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Monday Soup

Ugh.  I'm looking at the date of my last post, and it reads August 9th.  Embarrassing.  Busy season, blah, blah, blah.  Time to recount again what God did this weekend.

Summer is coming to an end, the fall is descending, people are back from their vacations, kids are back in school, students are back at college, and we are in week #2 of our Who We Are series... across all THREE of our campuses!  Welcome, Osage!  Keep praying, giving, and going - September 12, your grand opening, is just around the corner!

Pastor Carl brought it.  Our arts teams brought it.  Loved every minute of it.

We opened with this hilarious yet poignant video by the Skit Guys.  Good use of humor that kinda slips past people's defenses and gets them involved into the subject matter for the weekend: the Bible as part of our DNA at PLC.

Then we sang a special from stage: Revelation Song.  You should've seen the crowd at Cedar Falls on Saturday night.  Awesome, spontaneous response to how God moved through it.  Many in the crowd stood and raised their hands - some singing, and some listening.



If you're not familiar with this song, its lyrics are taken directly from Revelation 5:11-12:

Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!"

We followed it up with Beautiful Jesus, Glory to God Forever, Mighty to Save, and an updated version of I Exalt Thee.  Fabulous set.

At Cedar Falls, for the first time this weekend, we used a "Campus Pastor" to handle both family concerns and some shepherding at the end of the service.  Kyle Thomas, the High School Coordinator at Cedar Falls, did a fantastic job, and gave our congregation a little bit of a taste of what it's like to have someone other than the teaching pastor shepherd through the service.

John Fuller served as the Campus Pastor in Waterloo this weekend, and loved every minute of it.  This was his first visit over there since they launched back in Easter.  The folks at Waterloo really enjoyed having him there, and gave him a glimpse into what it's like to be a multisite campus.

Chip and the gang completed their second soft launch weekend service, this time flying solo on a lot of accounts: no Portable Church staff, and no tech personnel from Cedar Falls.  Tim Sherwood, their Tech Director, says they are still ironing out a few kinks... but overall, it's going very well.

Pastor Carl preached from Nehemiah 8, the passage that marked a point in Israel's history where they cracked God's Word open for the first time in a long time.  If you missed it, make sure you watch it when it gets uploaded to the web on Tuesday.  There's some great, helpful encouragement there to get reconnected to the Bible if you've been drifting lately.

Finally, our campus pastors closed by handing out a Bible study resource called SOAP (which stands for Scripture, Observation, Application, and Prayer), a study method developed by Wayne Cordeiro of New Hope Church in Oahu, Hawaii.  (For an great exposition on this method and how to use it in your own personal study, take a look at this blog.)  If you missed this weekend and want access to the little card we handed out with a brief explanation of SOAP, stop by and pick one up at the Connection Desk, or just come on one of the next few weekends.  We'll make them available.

EndNotes:

• We had a great Worship and Production Staff and Volunteer retreat last weekend at the Waterloo Center for the Arts.  If you missed it, grab some coffee with one of your shepherds.  They'd love to get you caught up.
• Jon, Spencer, and the team put on an amazing night of worship last Friday.  We were able to debut some PLC originals: Hope Is, and The Eternal One.  You'll be hearing them in the services soon!  Special thanks to the many volunteers who served extra hours this weekend: Craig, Mitch, Ken, Renee, Bob, Gary, Andy, Bret... and the list goes on.  You guys are amazing.
• Make sure to keep Osage and Waterloo in your prayers, regardless of what campus you're attending.  Although they are at different stages of the journey, they would both benefit from your requests and petitions to God.

Pleasure serving with you all.

Monday Soup

 
Week #2 in our 3 Doors series saw us open ourselves up to confession.  Wonderful message and a wonderful service.

I've really felt like we've been touching on some deep spiritual needs of our campuses with this series.  It's been humbling to watch how people have responded.

This also marked the first weekend that John preached solo back from his 1 month sabbatical.  Maybe you noticed what I did: he spoke out of the journey that God took him on during his time away.  Very powerful, authentic, and focused.  I loved hearing him recount his prayer of confession at the monastery: "God, have mercy on me, your son, a sinner."

I thought our worship set was incredibly powerful and appropriate.  We began the service with this video as a call to be present in the moment with God's presence.  Then we followed it by singing Jeremy Riddle's song, Stand In Awe:



We then invited our people to sing with us to Sweetly Broken, Sweep Me Away, and How He Loves.  Ron Morlan (at Cedar Falls) and Zach Elster (at Waterloo) both did a fantastic job of leading and spiritually directing people into this posture and attitude of confession.

