Bill Hybels -- Session 1 -- “5 Critical Questions for Leaders”

• When a leader gets better, everyone wins.
• QUESTION 1: What is your current leadership challenge level? Are you under-challenged? appropriately challenged? dangerously over-challenged?
• Where do you do your absolutely best work as a leader on this spectrum?
• Leadership is like a muscle. You have to stress it to grow it.
• First Application
• If you’re under-challenged, step it up. If you don’t challenge yourself enough, you’re in danger of atrophy.
• If you’re dangerously over-challenged, you’re in danger of a melt down. You need to find a way to delegate and scale back. You set a bad example for those you lead if you live in this area.
• When you are stressed, you get a lift. When you stay stressed, you’ll flatten out. If you stay in this level, you’ll crash and bottom out in the cellar.
• Second Application
• How do we get a handle on who is being overworked in an organization?
• What do under-challenged people in a department do? They leave.
• Third Application
• Do you think it possible for organizations to be under-challenged, appropriately challenged, or dangerously over-challenged?
• QUESTION 2: What is your plan on dealing with challenging people in your organization?
• If there was a 50% revenue drop, who would you get rid of?
• Line Exercise: Put all your people in order from the ones you would most hate to lose.
• Are the people at the end of the line, off-mission? under-performing? Am I just avoiding tough conversations because we are fully funded?
• Willow’s mission is totally dependent on the people we can attract and develop.
• Our future is also tied to dealing with people who are no longer fantastic.
• How much time are you going to give Fantastic Fred to spread his radioactive poison? I get answers from minutes to years. At Willow, this is 30 days.
• Your staff needs to know how long people can have a bad attitude.
• How do you handle under-performers? Or as the Bible says, no worthy their hire?
• Under-performers need our attention just as soon as it is identified. At Willow, this is 3 months.
• The single toughest challenging people issue I’ve had to deal with is when the growth of an organization requires somebody with a greater capacity to fill that role.
• Takeaway #1: If you don’t deal with challenging people in your organization, you discourage and de-motivate your best people. Fantastic people do not want to be dragged down by whiners and complainers.
• Takeaway #2: Challenging people are not happy people.
• QUESTION 3: Are you naming, facing and resolving the problems in your organization?
• Example: The problem of the feeding of the widows in Acts 6
• Nothing rocks forever. Everything has a season.
• Life-cycle of an idea: Accelerating, Booming, Decelerating, Tanking
• By identifying, we can solve these problems.
• QUESTION 4: When was the last time, you re-examined the core of what your organization is all about?
• Can you put the vision and mission of your organization on the front of a t-shirt?
• We all get fuzzy on what we do over time.
• Exercise: In five words, explain the central message of your product or service. In five words, what best describes the good news of Jesus Christ?
• Hybels answer for himself: Love, Evil, Rescue, Choice, Restoration
• God loved you the moment you started sucking air.
• When you’re clear about the core, there is no end to what God can do.
• QUESTION 5: Have you had your leadership bell rung lately? Has any leadership book or talk or crisis rocked your world lately?
• Most of us are hard-headed leadership types; we need our bells rung occasionally.
• If you’re sick enough of being stuck, you’d get on the solution-side of this problem and you’d take action.
• Quit making excuses and start making bold, new solutions.
• There is too much at stake in this world for leaders to walk around with a defeated mindset.
• Why couldn’t the next five years be your best five years?
• How you finish is how you will be remembered.