Tag Archives: future

Understanding the times

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This is one of my favorite leadership qualities. In times of vast discontinuous change, leaders who understand the times are as rare as they are valuable.

In the Old Testament, there are two references to people who understood the times (Esther 1:13, I Chron 12:32). All kings seem to have surrounded themselves with men who understood the times and knew the direction the king should go. Kings had an uneasy relationship with these “wise men,” sometimes choosing to follow their advice and sometimes going their own way. For instance, Solomon’s son Rehoboam.

I want to pick an earlier and more familiar example, however. Everyone remembers the story of Joseph, a young man who was sold into slavery by his brothers. After some fruitful years as a slave in Egypt, managing the household of his master efficiently, he’s railroaded and thrown in prison. Even there, God’s hand is on him, and he thrives, taking on responsibility. One day his opportunity for redemption finally comes in the form of a dream by the king. God gives him the ability to understand the meaning of the dream and to come up with a plan that will rescue Egypt, preserve Israel and make his boss really wealthy.

Joseph certainly understands the times. He knows there will be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of severe drought. He deploys his plan with efficiency and discipline. When the task of stockpiling gets too difficult, he doesn’t give up on collecting food; he gives up on counting. So, when the seven years of plenty end, Egypt and Joseph are in good shape. That’s where the story gets interesting.

Two years into the drought, everyone else’s worst-case scenarios have expired.

  • Genesis 45:6 says the famine has reached a critical stage for Joseph’s Canaan-based family by year two of the drought.
  • 47:17-20 records how Joseph bought all of the property of Egypt and Canaan with the grain he’d collected.
  • By 47:21, he owns all the people. He can then dictate terms under a rollover contract that lasts long after the famine ends.

But here’s the thing that caught my attention. In the years of plenty, no one but Joseph saw the drought ahead. Anyone who did plan ahead saved up a couple of years worth to get them through what would surely be a short-term decline. Joseph’s value came in his God-given ability to understand the times and know what to do.

Is there anyone who understands the times today? We have no context for the changes we’re going through. A global financial crisis has never happened before, so all the previous models just don’t apply. It’s obvious that old guidelines don’t cut it in 10%+ unemployment, unheard-of foreclosure rates and frozen credit. Eddie Gibbs, in Leadership Next: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture, says:

It is evident in rapidly changing times that knowledge does not necessarily flow from experience. Yesterday’s solutions and procedures may not provide an adequate or appropriate response to present challenges. Hence, the biggest hurdles facing long-time leaders may not be in learning new insights and skills, but in unlearning what they consider to be tried and true and what thus provides them with a false sense of security.

My response is that God is still God in good times and bad. He was still God while Joseph fumed in prison. Our brothers and sisters in the non-Western church can testify that they still have hope, joy and faith when the economy simply doesn’t rebound. I think we have a lot to learn from them, whether it’s patience in endurance or a theology of suffering. Christianity thrives in difficult times… because we realize we need God!

I suggest we learn from Joseph to be faithful and do the little things even from exile, even from prison.

I suggest we leaders seek the God who does understand the times and occasionally chooses to disclose them to those who listen.

I suggest we try our best to be ready when opportunity happens, even in the darkest situations.

And I suggest we seek to help each other out, offering our best to fellow prisoners with little hope of reward.

You never know how God might choose to use these times, because he holds today, and he holds the future.

Little things

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Yesterday Mauricio Alvarez shared a fantastic message about living in hope, even in difficult situations. I think the non-western church has a lot to teach us about maintaining hope when times are difficult. While westerners are convinced things will rebound, our brothers and sisters from South America, Africa and Asia understand that things could very well not improve. Whether they do or not, we can still have hope.

One point Alvarez made was that we build hope by focusing on God and the character he wants to build in our lives. David’s life, for instance, shows the law of preparation. As a young shepherd, David spent a lot of time in isolation — plenty of time to practice his slingshot so that when he needed that shot, he could hit it with perfection. When he was young, he was tested by lions and bears. He learned to face his worst enemy and to overcome with inadequate weapons. His early years without pressure shaped him into the leader he would become when the pressure was on.

Years later, David mastered that ability to use circumstances as practice. He was a capable military commander and then leader over 400 outcasts in the wilderness. He showed fruitfulness at every level and demonstrated the character he would need as king. For instance, consider his incredible patience even when he had an opportunity to take the kingdom on his own terms.

Some friends in Seattle reminded me of Psalm 63 last week. David, writing in the wilderness while being pursued by King Saul, spends the first ten verses talking about his thirst for God’s presence, love, power and glory. Throughout the psalm, he speaks as a visionary, confusing present and future. He celebrates the future ruin of his enemies, then offers a very interesting statement:

But the king will rejoice in God.
All who trust in him will praise him,
while liars will be silenced.

What king? Saul? No. David’s referring to himself in future tense. He was anointed years before. He knows that he is next in line. So he lives the future even though present circumstances don’t warrant it. That hope allows him to thrive in small things, resulting in fruitfulness, faithfulness and joy.

