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7 Ancient Secrets To Managing Productivity

It’s a small business parable book, but a powerful one. I have worked through the seven ancient secrets found in the book “The Way of the Shepherd” with some of my executive leaders as well as leaders from other groups.

The publisher notes are as follows:

Find inspiration and a fresh perspective on the art of leadership in this account of a cub reporter who lands the interview of a lifetime and walks away with the keys to exceptional leadership. When the reporter meets with the most respected CEO in America, the businessman shares the seven secrets he learned long ago from his mentor—an eccentric but brilliant professor who taught him proven management principles that, while ancient in origin, are applicable in today’s fast-paced, high-tech world. The Way of the Shepherd is a compact, heart-warming story dotted with humor. It will teach you how to lead the people close to you so they will view their work as a calling rather than merely a job, a place to belong rather than a place to work. It shows leaders how to infuse work with meaning and how to engage, energize, and ignite their workforce and gives employees a better understanding of what makes for a quality work experience. It is a powerful metaphor for leaders that reaches back 5,000 years. It is . . . The Way of the Shepherd.

Monty: The principles are solid, and speak powerfully. While they may seem simple, it is often the simple laws of leadership that we forget or overlook, so a fresh nudge reminding us of leadership 101 is always a good thing. Here are the 7 Ancient Secrets:

1. Know the Condition of Your Flock

* Follow the status of your people as well as the status of the work.
* Get to know your flock, one sheep at a time.
* Engage your people on a regular basis.
* Keep your eyes and ears open, question and follow through.

Monty: What I love about principle is that it reminds us the value of people in an organization or an organism. Too often, people become a means to an end, rather than actual human-beings who are on this journey with you. When we don’t know the condition of our “flock” our leadership will hit a lid. That lid can be removed as we purposefully invest in the people we work with and lead. To invest in relationships, to know what is going on in their world, and to know how they are doing with their work creates a positive working relationship. The benefit here is that by doing this, your leadership will be less crunchy-work and more productive.

2. Discover the Shape of You Sheep

* Your choice of sheep can make flock management easier or harder.
* Start with healthy sheep, or you’ll inherit someone else’s problems.
* Know the SHAPE of your sheep to make sure they are in the right fold.

S – Strengths: place people in their area of strength not weakness
H – Heart: place people in areas that they are passionate about
A – Attitude: a bad attitude will hurt your team, a positive attitude is crucial
P – Personality: place people in positions that align with the temperament
E – Experiences: place people in areas where they have had experiences

Monty: This is a powerful principle. If you are starting a new team please don’t miss the importance revealed in this chapter. Selecting the right people based off of their SHAPE will make you or break you. I have often chosen well, and sometimes not so well. This is one lesson I wish I had learned earlier in life! For those who look at this and say, “Well, that’s great for starting something new, but I am stuck with a team I didn’t choose!”, let me say that you need to learn this for future hires, and for re-tooling and training your current team in order to become more productive. If you are unable to replace some team members, you will need to look at developing them. This will build your relationship and can result in a transformed team.

3. Help Your Sheep Identify With You

* Build trust with your followers by modeling authenticity, integrity, and compassion.
* Set high standards of performance.
* Relentlessly communicate your values and sense of mission.
* Define the cause for your people and tell them where they fit in.
* Remember that great leadership isn’t just professional; it’s personal.

Monty: A great leader does more than learn the SHAPE of his team and discover their individual condition…they enter into a synergistic relationship where they are also becoming known to those they lead. Being open, honest and practicing continual communication will help your team know who you are, your passion, goals, and that they matter in the over-all mission. People will follow a leader like this not just because they are paid to, but because they want to.

4. Make Your Pasture a Safe Place

* Keep your people well informed.
* Infuse every position with importance.
* Cull chronic instigators from the flock.
* Regularly rotate the sheep to fresh pastures.
* Reassure the sheep by staying visible.
* Don’t give problems time to fester.

