Influencing Positive Change – Finding Courage

Leadership manifests itself in many cultural environments and is heavily impacted by situational dynamics. People assuming leadership roles are equipped with many different skill-sets and experiences. They face in many cases skepticism and entrenched resistance to change. Leaders are those who despite the challenges they face work to influence positive change. Finding the courage to make that first step forward and follow through is one of the foundational milestones to success in achieving those changes!

There are six steps that define the needed courage to step out of the leader’s safe comfort zone and find the courage to move forward:

1.    Accept Responsibility

Part of finding the courage is to accept some personal responsibility for the challenges of influencing positive change. The leader needs to accept that he/she has been fully equipped and placed into this situation to lead. The leader is not at the mercy of the situation. Nor are they helpless against the opposition. The leader has the responsibility to work to achieve the needed change and needs to affirm that to themselves. Accepting responsibility means they need to:

• ·         Eliminate the ”buts” of moving forward
• ·         Develop a positive support network
• ·         Encourage the “We” and reduce the “Them” involved in placing responsibility/blame

2.    Embrace Non-Conformity

The leader needs to find a way to embrace non-conformity in order to foster and influence positive change within the organization. There is tremendous inertia in all organizations. Those organizations who embrace change continue to move forward by improving along the way through this momentum having overcome inertia until stopped by external events. Many organizations are stuck and this inertia must be overcome though embracing non-conformity! This is why it is so important to develop and pursue a vision and mission that is positive and future oriented not backward looking focused on seeking to maintain the status quo. Embracing non-conformity means leaders need to:

• ·         Seek a higher purpose and preferred future state
• ·         Utilize a language of growth and progress
• ·         Strive to not fit in rather stretch out

3.    Push beyond Comfort Zone

Leaders seeking to influence change must find the courage to push beyond their comfort zone as well as the comfort zone of the organization. As human beings we are naturally risk adverse as we seek to fit into the group and community we find ourselves. We want to find that comfort zone where we can live our lives out in peaceful existence. Leaders by definitions are those that want to move people through influence to where they do not naturally want to go. The preferred state is outside the people’s comfort zone and the leader needs to help them get there through moving out of their comfort zone also. Finding the courage to move out of the comfort zone means they need to:

• ·         Know who you are through a thorough self-assessment
• ·         Find an encourager and accountability partner
• ·         Benchmark the future state

4.    Ask for What you Want

Curiosity and the ability to ask powerful open-ended questions are essential tools of the leader who seeks to influence others to positive change. No one not even the most talented leader has all of the answers to achieving the preferred future state. Develop a connection with the people through being curious about how things are and what the thinking is on a situation. Learn to ask open ended questions that seek common understanding with other people/groups. Find the courage to ask for the change you want and build support from the people who are impacted by the change:

·         Learn to ask open ended and powerful questions that build understanding and agreement

·         Seek to find the common ground and influence change though curiosity

·         Develop a common language among supporters of the change to the preferred future state

5.    Say what you think

Learn to say what you believe and think even in unfriendly cultural environments. Work to ensure our thoughts are grounded in faithful belief and reflection. Work to say what you think which drives common understanding and moves the dialogue forward. Part of this process is to seek the basis for other opposed ideas so as to honor their place in the conversation. Take those different points of view into consideration when you say what you think about the change that is needed in the organization. Finding the courage to say what you think even to unhearing ears takes the development of the ability to:

• ·         Learn to listen actively to others
• ·         Place your thoughts in the context of the listener and cultural situation
• ·         Speak what you think from a non-judgmental place

6.    Fight for what you believe

The ability to influence others to a preferred state is worth a stand. The courage of one’s convictions is an important component of leadership. The challenge in acting on these convictions is are they for self-interest and self-promotion or are they being espoused for the common good and for the higher purpose. The consideration of the other side of the argument is an important component of standing for one’s beliefs. Growth comes from the taking on of all points of view stated in a constructive manner and rarely are dogmatic truths. So as an example if your are fighting for or standing up for a disadvantaged group continue to listen for the other approaches and arguments in the context of the greater purpose and whether is value added merit in a piece of the opposition you are fighting against with some such passion. Fighting for what you believe is an important part of finding the courage to be a leader:

• ·         Develop a core statement of belief which is living and growing all the time through learning and listening
• ·         Express your thoughts and beliefs freely focused on the greater purpose
• ·         Engage in dialogue that seeks common understanding and avoids hard barriers

Leaders by definitions are those that want to move people through influence to where they do not naturally want to go. The preferred state is outside the people’s comfort zone and the leader needs to help them get there through moving out of their comfort zone also.