A leadership case study: football in Florida

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You knew I’d eventually have to comment on Urban Meyer, coach of the University of Florida. As a student of competition as well as a student of leadership, I love watching sports management, draft decisions and trade discussions. Football in Florida this year offers some interesting scenarios and lessons for leadership, with Bobby Bowden’s retirement from Florida State after 34 years and Urban Meyer’s health leave.

For some time, I’ve been watching Florida State because of their succession planning arrangement. I admired their decision to try to work out a seamless transition but observed with interest how they handled some of the pitfalls:

  • How does the incumbent leader know when to step away?
  • What if he knows it’s time but is afraid of the future?
  • What happens if the successor deems himself “ready” before the incumbent leaves?
  • Who has the real power in hiring decisions?
  • Is the university still committed to going in the same direction a few years after they named the successor, especially when that successor hasn’t looked like the savior they hoped him to be?

Though Florida State fumbled the handoff a bit and ended up creating some bitterness with Bobby’s family, Jimbo Fisher has taken the reigns and has been given the flexibility to remake the coaching staff because of the way things shook out this season. Florida State football is moving in a predictable direction, and the future looks bright under its new coach. All as a result of forethought and planning.

Florida, on the other hand, was caught completely by surprise when Urban Meyer announced December 26 that he was stepping down. I’m sure Florida’s administration had some forewarning, but it was still a shock. How on earth could a coach resign out of the blue after five wildly successful years? Florida had just breathed a sigh of relief when Notre Dame hired someone else; they knew they could plan on having their coach for a lot more years if he was willing to turn down his “dream job.” They were so confident they let their emergency plan walk out the door to coach Louisville. Yet, here they were, caught without a coach or even a thought of transition planning.

Florida acted quickly and managed to talk Meyer into calling it a leave of absence rather than a resignation. Gator Nation breathed a sigh of relief — with the hope that Meyer will come back, the recruiting class is safe and the administration has a bit of time to put a plan together. However, I want to ask, from a leadership standpoint: Is Florida in a better place today — both short and long term — than they would have been if they went out and found the best coach on the market? I think Florida has some very uncomfortable days and decisions ahead. The questions I’m asking:

  • How well has Meyer’s leadership style set up his assistants to succeed? We’ll find out pretty quickly how much of the offense came from Meyer himself. With a lot of transition in the team and an interim coach without real authority, there’s a recipe for failure here in the short term. This was going to be one of Meyer’s toughest coaching years anyway. Now the interim coach inherits that challenge.
  • What if Meyer doesn’t come back in 2010? How long do they wait for him? How long will the University be strung along?
  • What if Meyer comes back too early? In the last few days, he’s shown that he’s willing to yield to pressure, at the expense of promises to family. How much pressure will there be to return by August? What happens if Meyer can’t handle the stress during the season?

Let me be clear here. Yes, I am a football fan, but many of these questions aren’t football questions. They’re leadership questions. Here are a few of my conclusions. First, no leader is ever irreplaceable, and no leader can guarantee his or her future. Boards and supervisors must always have a plan for emergency and long-term successors.

Second, there are certain priorities that override your business objectives. Health is one of those. To their credit, Florida showed that its people are their priority, not just a winning product. They clearly showed loyalty to a coach who has given them everything.

Third, sometimes making a clear but difficult decision, without looking back, is better for business than sentimentality. While I admire Florida’s loyalty to Meyer, I think they’re going to regret their attempt to hold onto past success by holding onto Meyer. I think they could have showed just as much loyalty and honor to Meyer while saying goodbye with great pomp and celebration. Then they could have moved on.

The future is coming!

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“Hurry, everybody! Hide! The future is coming!”

I think my three-year-old daughter summed up the way a lot of people feel about the future. Time to put our heads in the sand. Maybe it’ll go away.

I’m really enjoying the premise of the new show, FlashForward — the idea that everyone on the planet gets a two-minute glimpse of their future six months ahead. For some, this glimpse gives them hope. For others, it’s agonizing. As the season moves ahead, I’m looking forward to seeing how the show tackles ideas like free will, our ability to control our destiny and our inherent brokenness. I’m quite sure I’ll be disappointed, but I might also be pleasantly delighted at the truth the show exposes.

Yesterday morning I led Wycliffe USA’s leaders in a discussion on succession planning. One point I made is that you can’t anticipate the leadership needs of an organization or department by looking at today’s leader. The tendency if you do that is either to seek a clone to succeed an incumbent or rather to seek a reaction to the incumbent — someone who has strengths where the incumbent is weak. Unfortunately, the present is a bad starting place for succession planning. You have to force yourself into an assessment of the organization and an assessment of future trends that then defines the leadership needs of an organization or department. Where are the challenges and opportunities going to be? Who can take advantage and lead us in that reality?

The future is coming. Are you the kind of person who sticks your head in the sand, or one who wishes you could see around corners? Are you excited or depressed about what you see?

Willow Creek Thoughts

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I’m chewing on my notes from the first day of the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, looking for patterns and the fingerprints of God. A couple of things jump out as I put the various threads from yesterday together.