Monty: A great leader proactively makes sure the “pasture” is safe. Predators that make it unsafe for everyone need to be removed…communication needs to be flowing as change is the norm, and change creates fear. The principle of management by walking around is powerful. A leader who practices the art of being seen tends to have a higher performing team than one who isolates and doesn’t communicate. Also key in this chapter is the need to deal quickly and decisively with negative problems that arise whether it is internal or external. When the team sees the leader dealing with these issues, whether they be personnel or circumstance…a sense of safety is secured and productivity increases.

5. The Staff of Direction

* Know where you’re going, get out in front, and keep your flock on the move.
* When directing, use persuasion rather than coercion.
* Give your people freedom of movement, but make sure they know where the
fence line is. Don’t confuse boundaries with bridles!
*When your people get in trouble, go and get them out!
* Remind your people that failure isn’t fatal.

Monty: A great leader takes responsibility for his team. The staff of direction reminds me that I need to be involved, guiding, helping and modeling. The staff of direction is used to help keep team members from making bad decisions as well as rescuing some who are teetering on the cliff’s edge. An engaged leader knows that a healthy team helps the entire organism, so time and energy need to be invested in the people you lead.

6. The Rod of Correction

* Protect: Stand in the gap and fight for your sheep.
* Correct: Approach discipline as a teaching opportunity.
*Inspect: Regularly inquire about your people’s progress.

Monty: While these are pretty self-explanatory, they are also vital. A leader who is only a rah-rah cheerleader and doesn’t enter into the hard side of correction is not a healthy leader. How you correct is the key. If you have established a relationship and move towards bettering the person, while not easy, the authentic nature of the conversation can lead to a better relationship and increased productivity. The phrase “caring enough to confront” comes to mind.

7. The Heart of the Shepherd

* Great leadership is a lifestyle, not a technique.
* Every day you have to decide who’s going to pay for your leadership-you or your people.
* Most of all, have a heart for your sheep.

Monty: The people you lead don’t get to decide how you will invest in growing in your leadership….only you can choose to do that. A leader that chooses to ignore continual growth make the people around him pay the price. As we all grow in our leadership capacity, it is hard work, and it is a lifelong process. When we choose the path of growth, it positively affects all that we are connected to. This reminds me that the end game is not merely the completion of tasks, but the transformation of who I am and of those around me as we work towards the mission God created us to accomplish.

Monty

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God In The Doorway

Each year I re-read “God In The Doorway”, which is found in Annie Dillard’s book, Teaching A Stone To Talk.” The short Christmas story never fails to re-center my soul, and de-scafold my thoughts reminding me that we humans so often miss life’s beauty because we have created an alternate reality formed from ashes of life.

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God In The Doorway

One cold Christmas Eve I was up unnaturally late because we had all gone out to dinner-my parents, my baby sister, and I. We had come home to a warm living room, and Christmas Eve. Our stockings drooped from the mantle; beside them, a special table bore a bottle of ginger ale and a plate of cookies.

I had taken off my fancy winter coat and was standing on the heat register to bake my shoe soles and warm my bare legs. There was a commotion at the front door; it opened, and cold winter blew around my dress.

Everyone was calling me. “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!” I looked. It was Santa Claus. Whom I never-ever-wanted to meet. Santa Claus was looming in the doorway and looking around for me. My mother’s voice was thrilled: “Look who’s here!” I ran upstairs.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God. I was still thoughtless and brute, reactive. I knew right from wrong, but had barely tested the
possibility of shaping my own behavior, and then only from fear, and not yet from love. Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you’d been bad or good. He knew when you’d been bad or good! And I had been bad.

My mother called and called, enthusiastic, pleading; I wouldn’t come down. My father
encouraged me; my sister howled. I wouldn’t come down, but I could bend over the stairwell and see: Santa Claus stood in the doorway with night over his shoulder, letting in all the cold air of the sky; Santa Claus stood in the doorway monstrous and bright, powerless, ringing a loud bell and repeating Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. I never came down. I don’t know who ate the cookies.

For so many years now I have known that this Santa Claus was actually a rigged-up Miss White, who lived across the street, that I confuse the dramatis personae in my mind, making Santa Claus, God, and Miss White an awesome, vulnerable trinity. This is really a story about Miss White.

