One of my best friends from college, Scot, used to talk about how he wished he had a soundtrack for his life that would play as he meandered through. Before digital music, that was a bit of an impossibility, but now, you could almost cobble together some version of that if you liked…
We are working with a company on the back end of cleaning up an incredible mess. Unknown to them, two key employees seem to have “quiet quit” many months before they actually left. Like a college student going through the motions for an entire semester, fooling everyone but themselves, the report card at the end of the term was a sobering reality to those who didn’t know…
I met with a leader of a large company before their annual offsite. We were scripting the event, and I wanted to help him create an introductory statement of where he felt they were and how he thought they were doing. He struggled mightily to say much good…
Sometimes when we work with a senior leader with a struggling area of their business, they are forced to make a leadership change. They level all their efforts on getting a proper replacement. But rather than hastily making the new hire, we often ask them to embody the role of the exiting leader for a season as a first step…
Nobody could have known. The children were well-behaved. Their blonde hair, perfect posture, with prominent bows in each of the girl’s hair. They didn’t misbehave like the other children we often saw in church. But the appearance of their perfection, even that of my wife, was mandated. Coerced with shame and disappointment. The appearance of the perfect family felt like my life depended on it…because it did…
A very good friend and client of many years asked for advice about a predicament. As a coach, I try not to give advice, but I do ask questions that lead to discovery, which produces ownership/engagement. The solutions emerge from within the other person at the end of a line of curated questions. Then I will often confirm, refine, or suggest things in that direction…
Almost a decade and a half ago, our eldest got invited to go on a mission trip to China. He was mid-teens at the time. He was almost six and a half feet tall and really stood out in a crowd. It was a very different country then. He received a lot of training about how to represent what he believed without endangering himself or others. It felt important and moderately dangerous there in all the best ways possible…
If you asked me where I had most experienced a sense of the garden of Eden, I would have, until recently, said Kauai. But while it offers some of the breathtaking beauty I have seen in South Africa, I haven’t experienced all the rest of those things there. And maybe this is the way that everybody feels about the things that they are deeply called to, but it feels like the hope of the world rests on this small southern portion of that great continent…
One of my good friends is an author, coach, missionary, pastor, home church leader and father of a beautiful tribe. Oh yeah, he also runs a successful business but is needing to spend less and less of his time there. The leadership he groomed at his company is handling most of that. In fact, that is still true despite the fact the company is doubling due to the awarding of a very large contract…
A young leader was venting his frustration. He had been telling those that lead him that they should do something for years and no one seemed to listen. And now some new hire had suggested the same thing and they were taking their advice. I’ve heard this so many times that I know precisely how I should respond. I said, “Great news, right?” And I always get the same incredulous look…
There is some pretty important information contained in that first sentence describing the “gospels”. Beyond that essential information that everything else rests on for Christians, there are a lot of great stories with a lot of good news in them. And while the “old” testament often reads more like a prescriptive rule book or an accounting of the journey of disenfranchised people trying to find their way back to God, the “new” testament was a great collection of stories of what it looks like to live life in union with that God….
I asked the business owner about a new employee I had observed in a team meeting I attended. Everything about him, including his contribution in the meeting, told me that he carried a pretty significant story. I found out that he had recently moved here from a great distance to work for this company…
I was talking with another coach who was very anxious. She felt her client was making a terrible mistake and she needed to do something about it…now. She felt the passion to make something happen, the immediacy of the situation Her heart was so well-intentioned in fighting for what she thought was best for them, but she had a check in her spirit. Something didn’t seem quite right about the way she was feeling. Or maybe better said, the severity of her emotional reaction felt a little too much…
A group of leaders was recently celebrating one of the coaches on our team. She joined us almost five years ago and they were all remarking on the progress they had seen in her over the last few years. They said too many nice things to rewrite in this short blog, but one of them said something really funny when they marked her process.
A friend of mine has been trading quotes like this with me; there is an abundance online. Colin Robinson is a vampire from the wildly inappropriate “What We Do in the Shadows” series based on the movie by the same name. You might notice that I haven’t done a “redemptive movie review” about that one…
I used to have a similar conversation with every new hire when I was running businesses. I was the last interview, testing for cultural fit. My conviction around the cultural fit should be obvious, but the things I shared in addition to that I scoured from over three decades of working alongside great leaders in dozens of companies…
One of the first questions we received from the “first Africa” South Africans we began working with was regarding our plans to serve “second” and “third” Africa. As we stumbled around in conversation with them, a leader who spent most of her time serving that Africa with women in and out of the penal system and prostitution, answered…
Summer is over. The kids are back in school, vacations have been completed, and things are getting back to normal. Right? Not right! There is nothing normal about the world in which we are living. We have become more accustomed to these crazy times, but there is nothing customary about these days.
But summer, oh summer! It was a rescue, right? Probably a little “yes" and a little "no”. We got our heads back above water, cleared out a bit of the cobwebs, and actually rested and recharged a bit. But below the surface, we are still dog-paddling like mad. We are also painfully…
When I was managing a large investment portfolio for a bank, I had groups of people reviewing pretty much every move I made. There were internal auditors, external examiners, and regulators of several varieties because of my securities licensing, the fact we were exchange-traded, etc., etc., etc.
There were literally billions of reasons why they needed to be watching so closely. I get it, but we always hoped for more of a collaborative working relationship with all of them. None of them seemed to be motivated by our improvement, desire to get better, or our commitment to doing things right.
Before we lead corporate offsites, we survey all the team members who will be in attendance. We offer anonymity, but use tools like SWOT, The Seven Helpful Questions, and sometimes even an organizational health assessment. We humbly tell the owner or senior leader that we will likely have a better lens than they do regarding what is actually going on in the company.
Most companies do anything they can to avoid conflict. They want to suppress dissension, keep their problems in the closet, and sweep everything under the rug. This is not only unhelpful…