Sidenote: this weekend also marked a few firsts for us.  Zach began his first weekend as the Worship Director at Waterloo.  And I began my interim position as the Waterloo Campus Pastor.  It's going to be a lot of work, but has already proved very insightful and rewarding.

On another sidenote: it's been a little while since I've been over to Waterloo, as this summer's vacations have kept me at Cedar Falls filling in on stage as the worship leader pretty often.  Coming back, I was delighted to see: they are good.  I mean, good.  The've got "It," if you know what I mean.  Great, excellent, relevant, inviting experience.

Whew.  This Monday Soup is getting long (big?  Maybe it's not possible for soup to get long?)

After John's message, we took communion together, and were invited to confess while we had the elements in our hands.  We listened to the band sing Tomlin's Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone):



Then we allowed people to stick around and take a step into the light if they so chose - to come forward to a pastor, elder, or chaplain and confess face to face.  We lined the stage with lamps to symbolize this desire to be transparent.  Always humbling to be a part of moments like that, at both campuses.

See you next weekend - another big one.  We send off Ron Phares to his next position as the Senior Pastor of Elevate Church in Mankato, MN.  We commission our Osage staff and congregation.  And we invite you to pray, give, and go.

See you there.

Leadership Summit Session Twelve :: Jack Welch

Jack Welch was the CEO of GE for over 40 years.  He grew the company from 13 billion to over 400 billion during that time, employing over 300,000 people.  Bill Hybels interviewed him.

• Leaders have to be authentic.  You have to be yourself.  People can see through a phony in a minute.  People want to know that you are who you say you are, and that you can be counted on.
• You should make your church or place of business less formal, where people can be themselves.
• Leaders have to have energy.  You not only have to be energetic; you have to be able to energize others.  It is not enough simply to be energetic; you have to excite people to achieve the mission and the vision that you have articulated.
• Energizing people towards a vision takes time, relationship, and investment.  You have to enjoy this process.  
• Energizing people is not hyping or manufacturing; it is getting people to feel where you are going.  Unless the leader feels the fire, he or she can not pass it on.  It's helping people connect to and tell a story of life change.  You get people excited about the journey because you are excited about the journey.
• The job of the leader is to always raise the intellectual bow of the room by drawing out the people who will make you smarter.  You have to hire smarter people.  
• Insecure people hire dopes.
• Leaders have to speak with candor, and encourage/develop/protect it among those who lead.  You have to fight desperately to get what people are actually feeling on the table.  Over the long haul, this requires less meetings, less posturing, because everyone is free and obligated to be honest and tell what they believe.
• Leaders have to be ok with differentiation.  At GE, they identified the top 20%, the vital 70%, and the 10% of people were low performers who needed to be improved.
• The best sports teams differentiate.  Differentiation leads to winning.
• You can not have a differentiated organization without having candor.
• You have to get rid of your phony evaluation systems.  
• You can not go to work with people who constantly don't know where they stand.
• Chances are: people already know who is in the top, middle, and bottom groups.
• Leaders have to stop spending so much time with the bottom 10%.  Rather, they should get them out and into a different organization in which they would be a better fit.
• The bottom 10% know where they stand if you promote candor in your organization.

• The top 20% (the A group) are filled with energy, likeable, and have a gene that says "I love to see people grow.  I love to reward people."  They celebrate their people.  They have generosity of spirit.
• These people also hire great people, and love to have them around.  This is an attractive and contagious characteristic.
• Top performers also are free of envy.

• The vital 70% (the B group) are hard working people.  What is hard about this, though, is that the top of the 70% don't like being in the same group as the bottom people in the 70%.  You have to keep them in the organization by telling them that this is a snapshot in time, and what they have to do to improve so that they can be in the top 20%.
• When giving performance appraisals, write over the old appraisal.  Don't write up a new one.

• The bottom 10% (the C group) are low energy, acidic people.  They actually have negative energy.  These aren't the boss-haters or the loudmouth disrupters; these people are the silent whisperers.
• You have to do everything you can to stop the meeting after the meeting.  The meeting after the meeting is an unacceptable event.  If something needs to be solved, it needs to be solved in the context where a solution can be found - the actual meeting.

• You can't give your top 20% enough.
• The idea of never acknowledging performance is silly.  No winning team operates that way.
• Non-profit can not mean non-performance.  You have chosen non-profit; you have to deliver non-profit.
• Jack Welch's biggest mistake?  Moving too slowly.  People have to have the self-confidence in the gut to do things when they feel that they have the right answer.  If they are right, it gives them confidence to make the hard decision the next time.
• You can't over-criticize a mistake.  It will kill self-confidence.
• Jack Welch began the process of selecting his successor 8 years before he was going to retire.  He had 8 candidates; 3 of which were long shots.  When it came time to make the decision, the final 3 candidates were all the ones who began as the long shots.
• Hiring is hard; succession is brutal.

