Monthly Archives: August 2017

Welcome back! Good leadership is an active choice. Awesome leadership takes total commitment. Anyone can suck at leadership, and many people do. Don’t be the whiny tyrant who perches on their leadership chair and bellows about how magnificent they are. That reduces you to a caricature of yourself. A version of who you are that can be taken about as seriously as a cartoon. You have not ascended to some lofty station that makes you better than anyone else. You haven’t arrived. You hold one position in one organization for one period of time. Your “leadership” might well be considered a joke in a different organization. The nonsense you are allowed to get away with at one place would get you fired at another. So before you coronate yourself ruler of the universe, remember that a vast legion of leaders has come before you, and even more will come after. This is just a moment in time, so it would be wise for you to keep the magnitude of your self-appointed grandeur in perspective. Make the choice to be a leader who serves rather than trying to force others to serve you. That one decision alone puts you on the path to greatness.

So how do we go about making the commitment to awesomeness? We ground ourselves in the most fundamental bedrock possible: we embrace that we are not God and stop trying to play Him in other people’s lives. Everything else after that is just details and skills we can learn.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for your growth and wisdom!

Toxic Workplaces Prayer

Toxic Workplaces Strategies for Moving Forward

Toxic Workplaces Minimize the Impact

Toxic Workplaces Where to Find Help

Toxic Workplace Your Impact on the Problem

Welcome back!

So far we’ve been talking about getting our own selves in order so that we don’t do damage to others and we give ourselves the best possible chances of success. We are arriving at the heart of this teaching series. Here’s the deal. Even if you’re a marvelously functional and mature adult, who does a remarkable job for your organization and is an upstanding member of your community, but you do not know how to properly take care of your team, you’ll create an epic failure for yourself. You’ll impose completely unnecessary hardship on every person under your command. So how do we get leadership right? By becoming awesome! Not by loafing our way through an endless series of handsome paychecks, or settling for mediocrity, or giving the status quo a place to flourish. We become awesome by being far above average impact players, a new generation of leadership who jabs a stick in the spokes of the out-of-control-bike of toxic workplaces and throws them over the handlebars to enact change. If you didn’t get into leadership with a clear intention to transform lives, organizations, and bottom line results, and you have no desire in your heart to achieve those outcomes now, then please do us all a favor and resign your post. There are too many ill-equipped people with characters that are completely unworthy of leadership seriously holding their organizations back from soaring success because they are in the way.

Specifically, becoming awesome means three things: interpersonal excellence, strategically developing others, and the art of consequences. Strap it up, and let’s get going!

Until next time, I’m praying that those of you who are hungry to be your best will have fun growing every day, and those of you stinking up leadership chairs will somehow find your way into an entirely different line of work!

Welcome back!

We’ve been talking about the perils of mistreating a team. Today we’re going to continue that conversation. When you mistreat people, it mangles your reputation. Detailed information about your misbehavior spreads far and wide. Losing your reputation will limit your future opportunities. Your current reality will erode out from under you like quicksand. People will stop trying to work with you. You’ll also miss out on important information and then situations you would have had an early warning about will erupt in your face. People will smile and nod but then quietly seek ways to correct whatever problem you are causing or allowing (or both). You will give people a common enemy to coalesce around. Productivity will shift from the mission of the organization to the goal of bringing you to justice. You can only mess with people for so long before they give up on you and fight back. Mess with the wrong person, who is braver than you, healthier than you, has more stamina than you, or especially if they are a person of faith under the protection of God, and you’ll find yourself in a world of hurt in a hurry. Worse yet, do something that hurts or threatens their family’s well-being, and you’ll have a street fight on your hands. Do the right thing and treat people well. Don’t make anyone succeed in spite of you. Gift them with succeeding because of you.

A special note for leaders who have surrounded themselves with people who are as dysfunctional, corrupt, or mean-spirited as they are in an attempt to build a human shield to hide behind. You may be wallowing in denial and seeking allies wherever and however you can find them, but the fact is, even that self-serving maneuver is readily transparent. Even people who are attached to you because of whatever illicit means you hooked them in with, will have no problem joining up with your adversaries if you treat them badly enough. Relationships based on using each other never last. Eventually, everyone will join forces on a quest to put a stop to the hurt you are causing. When that happens, you’ll find yourself on the outside looking in. Even if you survive the controversy, your power will forever be diminished and you will never be fully trusted again. In a classic case of reaping what you chose to sow, the damage you caused other people will finally be visited upon your own doorstep. When the suffering quite rightly switches from the team to you, misery becomes your new normal while everyone else will be celebrating your fall. Your team is talking about your nonsense in their living rooms, around the Thanksgiving table, in church, while playing sports, and everywhere else they go. You can’t stop it. All you can do is change it by doing right by people, and giving them reasons to speak well of you. That’s your social reality as a leader. Either people are singing your praises and raising your social capital, or you are handing them the ammunition that will eventually bring your reign of tyranny to a screeching halt.

Until next time, think about this question and be brutally honest in your answer to yourself: what is it like for each member of your team to work for you? Not just what you want to believe because it’s what your buddies tell you to stroke your ego, but what it’s like for every single person to be under your command.

I’m praying for your wisdom and positive action!

Welcome back!

After getting yourself squared away, the next item on the agenda is to learn how to properly treat a team. If you’re still nursing a “me first” mentality, think of it like this: your life is much easier, more pleasant, and your outcomes far better when you treat people right. Here is the utterly sobering power of leadership: you literally hold your team’s well-being and their quality of life in their hands. Take a moment to let that sink in. You have a massive ripple impact on their family and every community of which they are a part. Your reputation accompanies them everywhere they go. They can and do talk about you. Whether what they have to say is positive or negative is entirely within your control. If you’re a jerk, that gets reported far and wide. If families incur medical bills because you’re such a nasty boss that people get sick from the stress, your name appears in medical records as the cause. If marriages are being damaged, kids are being abused, or the family dog is getting kicked because you have driven someone beyond their breaking point, it will be all over social media. If you’re unstable, or a drunk, or corrupt, or a thousand other variations of dysfunctional, that’s getting shared like wildfire. Would you be proud to have your mother or your pastor read the reports on how you’re conducting yourself at work?

Bad leaders made the mistake of not looking beyond the narrow boundaries of their own manipulations. They think they are in control because they are not yet fully facing the consequences of their actions. Consequences are cumulative. Those who don’t make course corrections are not savvy or humble enough to realize that the entire time they are behaving with impunity, there is a large and growing groundswell of disapproval and opposition that will one day knock them off their self-appointed pedestal and out of power. Resistance does not have to be visible to be effective. Some of the most trajectory-altering battles take place behind the scenes with the quiet resolve of those committed to a healthier path. The clock of accountability is ticking whether you deny it’s existence or not.

Until next time, take a serious look at how you’re treating the people under your command and ask yourself this question: will I be happy to harvest the spiritual consequences of how I am taking care of my people?

I’m praying for your wisdom, action, and growth!

Toxic Workplace Impact on You