How your organization feels is a result of the culture you build (or inherit). I’m not talking about your mission statement or values printed in the annual report. I’m talking about the active ingredients to your daily operation. For instance, you may have identified excellence as a value. It may even be printed in your brochure and hung on the wall with a cool Successories poster.  But if everything else around you screams "we are about good enough" as opposed to excellence the dissonance will be glaring, even audible.

One of the most critical values an organization can have is authenticity.  You may call it a number of things, but what happens in the conversations you have (and in the aftershock conversations about what was said earlier) determines much of your team’s potential for success.  And I want to be sure you understand that by success I mean real and lasting impact.  Authenticity is the foundation for real impact.  Marketing and technique can produce initial buzz.  With all that we know today it is not hard to get that initial vibe going.  Actually doing something that makes a difference only happens when there is authenticity that serves as the foundation for what you’re doing.  And that authenticity begins with your lead team.

One of the elements that must be present within your lead team is trust and trust grows out of a determined authenticity.  Andy Stanley has a great article on Choosing to Trust in May’s Catalyst Monthly.  I particularly love this line:

Trust is not built on flawless characther, but on authenticity.  I will extend trust to people who will admit their imperfections.  It is people who defend their infallibility who make me suspicious."

As you’re building your culture, is trust one of the building blocks?  You can read Andy’s whole article here.

There was a great question in today’s The Daily Drucker.  Drucker poses the simple, but very thought provoking question: "What do you want to be remembered for?"  How do you answer that question?

The piece in The Daily Drucker begins with his memory of being asked that question as a young boy in a classroom full of young boys…and none of them could answer.  To their silence the teacher replied, "I didn’t expect you to be able to answer it.  But if you still can’t answer it by the time you’re fifty, you will have wasted your life." 

That is a powerful concept.  Do you have an answer to the question?  I’ve found it helpful to add …by your family?  …in your work?  …by your friends?

It’s similar to that concept from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where you envision yourself as an eavesdropper on your own memorial service.  What would you like said at your memorial?  And then you back your way into the present by asking, "What will I have to do now in order to have those things said then?"

Here’s our dilemma: On the one hand, none of us want to be micromanaged (or necessarily even managed).  On the other hand, the demands of the knowledge worker world require professional development in order to keep pace with the needs of our organizations.  The illusion that we’re everything we need to be already and know what we need to know already is just that; an illusion.  In order to really make a difference in the organizations we play in we’ll all have to be on a personal development track.  So how’s your’s doing?  Your personal development track?  You know…the one that you don’t want anyone telling you how to do?

In yesterday’s snippet from The Daily Drucker there was a really helpful set of questions that could form the beginning of your own personal development track.  Here they are:

• Who am I?
• What are my strengths? (By the way, Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton is a great resource for this one)
• How do I work to achieve results?
• What are my values?
• Where do I belong?

Once you’ve worked through these questions you’re ready to begin a more systematic development track.  The next step is to set yourself up for what Drucker calls Feedback Analysis.  The idea is to "record your expected results for every key action or decision you take, and then compare actual results nine months or a year later to your expectations."

You’ll find this idea in a larger article called Managing Oneself, available on Amazon as a pdf download.  Very good resource.

This process would be a very helpful beginning for lots of our teams to undertake.  Are you doing something like this already?  Why not share with us what you’re doing?

Every once in a while I trip across a GREAT article on some aspects of leadership.  Although I am always on the lookout the moment of finding what I’m looking for is a take your breath away kind of thing.  Let me just say, this article by Andy Stanley is that kind of find.  Really, really, good.

It is so good, I am forced to give you a preview.  Check out the first two paragraphs:

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape.  It never goes away.  Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.  It is the environment in which good leadership is most easily identified.

Where there is no uncertainty, there is no longer the need for leadership.  As Jim Kouzes puts it, "Uncertainty creates the necessary condition for leadership."

This is a huge find.  Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Feeling that my "play it by ear" personal style was the real me but that the procrastination/disorganization element might be a symptom of something else and unrelated to being an ENTP (You know all about the whole Myers-Briggs idea right? ), I bought Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and have spent the past couple weeks absorbing it.  I have to say I’m feeling hopeful!  My desk is clear when I leave.  My inbox is empty.  What a great feeling.

The other resource that has been just inspirational is Lifehacker’s Getting to Done: Spring Cleanout.  In fact, if you’re not checking out Lifehacker on a regular basis you’re missing some really good ideas.

Yesterday’s idea from The Daily Drucker was a very helpful piece on defining quality, which has everything to do with measuring.  We’ve been talking about keeping score.  Drucker mentions the fact that surgeons measure success rates (survival rates) but points out the fact that in most knowledge work the "main trouble is…not the difficulty of measuring quality.  It is the difficulty in defining what the task is and what it should be (p. 160)."  His idea is that if you don’t define your task correctly you will measure the wrong thing and if you measure the wrong thing you’ll have a different outcome.

He uses an example of two inner city schools and points out that the difference in their effectiveness is determined by the fact that they’ve defined their task differently.  One has simply defned their task as "helping the underprivileged."  The other, "enabling those who want to learn, to learn."

We could do the same test for our organizations.  Are you measuring the right things?  Have you defined the task correctly?  It’s worth a careful examination.

Be sure to check out Keeping Score and More on Keeping Score.

In a breakout at last week’s Purpose Driven Church Conference, Dan Southerland of Church Transitions talked about measuring success (effectiveness) by purpose.  If you’re unfamiliar with the ideas of Purpose Driven you can learn more here.  What Southerland was talking about was simply that for each of the purpose components at Flamingo Road they learned to measure certain things.  For instance, in order to measure their effectiveness at connecting people to Christ they kept score of how many commitments to Christ and also how many completed their new members class.  To measure effectiveness at growing to be like Christ they kept score of how many people were involved in a small group and also weekly giving.

Why go to that trouble?  As the saying goes, "You can only expect what you inspect."  By keeping a closer eye on their dashboard they learned what worked.

Be sure and take a look at Keeping Score.

How are you keeping score?  In order to be sure you’re heading in the right direction, doing the right things, on the right track…you’ve got to have a way to keep score.  Dave Ferguson has a great post today on how CCC keeps score.  He refers to a dashboard that they’re developing in order to see all the areas they’re measuring.  I like the metaphor.  We can all relate to a dashboard.  As I’m driving in every morning I keep an eye on my odometer because I know how many miles I can drive after the yellow fuel light comes on.  I lean forward to get a look at the speedometer (the steering wheel blocks my line of sight) to make sure that I’m not going too fast.  When I’m driving up to Bakersfield I watch the temperature gauge (the signs tell me I need to turn off the AC for the next 12 miles…but I never do).  I am familiar with the dashboard in my car.  But what would the dashboard at SeaCoast Grace look like?  What would it measure?

First, I can tell you it would include attendance, but wouldn’t stop there.  It would also include the number of commitments to Christ, baptisms, and attendance at First Steps.  Second, it would merit an evaluation of our key objectives and determining what factors could be measured for each.  At last week’s Purpose Driven Church Conference Dan Southerland of Church Transitions talked about how they measured certain elements for each purpose.  Good idea.  As soon as I dig up my notes I’ll post more on it.

In the meantime, what are you measuring?  What are the gauges on your dashboard?