Michael Warden, Leadership Coach

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Women Leaders: We Need You!

I’m excited to welcome back Jenni Catron to the blog this week! Jenni serves as the Executive Director of Cross Point Church in Nashville, TN, where she leads the staff and oversees the ministry of five campuses. She loves a fabulous cup of tea, great books, learning the game of tennis and hanging out with her husband and border collie. Jenni’s passion is to lead well and to inspire, equip and encourage others to do the same. Jenni blogs at www.jennicatron.tv. Her new book, Just Lead! A No Whining, No Complaining, No Nonsense Practical Guide for Women Leaders in the Church, co-authored with Sherry Surratt is available now.

Leaders make life better. They believe and develop. They identify giftedness and call it out. Leaders leave the world and others better as a result of their presence, and they influence those they love.

Sometimes the word leadership is scary. That seems to be especially true for women. Maybe it’s because of the gross feelings of inadequacy and insecurity we tend to wrestle with. Perhaps it’s because society, culture, and the church have been slow to endow us with this title. But for whatever reason, a lot of us run away from it. This makes me angry for you, one of our world’s best leaders. It makes me angry for all of us: the world that needs you to come out of the shadows and be the leader you were created to be.

March 4, 2013 in Culture Change, Leadership with 0 Comments

How to Avoid the Role of Middle Man in Team Conflict

“A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” ~ Ecclesiastes 4:12

Ever been in this sticky wicket?

Joe and Jana are two leaders who report to you. But Jana doesn’t like Joe. She thinks he’s overbearing and condescending in the way he interacts with her. Joe doesn’t know this, of course. She’s never told him. But you know it, because, as your direct report, she has come to you and demanded you step in and do something about it.

If you’re like most leaders, here’s what you’re likely to do next: You assure Jana that you’ll look into it. Then you immediately set up a 1-on-1 meeting with Joe, in which you explain that Jana has complained about the way he treats her. Joe gets defensive, says Jana is over-reacting and/or doesn’t know how to relax and take a joke. You nevertheless require Joe to change his approach. He reluctantly agrees. You then meet with Jana 1-on-1 to let her know you’ve talked with Joe, and ask her to come back to you if Joe’s behavior doesn’t change. Jana and Joe, meantime, continue interacting as if none of this has happened, although they are clearly very tense around each other now, even more than they were. Then you…blah blah blah yuck yuck yuck…

February 25, 2013 in Leadership, Team Dynamics with 0 Comments

12 Ways to UP the Creativity on Your Team

As any good leader will tell you, there’s nothing quite so awesome as working with a leadership team that’s highly skilled in creativity and innovative thinking. In teams like these, meetings are filled with the hopeful energy of possibility. All ideas and all questions are welcomed in a sort of playful reverence, because who knows which one may lead to the next brilliant discovery, or innovative approach to a challenge the team is facing.

Unfortunately, teams like these are as rare as they are amazing. Think for a moment of your own leadership team:

February 18, 2013 in Leadership, Team Dynamics with 0 Comments

The Private Wars of Leadership

This video reawakened my soul to a deeper truth this week ~ about what it means to be a leader in God’s Kingdom…or perhaps to simply be a real, wholehearted human being.

In the video, Michael Schaefer and Dean Potter create a scene of a solitary man walking the highline at Cathedral Peak. As Potter begins his unaided walk, you hear the camera operator take deep, anxious but meditative breaths. And I breathe with him, reminded of highlines I, too, have walked at night alone.

February 11, 2013 in Contemplative Sojourn, Leadership with 2 Comments

Mud and the Masterpiece

This week I’m stoked to welcome my good friend John Burke to the blog. John is the lead pastor at Gateway Church in Austin, TX (yep, he’s also my pastor), and the author of Mud and the Masterpiece, which officially releases this week! I’m really excited about this book ~ in fact, I believe it’s one of the most important books for Christians to be written in decades. I hope leaders everywhere will read it. See the end of John’s post for info on how you can snag a copy, plus a whole bunch of other great stuff too!

February 1, 2013 in Data Stream, Leadership, Transformation with 0 Comments

Musings on Culture Change, Part 4

“Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal ~ and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace.” ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.

Last week, I wrote that for a leader to inspire authentic culture change in an organization, he or she must do three things:

Facilitate a process to help the culture see itself as it is right now.
Enlist (not force!) the members of the culture toward a more compelling vision via an open honest conversation about who we are and who we want to be.
Fully embody the new culture he or she wants everyone to live. Go first.

Here’s what I mean by these:

January 29, 2013 in Culture Change, Leadership, Team Dynamics, Transformation with 0 Comments

Musings on Culture Change, Part 3

“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” ~ Richard Hooker

I’ll bet you’ve seen those nature shows where a school of fish reshapes itself into a ball when threatened by a predator. Every time I watch a scene like that, I’m mesmerized by it. It’s like this collection of individual life forms somehow transforms itself into a single entity, becoming this cloud of life that moves and reacts to its environment as if it were one creature rather than a collection of hundreds. How do they do that? How does this balled-up life form decide where to go, how to move in response to a predatory threat? It looks for all the world like those hundreds of fish are operating with one mind. But where is that mind?

January 22, 2013 in Contemplative Sojourn, Culture Change, Leadership, Team Dynamics, Transformation with 1 Comment