Leadership Summit Session Eleven :: Blake Mycoskie :: Tom's Shoes

Blake Mycoskie is the 33 year-old founder of TOMS Shoes.  He successfully launched five companies before the age of 30.  Tom was interviewed by Darren Whitehead, a teaching pastor at Willow Creek.

• Instead of looking to charity to solve social problems, Blake looked to business: for every pair of shoes bought, a pair of shoes is given away to a child in need.
• Giving not only feels good; it is a good business and life strategy.
• People who buy Toms are invested in the story of TOMS.  They organically and passionately share it.
• TOMS focuses on giving in a clear and authentic way, which leads to natural marketing within their customer base: they do the same things.
• TOMS employees are encouraged to be a part of the giving.  If you are an employee for 2 years, the company pays for a trip for you to go and give away shoes to children.
• Even if you can't incorporate 1 to 1 giving in your organization, incorporating giving at any level is transformative: it reduces anxiety because it takes the focus off of you and your problems, and puts it in on solving that of another unselfishly.
• TOMS is a for-profit company with a non-profit culture.  It is a for-profit company, because a for-profit company provides a never ending supply of revenue and capital to continue to give away shoes.
• 250,000 people participated in TOMS initiative of "A Day Without Shoes" to raise awareness and solidarity with children around the world who do not have shoes.
• TOMS gives people a very simple thing to do - a very easy way to act - as well as gives them an opportunity to show the world what their value system is by giving them something that becomes representative of their identity: a pair of shoes.
• TOMS has plenty of strategic partnerships with corporations and churches.  They have formed these partnerships by offering these partners an authentic story - that the owner was connected and invested in the cause.  This was an attractive thing to the partners to be a part of.
• If you really want to create change around your idea, you can't get around making big asks.  What's more: people enjoy it, because they enjoy being a part of a great journey.  You simply can not afford to be bashful.
• Blake thinks that TOMS represents the principle behind the Proverb: give away your first fruits, and your vats will be full.  This has formed the 1-to-1 principle.
• It's never too early to start giving and start serving.  Don't wait to "make it" to be generous.

Leadership Summit Session Ten :: Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink is a speaker, an author, and former speech writer for the White House.  He is the author of the recent book "Drive."

• We each have a biological drive, a reward and punishment drive, but also a curiosity drive.  This third drive is routinely neglected in the context of an organization.
• Organizations usually have a two dimensional view of human beings - trying to restrain the biological, and manage the reward and punishment.
• Even the most rudimentary cognitive skill can not be rewarded by the science of reward and punishment.
• Straight, simple, straightforward tasks can be rewarded by the science of punishment and reward.  But when you're dealing with complicated tasks that require creativity, these kinds of rewards are ineffective, because they encourage tunnel vision.
• When we see these "carrots and sticks" fail before our eyes, we don't try to be more creative in our approach to our work.  We instead cry out for more carrots and sticks.  People try to manipulate the system of reward rather than try to improve their work when we are simply trying to reward/punish.
• We make the wrong assumptions about people in our organizations: 1) That human beings are complicated but mechanistic machines.  If you push the right buttons, you can get them to do what you want them to do; and 2) That human beings are blobs - that people are basically passive and inert, who need to be rewarded or punished to get them to do what you want them to do.
• It is in human nature to be active and engaged (just look at kids).  This is our default setting.  And while events and circumstances can mess with this setting, we still have this in us.

• So: what works for complicated, conceptual, and creative people doing this kind of work?

• Autonomy - Management is an inventional/technology from the 1850s.  It is a technology designed to get compliance.  We don't want compliance in our organizations; we want engagement.  Self direction - autonomy - leads to engagement.  People report their best bosses as being the types that gave them the most autonomy.
• Giving people autonomy over their time, their team, their task, and their technique leads to engagement.  Example: giving people a Thursday afternoon to work on anything they want that is not work-related, and presenting it to the company on Friday.  It's a "FedEx Day" - delivering something overnight.
• Another example: 20% time by Google - people can spend 20% of their paid time doing working on whatever they want.  Out of these times have come Google News, Gmail, etc.  Almost all of Google's good ideas have come out of the 20% time.
• To implement this in your organization, you have to go slow, because people are used to being compliant.  Use scaffolding: try a FedEx day, or some other modified version of 20% time (maybe 10% time).  Do it with the people who would use it the most effectively, and do it for a predetermined period of time.