When the Rubber Meets the Road

Recently the pastor of a growing and healthy church reflected in a meeting that “Our church has worked through a process of evaluating what we are good at and where God has blessed us. We have prayed about this thought about where we feel God is leading us to fulfill needs in our community. Now we need to implement that strategy and we don’t see many examples of how to successfully accomplish that task!”

There is an old saying “When the Rubber Meets the Road.” This referred to the time when you were ready to implement an idea or new product. The design and planning had been accomplished. You were ready to embark on your journey or change.  Finally, after prayer and discussion the decision is made to start the work. This time of implementation is when the “rubber meets the road”, all the twists and challenges, bumps and complaints, longing to return, and not everyone enthusiastic about the journey. There are practical as well as spiritual elements involved in the change journey. A roadmap needs to be developed and implemented.

Key components of that roadmap:

·         Focus on compelling priorities

o   What excites you about the preferred future state?

o   What are the three big accomplishments that would make you feel successful living in to your preferred future state?

·         Reflect and build on ways you are already living into the preferred future state/strategic plan implementation

o   What have you done previously that you could do again move forward toward your future?

o   What smaller aspects of your preferred state/vision could you experiment with now?

·         Take  actions to incorporate elements of the strategic plan into daily life

o   Who are your fellow travelers?

o   Who are people you trust and value who have supported you in the past and will provide support?

o   What small actions that you seek in the preferred future state that could be turned into new actions today?

Practical elements of team building, communications, vision branding, prayer, scripture, leadership development, project management, and accountability must join with scriptural elements of faith, hope, and love to lead our following God in order to implement our strategic plan …

Focus on compelling priorities - Practical and Spiritual Elements:

·         Establish a clear brand for the future state

o   Short and clear statement that can be consistently repeated

o   Focus the future state on Jesus love and grace

o   Develop an ‘elevator talk’ size articulation on the future state so all leaders use the same language when describing the vision

o   Develop and surround that brand with scripture and prayer

o   Develop a process of celebrating success through stories

·         Establish a clear hoped for timetable and outcomes for the future state

o   Suggested time frames are next three months, next six months, next year, next three years

o   Articulate the three big accomplishments in terms of the timeframe and hoped for outcomes

o   Establish accountability

o   Affirm a Holy Spirit driven openness to change the big accomplishments and plan along the way

·         Develop resources available and needed

o   Identify leadership, talent, and resources needed to accomplish the three big accomplishments

o   Establish accountability

o   Rely on God to provide what you need through faith in His provision

Reflect and build on ways you’re already living into the preferred future state/strategic plan implementation - Practical and Spiritual Elements:

·         Integrate your future state / vision team into the Leadership Structure

·         Identify Leadership

o   Recommend that initiative have three leaders – one a visionary, one a project management/logistics gifted leader, and one a relationship builder /inviter

o   Technique to identify those who should be on the implementation team: empty room + ask: who are the six people who fill out the team + what empty chairs gift wise are in the room?