1. Our current crises are opportunity. I knew that already, but it was good to hear Bill Hybels and Gary Hamel say it.

Hybels: How do gifted leaders react? With perverse excitement at the opportunities. These are perfect conditions for greatness to emerge.

Hamel: Should we wring our hands or thank God for the opportunity?

I think your reaction depends on whether you’re more concerned with defending the past or strategizing for the future. It also depends on how nimble you are. I think of Rudolph Guiliani on 9/11. He had a long-term plan for the city, though the average person in Orlando never heard about it or cared. That was the plan that no doubt led him to the meeting that happened to be right near the Trade Center that morning. But if Guiliani was anything, he was nimble as he reacted to the crisis, and greatness emerged.

2. Leadership in the future is going to look quite different. Gary Hamel and Jessica Jackley (founder of Kiva) both talked about a lack of hierarchy.

Hamel: It’s a challenge to build organizations that can survive without superhumans at the top. Leaders today are less concerned with control and more concerned with connecting, mobilizing and supporting. Their strategies are open and their hierarchy is flat.

Jackley: When you assume co-creation as a value from the beginning, top-down management doesn’t work.

If the hero leader is an old and failed model, as I’ve blogged about before, how do we move to the idea that a team can fill the impossibly long list of requirements for a CEO? Could you have different members of the team to cover the multiple roles of rousing public speaker, visionary leader, internal communicator, disciplined manager and caring, accessible, sympathetic boss? High-level leadership would sure look more attainable if we could find a way to lead in community.

3. Ideas need contribution. Gary Hamel had a couple of zingers, but one metaphor is going to stick with me:

Ideas shouldn’t develop like a pregnancy, where something happens in private and then a number of months later, out comes a nice package, but as a family picnic, out in the open where everyone contributes.

How do we get everyone — colleagues, clients, etc. — involved in our future? How can a large organization move to co-creation? Others have managed to reinvent themselves.

At lunch, one of our staff members pointed out that he’s been around long enough to see us move from bottom-up leadership to top-down leadership, and now we’re talking about bottom-up leadership again. I’m not sure we’re really back where we started. I think our world and our technology has evolved to the point that we now have the ability to co-create instead of individual brainstorming that has to be pulled together by an individual. It may have flavors of the old, but it feels new.

The future is never more of today

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I saw an announcement that a group of futurists was meeting in Chicago this past weekend to consider where the world is going in the near and longer-term future. The few things I read about it were a little troubling, because the experts were predicting the medical and ecological trends we face today continuing to their logical conclusions.

Here’s the problem: trends are never linear. Every trend has a shelf life. So the future is never more of today; often it’s a response to or rebellion against today.  Let me give an example from Wycliffe. When we began to plan our new Orlando headquarters building almost ten years ago, leaders were asked to project staffing for the next ten years and request space to meet the needs of the future. Of course, we predicted growing numbers of office-bound staff, and the result is a facility with a lot of elbow room. We’re moving departments together to create larger sections that can be rented out to our partners.

As we look ahead, who’s to say that the future is more and more remote work? In ten or fifteen years, will people start gathering together to work again? I suspect not, but I wouldn’t rule out a confluence of forces such as a reaction against technology or a new economic or business model that suddenly revives the popularity of working in large facilities. What I can say with some confidence is that if that were to  happen, it would look considerably different than our current setup. We can slap the “retro” label on it: an improved variation on something that was never as great as we all remember it.

I can’t wait for the retro commuting movement. It’s going to be so phat.

An elusive breed of potential leaders

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Time after time, I’ve run into people my age or younger who have leadership gifts that remain hidden. I’m not necessarily just referring to the long-established art of unearthing leadership gifts in people and bringing those to light. The part that disturbs me is when young leaders know they have leadership gifts but dodge the mantle of leadership.

“If God has given you leadership ability, take the responsibility seriously” (Rom 12:8). I firmly believe that those who have leadership gifts have a responsibility. Rather than squander it or suppress it, they need to develop it and practice leading.

Why would people seek to bury their leadership gifts? There are lots of reasons I’m going to dig into over the next few posts. Before I do that, we should agree on what a reluctant leader is.

The internet is a goldmine. Of all places, I found a wonderful article from the Natural Science Department at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, FL. Perhaps in scouring the world for new and endangered species, they discovered the reluctant leader. Check out this quote from Dr. Anthony and Crystal Gambino’s essay: “Untapped Potential: In Search of the Reluctant Leader.”

There exists an elusive breed of potential leaders. Most of these potential leaders will go unnoticed; very few will ever reach their leadership potential. They serve out of view and live in the shadows of others. It is this existence, in the shadow, that will serve them well if they are found and developed into the leaders they could be. The question is how do you find such a potential leader, one that does their job, but gives the credit to those who they helped. They help others reach their potential by gently pushing from behind with words of encouragement. This potential leader should lead, but is reluctant to do so mainly because they see leaders as those who assign the work and then take the credit. In their mind this is the last thing they want to become. Finding a reluctant leader will take a keen eye for observation, nurturing with patience, equipping with knowledge and developing the future leader over time. Tapping into this untapped potential will be a personal investment with a high rate of return.

What are your reactions? Anything stand out to you?