• Mastery - The single most powerful motivator at work are those days in which people are making progress.  Therefore, a manager's role isn't to help people gain compliance, but helping them see their progress.  People want to gain mastery at things, because of their curious drive.
• Flow - the place where what you are doing is so in line with your passion and giftedness that you lose a sense of time and self.  These moments are most likely to happen during work.  We want to help people get into the flow.
• You also have to give people feedback - feedback that is rich, robust, frequent, and authentic.  We need to encourage people to take their feedback into their own hands, doing their own reviews, by setting their goals at the beginning of the month, and then assessing themselves every month against those goals - perhaps informally with a supervisor over coffee.

• Purpose - we are seeing the limits of the profit motive.  There is a rise of the purpose motive.  
• When the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, ethical problems arise, but even more so, mediocrity and uninspired, insufficient motivators.
• People are telling the profit sector to act more like the private/non profit sector - to be driven by purpose.
• Use this diagnostic tool - listen to the pronouns people use when they are describing the organizations they work for.  The "we" organizations are high performing; the "they" organizations are not.

Organizations are not simply changed, overnight, with a silver bullet.  Rather, we should be asking if we can change what we do.  These cumulative changes will effect change in the organizations.  These changes begin with a conversation.

Leadership Summit Session Nine :: Terri Kelly

Terri Kelley is the president and CEO of W.L. Gore and Associates, makers of the waterproof, breathable GORE-TEX material.

• Your foundation and values of your organization will drive your success.
• Gore & Assoc. developed and employed small teams to fuel their organization.
• It is a peer-based organization; each employee's job is to build relationships with their team members and help the other succeed.  The effect of this was that ownership greatly increased.
• While Gore & Assoc. has a leadership structure, they do not have a fixed, formalized hierarchy.  Decisions are made by the best person to make that particular decision.  They call this "hierarchy on demand."  A lot more of the population was involved in decision making.
• "Ladder vs. Lattice Organization" - Gore is a lattice organization, in which everyone is connected to their network, and has access to the person they need in order to keep things moving.
• Arriving leaders do not simply direct reports.  Instead, they influence them.  They try and help them to understand the significance of what they are doing, and shift the energy to get it done from the leader to the report.
• Gore keeps everything aligned by spending more time creating a common foundation in values among their employees: the power of the individual and his/her ideas/influence, the power of small teams, the reality that we are in the same boat, and a long term view (sustainability and innovation over profit).
• Every associate at Gore has to be a good "salesman" - they have to be good at selling their ideas to the company, and get others to buy in to them.  They also use a peer review process to help the best ideas bubble up by letting their teams review and recommend ideas that have been put on the table.
• Also: the teams are asked to rank which individuals are contributing the most to the success of the enterprise - top to bottom.  This is what determines compensation.  The person contributing the most to the success of the organization as ranked by their peers garners the most compensation.  The person contributing the least gets the least.
• This process helps to drive people not to just succeed and advance, but to align themselves with what they are passionate about.
• Gore has more "coaches" than "bosses."  Gore has utilized the role of a sponsor.  A sponsor - usually not their supervisor - takes charge of helping an associate grow and develop, including selecting a career path that will help the associate be the most successful one they can.  Each associate at Gore has a sponsor.  These responsibilities are delineated from leadership, and the sponsor facilitates conversations that span work and personal interests.
• Gore has 18 plants of 200-250 people each within a 25 mile radius.  This encourages relationships, fosters personality and individuality, and encourages collaboration.  Beyond this, Gore found that their organization's effectiveness fell off.
• This model also helps the organization's values to be transferrable and rooted.
• While the values binds each plant together, each plant is also given the freedom to achieve those values in a way that makes the most sense for that individual plant.
• Gore spends a lot of time on behavioral interviewing to determine if the values of Gore resonate with their own, and if they can lead into them.
• The "waterline" principle - this encourages healthy risk taking.  In things above the waterline - where the water hits the hull of the ship -  the individual has the freedom to make decisions.  In things below the waterline, the decision has to be run up the lattice.
• Leadership at Gore is defined by followship: people are only a leader if people want to follow them.  Leaders therefore are working to secure the influence and trust of their teams.  The ranking system is a good reinforcement of this value.
• In this system, the leader spends a lot of time explaining their decisions.  At Gore, this is precious time, not wasted time.
• The CEO at Gore is responsible for remaining true to Gore's values while defining the changes in their expression to remain relevant in a changing world.  She also determines the allocation of resources, and spends time with their key leaders.
• Over 50% of the associates at Gore reported that they considered themselves leaders in the organization.