·         Clearly identify initiatives that are part of this implementation

o   Clear articulation of the initiative steps AND their complimentary nature to current church practices/work is important

Take actions to incorporate elements of the strategic plan into daily life - Practical and Spiritual Elements:

·         Surround your work in prayer

·         Utilize project management techniques to understand the timing and impact of one step on future steps – build foundation

·         Integrate the reporting of progress and plans into the traditional leadership and organizational structure

·         Celebrate  successes with stories inside the implementation team and the church / community

Key components of that roadmap:

·         Focus on compelling priorities

·         Reflect and build on ways you are already living into the preferred future state/strategic plan implementation

·         Take  actions to incorporate elements of the strategic plan into daily life

Bold and Courageous Leadership

Bold and courageous leadership is increasingly needed to face today's challenges. Increasing self-interest and advocacy for a single point of view is challenging the ability for leaders to find ways of energizing people for a common purpose. People seem quick to criticize and put up barriers to changes. At the same time, changes in our communities, our organizations, our families and within ourselves call for individual and communal courage that forms the heart of leadership.

Leaders need to find the boldness and courage for energizing others into learning and action. These are some characteristics of leaders, followers, and organizations successful in leading needed change:

Find Moral Leadership as Leaders

• Put service before self-interest – faith communities exist as much to serve the community as a whole as it exists for itself and members
• Listen first and affirm others – listening authentically is foundational to leadership
• Inspire trust by being trustworthy – focus on what is right, not popular, be consistent, focus on the well being of others
• Nourish and build up followers and believe in the uniqueness and value of all to have a positive impact on the world

Develop Followers Who Display Courage

• Courage to assume responsibility
• Courage to challenge
• Courage to participate in transformation
• Courage to serve
• Courage to leave

Lead with Courage

• Face fear of change and challenge with courage so as not to have regrets
• Accept the responsibility of leading and building up others
• Be willing not to conform and step in a different direction than the institution and popular direction
• Push beyond the comfort zone by taking a chance and improve things
• Give voice to what you think and visualize as a preferred state
•  Fight for what you believe

Develop Personal Courage

• Believe in a higher purpose
• Draw strength from others
• Harness frustration and anger for good
• Take small steps

Finding and Developing Leaders

Leaders in many faith organizations are typically appointed for a period of time, often three years. This frequently happens once a year and often as a process of seeking people to fill open leadership roles. At Assurance UMC, we seek to grow leaders through an intentional process of identifying, encouraging, equipping, and apprenticing leaders through a year around process. This process combines aspects of leadership succession planning and the apprenticeship process to build a culture of relational discipleship.

Pastor Chris Westmoreland, AUMC's Lead Pastor this past year, believes that "the combination of lay leadership succession planning and apprenticeship has grown leaders and significantly smoothed out the lay leaders nominations process. We are blessed to have leaders identified and developed as leaders for our extensive ministry and administrative teams."  Hope Maske, the Church Council Chair is a product of this on-going and intentional process: "As one of the church leaders, I am constantly in awe of the amazing lay leadership at Assurance. Through my mentor's apprenticeship, I grew spiritually, learned about my passions, and answered calls to co-lead and then lead teams, growing my successors through the same process along the way." 

One of the key leadership development initiatives is in deepening discipleship to develop current and future leaders through intentional identification of apprentices; create candidate pools in order to ensure adequate numbers of equipped candidates; and provide training/equipping opportunities. This LEAD process: ‘L’  Learn Leadership Skills; ‘E’ Encourage SHAPE; ‘A’ Apprentice Others; and ‘D’ Disciple Through Grow & GO.

The process is tied to the church’s singular mission to follow Jesus to “Grow and Go”. Assurance is Growing Disciples (followers) of Jesus Christ so that we can Go serve Christ in the world. In “Growing and Going”, we emphasize the 3 S’s: Spirit, Serve, and Share. We grow our Spirit in worship, prayer, and small group connections. We grow by Serving others inside and outside the walls of the church. And we Share our gifts and the good News that God loves us all.

These are some key results from this LEAD process:

Identification of Apprentices - We continue to find future leaders to work alongside current leaders through intentional invitation. We explore member gifts through SHAPE, participation in small group and ministry work, and a heart for leadership.

Candidate Pools – We create pools of candidates for leadership positions that have been pre-identified as candidates last year and throughout this year, many of whom have received encouragement and development opportunities during the following year. We believe in co-chairs for our administrative teams for continuity of leadership. We believe ministries we are called to start should have three leaders at their inception: one who is the visionary leader, one who is the logistics and equipping leader, and one who is the inviter/nurturer of volunteers and partners to come alongside.