Miss White was old; she lived alone in the big house across the street. She liked having me around; she plied me with cookies, taught me things about the world, and tried to interest me in finger painting, in which she herself took great pleasure. She would set up easels in her kitchen, tack enormous slick soaking papers to their frames, and paint
undulating undersea scenes: horizontal smears of color sparked by occasional vertical streaks which were understood to be fixed kelp. I liked her. She meant no harm on earth, and yet half a year after her failed visit as Santa Claus, I ran from her again.

That day, a day of the following summer, Miss White and I knelt in her yard while she showed me a magnifying glass. It was a large, strong hand lens. She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm. The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point. It burned; I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying. Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining, but I didn’t look back.

Even now I wonder: if I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?

But no. It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down. Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

*Taken from…”Teaching a Stone to Talk” by Annie Dillard

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Book Review: Speaking of Jesus

The subtitle to carl medearis’ book is “the art of not-evangelism”  immediately caught my eye. I wondered, “Is this another book on be like Jesus but don’t talk about him?” Or perhaps I mused, “Is this going to be a book that tries to help us enter into spiritual conversation without the use of bull-horns?”

In some ways it is, and in some ways it is not. What Carl does a great job of is refocusing us on the person of Christ rather than the religion of Christ. There are many books out today that take a big stick to the church for the way it evangelizes, while Carl would definitely love to see the church learn and unleash a radically different approach to the way we share Christ with people, the stick isn’t as big as I thought it might be.

Medearis tips his hat in the introduction story about two competing soccer teams. Both teams grinding it out for their truth and fighting to win with everything they have until the game is stalled because of a man walking through the field. The man’s name is Joshua, and he looks at you as you come to a halt in your game, and his eyes penetrate your soul. Which side is he on? Neither, he replies. If you’re not on either of these two sides, then what is your side? Joshua responds with his own name and the words “Follow Me.”

So, you follow Him, and then Medearis makes this observation:

“As you follow, you begin to learn that this soccer game you’ve been playing-that everyone’s been playing isn’t the way. Joshua is. And that winning doesn’t mean scoring more points than the other team. It’s Joshua. He’s the score. And the strategies your team was using, though well meaning, really missed the whole point. You soon realize that your life will never be the same following this Joshua guy.” p18-19

It seems to me that we have often replaced Jesus with a religiosity that robs us of all that God intends. While I am not all the way through this book yet, it seems to be raising some great question about whether or not our faith will be a bridge or a barrier.

At the heart of what I have read is a plea to get real, wrestle with evangelical formula’s we have bought into, and simply allow our not-evangelism to flow from our relationship with Jesus, rather than a packaged presentation of religion that misses relationship and the reality that Trinity dwells within us.

I’m going to keep reading, you might want to check this out too.

Monty

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Shattered Dreams: Larry Crabb

Shutterstock_50424211 I am just finishing a book by Larry Crabb called Shattered Dreams…It is the kind of the book that goes deep rather quickly, loosening the ties that often keep us anchored to a "lesser life." Larry is right when he notes in the book that some cherished dreams we have in life will crumble. Maybe it's the dream that the cancer will not take a loved one, or the dream of a successful new business venture that never had lift-off, or perhaps even the dream that a marriage would be restored. Many dreams crumble, and then the real journey begins.

Because most of our dreams are centered on ourselves, and are generally lesser dreams in terms of a dynamic, God-saturated life, we find that we are often able to attain those "lesser" goals or dreams. Larry notes that when we continually live off a diet of lesser dreams we never develop an appetite for the truly deeper dreams…the dreams that come from God…the dreams that are borne out of pain and brokenness.

The following paragraph caused me to pause:

"It comes down to this: God's best is available only to those who sacrifice, or are willing to sacrifice, the merely good. If we are satisfied with good health, responsible children, enjoyable marriages, close friendships, interesting jobs, and successful ministries, we will never hunger for God's best. We will never worship. I've come to believe that only broken people truly worship. Unbroken people-happy folks who enjoy their blessings more than the blesser-say thanks to God the way a shopper thanks a clerk."

In a culture of "relieve the pain at any cost" have we traded away our opportunity to truly know God…to meet with Him in the pain instead of merely ask Him to remove the pain?

May we not become satisfied with anything less than God…

Dei Gratia,

Monty

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