Chess Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game

Mark Miller’s new book Chess Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game is easily the best book to read if you are a pastor that is facing a growth plateau, can’t break through the next growth barrier or find yourself breaking through say, 500 people but always drop back down.

I read this book and so many things about my leadership and the church I lead became so obvious to me I was annoyed I didn’t see it.

For instance, it helped me see that as Revolution is on its way to becoming a church of 500, I and our team act like and lead like we are still a church of 200.

Many churches do this without knowing it and the reason as Miller points out is, the game has changed.

I love the picture of this book. Chess and checkers use the same board, but have different pieces and different rules. The game board flips but no one seems to notice.

Here’s how Miller describes it:

Most small businesses can be successful with a checkers mindset. That’s actually the game you play when an organization is in start-up mode. The leader does virtually everything in the beginning. That’s checkers. Then, if you grow, you begin to add staff. Many leaders see these additional people as interchangeable pieces, nothing more than hired hands, no need for specialists. Each piece is capable of the same limited moves. That’s checkers. In the beginning the game is simple. That’s checkers. You react, you make decisions, the pace is frenetic—you’re playing checkers. And, it works … for a while. “You can win in business by playing checkers until someone sneaks in one night after you’ve closed for the day and flips the board. The game changes, and you don’t even know it.

So how do you know if the game has switched? Here are a few:

  1. You always find yourself responding to something. Your leadership and job become reactive instead of proactive.
  2. You don’t feel like you have time to do your job.
  3. Here’s another question to help reveal which game you’re playing: Have you asked your employees to think deeply about the business? Have you asked them to prevent problems and solve the ones that do surface?
  4. If you, and the others on your leadership team, probably like coming to the rescue. You think that is your job. You like checkers. The pace and the excitement can be exhilarating. Your employees are following your lead. They are playing checkers because you are.
  5. Problems that reoccur; problems that should have been anticipated and avoided, problems that catch us totally by surprise and we should have seen coming, and problems that are created by lack of focus or a failure to execute.

This is a book that every time we get close to a growth barrier, I am returning too. Get it today.