Leadership Training & Development Opportunities - We continue to develop manuals and training events for our leadership. We believe a leader at Assurance should serve where God has equipped them and have a heart for Grow and Go.

This is what we hope will be accomplished by our year around lay leadership team:

·         Fill the key leadership roles with our church community

·         Discuss and recommend that a new leadership structure be adopted that is more conducive to successful missional and vital UMC congregations

·         Support the future leadership needs of a multi-site church

·         Recommend Leadership Celebration and Development Days

·         Affirm GROW & GO characteristics of Spirit, Serve, And Share as a part of leadership

We seek to build the leadership of the faith community intentionally all year long.

There are so many examples of successful apprenticeship and succession planning successes. Hope provides one such example: 

• Moved from leading a ministry to apprenticing as a small group leaders to leading the small group
• Identified a co-leader for the small group and apprenticed her into a leader
• Moved on to SPRC, apprenticed as a SPRC co-leader, moved to SPRC leader and helped with lay leadership identify a co-leader whom Hope apprenticed
• Selected to be co-chair of Church Council and apprenticed to become the Church Council Chair, then apprenticed the new co-leader identifed

At Assurance UMC, we seek to grow leaders through an intentional process of identifying, encouraging, equipping, and apprenticing leaders through a year around process. This process combines aspects of leadership succession planning and the apprenticeship process to build a culture of relational discipleship.

If you are interested in more information, please feel free to contact Dave Zietlow. Director - Leadership Development AUMC (dave@assuranceumc.org) or visit his leadership website at www.dpzleadership.com (dave@dpzleadership.com)

Living Out Go Share Jesus

We are a church that lives out its mission to Grow and Go in so many unique and powerful ways. These last two weeks I have been blessed with the opportunity to experience the Go Share piece of this mission. We are equipped and called as individuals and as a faith community to share the Good News that Jesus loves us. We do that in a multitude of ways throughout the year and perhaps most powerfully during the summer months in the community around our two campuses: Northlake and Connections.

Our role, as Christians and active participants in the Assurance community, is to be witnesses for Jesus Christ – spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and God’s love to those who need to experience God’s transforming love. Assurance shares the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8 John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism,  spoke of this Go Share: “I look on all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.” 

We share Jesus and connect with our community at Northlake through our Vacation Bible School where near four hundred children and their families experience the love of Jesus for a week. Most of those attending are not part of our Assurance Faith Community rather people drawn by God’s grace that calls us to experience Jesus. This Go Share ministry of sharing God’s love has the tangible action of Go serve through the collection of over 4.000 food items that supports two of our Go Serve ministries: Love in a Bag and Micah’s Backpack.

Take a moment to hear about some of the Go Share ministries at Assurance: http://emc.mcpile.com/

These are some of the Go Share God’s love in the community I experienced in the last two weeks:

·         Jammin’ with Jesus – our weekly Tuesday afternoon summer Children’s programming on the Connections community shares God’s love with children through stories of Christ and activities designed to touch the heart of the children and their families.

·         God’s Garden – our summer camp program on our Northlake campus allows us to share God’s love to any families in our community in a safe and fun environment. This is an extension of one of our strong community ministries – our pre-school and after-school programs.

·         Matthew’s Closet – our clothing ministry based at our Northlake Campus has opened a distribution and community engagement day on the last Sunday of the month on the Connections campus where the need is acute. We draw so many families who are not connected with our faith community and allow us to share God’s love. This ministry greatly benefits from our community consignment sales in the spring and fall.

·         SOAR – our summer reading program on the Connections campus allows us to reach children and families in our community through a critical need. This sharing of God’s love continues in the community through our other community activities like Love in a Bag.

·         Mission Guatemala – This annual mission trip allows the Assurance faith community to touch people in another country who long to hear and see God’s love in action. As a year around response a small group called Reach Out shares God’s love throughout the two campus communities as well as other parts of our local community.

