Simple thoughts about management...

My campus pastor, Keith Carmichael, made a great statement today. He said that "management is about knowing yourself and then knowing the people you are managing." I guess it doesn't sound all the profound...I mean obviously you should know yourself, your leadership style and management style and you should know the people that you are managing and their different strengths and what they bring to the table in your organization. Still, I can't get his statement out of my mind. As I mull over my own leadership I realize that there are little nuances that I can make when leading my team that will make me a much more effective leader.

Determine the ultimate goal: This can be a lot harder than you might think. Narrowing down everything that you do in your organization so that you understand the ultimate goal of what you and your team are doing can take a lot of self discovery. Ultimately the goal of a manger is to empower and develop a passion into those being managed toward the ultimate goal and purpose even if it is something they might not have taken personally in the beginning. In other words, am I able to help my team grow passionate about the ultimate goal and the part that each of them plays in reaching that goal?

This task becomes even more convoluted when I factor in my desire to see my team develop and grow as individual leaders as well as team players. I am not naive enough to believe that everyone who I work with now will always be working with me. I hope and pray that this is a grooming time for each of them and that eventually they will move on to more influential and bigger roles whether in ministry or in the business world. I guess what I'm saying is that my ultimate goal for each of them as leaders is that they become better finishers and that they gain the confidence to replicate and reproduce themselves. My hope is that every leader I work with will grow and gain as a result of working around or with me. However that might be, I don't want anyone to have worked with me for any length of time and not have taken some benefit or growth in their leadership from our time together.

Put leaders in places where they will win: Recently the manager of the Yankee's brought back a starting pitcher who had been injured for some time. The outing he opened him with? An away game against the Boston Redsox...what a bad move. How was the young and newly healed pitcher going to regain all of his lost confidence in a hotbed of a game like the Yankees vs the Redsox? Wouldn't it have been better to get him a start against a team that he was more likely to have a measure of success against so that he would have at least some success?

It is so important to do this with leaders as well...put them in spots where they will succeed. Success breeds more success, and winning breeds more winning. Once you have established a level of confidence and success in your team they will gladly take on tasks that are much larger or more difficult knowing that you have confidence that they will succeed!

Be humble enough to do what you ask your team to do: There is nothing worse than following someone who will ask you to do the worst things in the world and you know that they have never and would never be willing to do those things themselves. It is so important that your workers know that you aren't above doing anything that you would ask them to do. Look for ways as a manager to take on some of the dirty-back breaking work and you will earn the trust and confidence of your team. They will be far more willing and hard working when it comes the menial tasks involved in accomplishing the goal if they know that you are willing to get in there with them!