Healthy Leaders | Issue 39
Achievement follows alignment.
Welcome to Issue 39 of Healthy Leaders. In this issue: what it means to achieve the vision you’ve been working toward.
Hello friends,
Welcome back to our ongoing conversation on healthy Christian leadership and leader development.1
So, now your followers are all aligned to your vision and ready to get going. What now? How do you go about achieving that vision?
Here’s Malcolm with more:
Last issue, we shared the story of Brother X, whose personal realignment brought about a complete paradigm shift in his church network. Through his leadership and the power of God, he was able to align all of his top leaders to a new vision for healthy churches.2
Let’s see how achievement worked out for him, particularly in terms of building the next generation of leaders.
Following the retreat he held for his top leaders, Brother X launched several intense training programs for high-capacity young leaders from each of the nine regions in his church network. Each of these programs involved a holistic context: relationships with intercessors, pastoral mentors, and host families, deep spiritual times of worship, prayer, and meditation; and challenging assignments.
Along the way, Brother X never lost sight of the vision, or his responsibility to align the young leaders he was training to it.
One of his strategies for growth involved taking his cohort of young leaders to different church regions on the weekend to share their testimonies and how their lives had been transformed recently. Everywhere they went, young people were inspired and revitalized. Many came back to the Lord; many rejoined the church.
In two of the church regions, they had lost so many young people previously that they had completely stopped the youth ministry. Through the impact of Brother X’s cohort, many young people returned and they restarted their youth ministries. Brother X set the young leaders in his program a challenging assignment: to provide direct support to those fledgling ministries, all while building the local leaders and equipping them in how to design their own plans for growth.
For another cohort, Brother X designed a 5-day, 200-km bicycle route that included five historical churches from their network who had special stories of God’s provision. The purpose was to experience what their spiritual fathers did in the early years, traveling on foot, or on bicycle, in every kind of weather. At each of the five churches the senior leaders of the church shared stories of faith and sufferings, of their prayers and hopes for the church. They also prayed for and blessed the young leaders.
The older generation were moved by the godly lives of the young people and encouraged to see the hope of the future. The young people were blessed by the deep stories of their forefathers, overwhelmed by their spiritual inheritance, and encouraged by rich prayers. The deep connection they established between multiple generations brought great joy and hope to everyone!
Notice that the impact that Brother X has had began in aligning his own life to God’s will for him. Then, every time he shared the vision God gave him — and the personal example of it in his life — he inspired and encouraged ever-widening circles of followers: from his leadership team to his local church, to the whole top leadership team of his network, to the larger regional church, and then to multiple generations of leaders across the region.
Talk about the achievement of an infectious vision!
What we’re getting at here is that big stories of impact like this one start small. Identifying the right people, aiming for incremental wins, affirming and encouraging your people, and being honest about the difficult journey ahead are all simple ways to get the motor running on your vision. And remember: alignment is continual. That’s why leadership is so vital!
You might be wondering how to identify a good small win. The first thing you can do, whether you’re designing a win for your organization or yourself, is to take a good hard look at the capacity available to you, and aim just above it.
Here are a few more ways you can aim for achievement.
Take it personally. If you’re the leader, the first small-win “unit” is you. Actions speak louder than words and build your credibility. What new initiatives have you taken lately? What small battles have you won?
Make a broad plan. You’ll never be able to foresee it all, and by the time you get there it will likely all be different anyway. Nevertheless, you’ve got to start somewhere and the process of planning gets people to mentally walk through the entire journey, anticipating the events, milestones, tasks and goals, and imagining their success.
Within the parameters of the overall vision, give people choices. Choice is the cement that binds action to the person, motivating individuals to take ownership and accept responsibility for what they do.
Break it down. Once you’ve set your sights, move forward incrementally — especially at the beginning. Break large groups and goals into small cohesive teams and doable tasks. There is nothing more discouraging than starting off with a failure, so make sure you include a few early successes in your plan.
Publicize your commitments and your progress. By making your corporate goals visible, you create accountability and increase everyone’s sense of obligation to the vision. Then by publicizing successes, you generate positive momentum and reinforce everyone’s long-term commitment.
Trust God for the outcomes. Don’t be impatient. When change is rushed, it can increase resistance and be extremely expensive. However, when leaders allow change to happen more naturally, it tends to be slower but it also receives greater acceptance. Build alliances and take the time to show people the benefits of moving ahead.
Encourage people constantly. Once people start moving down a new path, they need frequent encouragement, especially when they encounter the inevitable obstacles, unexpected disasters and the uncharted forks in the road.
Your initial first wins will not bring everyone in your organization or ministry on board. People adopt change at different rates.3 But the initial small wins will be instrumental in getting a critical mass of people on board with your vision.
What about you?
For those of you who’ve been working on those small wins, what are some of your favorite “small-win” stories? How can you see them leading to bigger wins?
For those of you who are just starting out on this journey, what small wins are you going to aim at? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.
Until next time, we’re with you!
— Chris
Recommended Resources
Book: Leading
For more resources, visit our website.
Thanks to our friends at Fifty-Four Collective for putting together a comprehensive set of video courses for growing healthy organizations, starting with this series of courses on leadership by Malcolm. We’ll be using some of their videos and some of our own. Be sure to check out what they’re doing!
See Understanding Change by Malcolm Webber for more information.