The actual summary was a PDF document with a very professional layout.

The writing was clear, concise and easy to follow.  I really enjoyed reading the “Pastor’s Perspective.”  This section shared specific ideas for applying the book in a Christian organization.

The company issues thirty (30) summaries of leadership books each year.  The books are written by secular and religious authors.  Recent examples include…

• Integrity by Henry Cloud
• Talent is Never Enough by John Maxwell
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni
• On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis

A subscription is only about $6 a month (cheaper if you pay for an entire year in advance). For the price of three hard-back books, you can receive 30 high quality book summaries.

Leaders Book Summaries is currently offering a free one-month trial for our blog readers. Save time and money as you grow your leadership skills!

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This is a sponsored post from Leaders Book Summaries, one of my ministry partners on TonyMorganLive.com

Two weeks before the NFL draft, Anthony “A.T” Barnes called his agent and told him to withdraw his name. He gave up a career in football for a bigger purpose. These are the stories you’ll never see on ESPN. Check out A.T’s story.

I recently connected with Ted Vaughn, Director of Production and Creative Arts at the Rock Church in San Diego, California.  Ted’s team created this manifesto.  The word manifesto is defined as a declaration of principles.  This manifesto is a great challenge for us not to settle for where we currently are in our leadership and ministry.  Where are you settling?  Possibly it’s time for your own manifesto.

by Steve Caton,Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Church Community Builder

If your church management solution (ChMS) isn’t accelerating your ministry forward, then it is holding you back. There is no neutral position. When your ChMS isn’t aligned with your ministry processes, you are limited in your ability to stay connected between Sundays.

Having worked with many churches and leaders across the country, I’ve observed eight reasons a church’s ChMS isn’t working for them:

1. Only a few people are allowed access to the system. The whole point of a ChMS should be to facilitate community and maintain connections. If the only time you access your ChMS is for a contribution statement or to verify your address, you’ve missed the point entirely.
2. It isn’t valued by executive leadership. If senior leadership doesn’t encourage the staff and lay leaders to use the system, then you’ll have an uphill battle from the beginning.
3. The primary concern is control and not impact. Your ChMS is much more than an address book and a way to track contributions. If that’s all you wanted, you could have saved a lot of money and put everything into a spreadsheet.
4. Your ChMS is complicated, requires a lot of training, and not very intuitive. If your ChMS is difficult to navigate or impossible to figure out – for the everyday person – then you are sunk. Most people are going to give it one try before they make up their minds. The goal is to get as many people using it as possible. Continue Reading…

Stop and Start 2012

I hope you enjoyed our “Stop and Start” series.  I had fun learning from some of America’s top leaders. I would love to hear what some of you have already stopped or started doing in 2012.

Here is a summary of the entire series:

Mark Batterson

Scott Belsky

Craig Groeschel

Chris Hodges

Tim Sanders

Perry Noble

Jon Acuff

Jenni Catron

Eric Geiger

Jeff Henderson

Ben Stroup

Jim Tomberlin

David Foster

Ron Edmondson

Lance Witt

Penelope Trunk, Sam Rainer and Maurilio Amorim

Dave Travis

Mike Foster

Will Mancini

Josh Griffin

Dan Reiland, Brad Lomenick and Dave Ferguson

Photo by Roo Reynolds.