·         Love in a Bag – our summer community engagement and feeding ministry allows us to share God’s love in multiple neighborhoods within our community who need a word of hop and love. Both Northlake and Connections small groups support this ministry throughout the summer. During the school year Micah’s Backpack in Northlake supports a feeding ministry.

·         Recreational Ministries – our Tuesday community open gym is a wonderful example of Go Sharing God’s love through sharing a resource He has given us. Our Peace on the Streets basketball ministry bring youth off the streets to compete in opportunities to learn about Jesus.

·         Sharing Gardens – our community sharing gardens on both campuses allow us to connect with the community in a tangible way and share the love of Jesus. They also provide food for the community as part of our Go Serve mission.

All of God’s people are called to Grow in Spirit through weekly worship, daily prayer and small group experiences; Go serve others through our outreach ministries inside and outside our church communities; and Go Share God’s love to others that need Jesus! Contact one of our pastors or lay leaders about how you might live out this community commitment. Contact Dave Zietlow – dave@assuranceumc.org.

Building on Foundation of Strengths

The appreciative inquiry process can be utilized effectively as a team building process. One of the key first steps is to establish an affirmative topic such as "Build an effective team" that can be used in a team building effort. The next step in any change process is to develop a current state. In the AI process, the first step is to Discover the strengths of the team members and the accomplishments of the collective team even if dysfunctional.

An excellent process to identifiy and celebrate the strengths of the team is to take the Gallup StrengthFinder evaluation. Tom Rath and the Gallup organization has developed a book that uses the strengthfinders results to speak to speak to leadership and how to leverage different strengths of the team members into a team leveraging those strengths. Strength Based Leadership  Tom Rath

The basis for using these strengths into a team building function comes from the belief: "Although individuals need not be well-rounded, teams should be." Some of the key finding of the book are:

• The most effective leaders are always investing in strengths
• The most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and then maximize their team
• The most effective leaders understand their followers' needs

Research has shown that there are four domains that group the specific 34 themes inside the domain.

• Executing
• Influencing
• Relationship Building
• Strategic Thinking

The steps for utilizing the strength finders into a team building process is:

• Take the evaluation
• Use the book as a resource
• Compile the team themes and place in domain
• Use the data as a foundation to the team building

There have been several different aspects of team building that these steps have led to successe:

• Senior leadership - the application of strength finders into an AI team building process where the team were senior managers at a location who reported into remote executives resulted in an appreciation for each others roles and developed a common language and bond to work together despite the reporting relationship.
• Team leadership - used as a team building tool to improve team communication between the leader and the team as well as between team members. Specifically identified that each indivudal had a different lens to the challenges and needed to see the other's point of view.
• Team building - utilized within a team to improve working together. Specifically allowed the AI process to start from a foundation of strength and celebrate successes together and mutual unqiue contributions to the common good.
• Strategic planning - strengthfinders also helps form the foundation of a group of different individuals placed together to think about the vision and strategic plan for the organization.

Creating a Shared Vision

The idea of creating a vision for the future and visualizing a preferred future state is a long held basic tenant of effective leadership theory. Leaders use positive change models building on a clear discernment of the current state and asking themselves what they want more of thus creating that vision for the future. In the Appreciative Inquiry Model, one of the powerful models of change, this is the journey from Discovery to Dream. This vision is cocreated between the leader and the followers to be most effective follows these steps:

• Target a vision for a desired future
• Cocreate the vision
• Identify strengths
• Create an initial picture of the desired future
• Solicit feedback and create the final vision
• Share the vision consistently and persistently

Many organizations, leaderships, and followers see this preferred state as progress in what is already so the vision or dream is often an organic progression of improvement. This continuous improvement albeit important and beneficial is not the dream or vision. The dream or vision needs to be what might be rather than what can be achieved.

Khalil Gibran put it this way:

"Progress lies not in enhancing what is, it lies in advancing toward what will be."

Next time your organization talks about creating a shared vision, consider not thinking incrementally rather develop a process to view the preferred future through the eyes of possibilities rather than barriers. Create an organizational sized vision of your preferred future.