Recently, I read through Dave Ramsey’s leadership book EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches. The title is right. There is tons of wisdom in this book and it is incredibly practical and helpful.
Here are 11 things I learned or was reminded of that I think are helpful for other pastors:
- The very things you want from a leader are the very things the people you are leading expect from you. Credibility, empathy, integrity, passion, vision. We want these things from leaders and our followers want them from us. The standard we hold people to, is the standard others hold us to. Step up to it.
- You cannot lead without passion. Passion causes things to move, and passion creates a force multiplier. The longer I lead Revolution, the more I am reminded of this. The times when we lacked momentum or energy, I lacked momentum and energy. This doesn’t mean a leader needs to be a loud cheerleader or an extrovert or can’t be tired sometimes. It does mean that you need to take care of yourself so that you are excited and energized. For a pastor, you need to make your schedule work so that on Sunday morning your game face is on and you are ready. This may mean you do very little on Saturday’s, but whatever you have to do, do it.
- The mission statement is one way we create culture. If you can’t give a clear win for your church, close your doors. You should be able to give a clear win for everything you do, this is what motivates people and pushes them to give their time, talent and treasure to something.
- Just because an idea is a good idea does not mean it is good for you or your company to take it on. Keep your eye on the ball. Pastors are notorious for not following this. Churches get complex, a powerful elders wife has an idea so you feel pressured to do it, the loudest person won’t stop complaining about why you don’t have a certain ministry. Someone says, “If we do ___, we will be able to reach people” and so the ideas seems sound. We can reach people? Then we should do it. The problem is, all kinds of things reach people, that doesn’t mean every church should do them all. TV ministries work at reaching people. Should every church have one? No. Focus on what you can do well and do that. The reason this is hard is because by staying simple and focused, you will lose people, but you will be more effective and healthier as a church in the end.
- If you spend fifteen minutes planning your day on paper every morning, you will add 20 percent to your productivity. I’ve come across this idea in a number of books recently and have put it into practice and seen a ton of results from this. By clarifying my wins for the day, I know where to spend my energy and time. I also know at the end of a day that maybe has little to show for it, that I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. This helps to put wind in your sails for the next day.
- The larger your dream, the larger the organization, the more complicated and emotionally draining your decisions. Leaders with small dreams don’t lay awake at night worrying and praying about their church. The ones who have things they feel called to, things that overwhelm them, they sweat the decisions they make. Hiring is now not just about filling a role, but can make or break a ministry for years. Where you meet, when you make a change, all of these decisions carry more weight.
- You put all you dream about in jeopardy when you are indecisive. Because of the season of growth and hiring that Revolution is in, this statement stopped me when I read it. While you should not rush things, you should take time when you can to make a choice and look at as many possibilities and angles as you can, at some point, you must decide. If you as a pastor are paralyzed about something, your church stops. That can’t happen. You can’t second guess something, you must decide and move forward.
- If you don’t have any good options then you don’t have enough options; search for more. If you are like me, it is easy to focus on one thing and just do it without finding good options. I realize others are in the other end of the spectrum of finding too many options and then aren’t sure how to move forward. I’ve always felt like I need to make a choice, when in reality, I could wait and find better options and that is a choice.
- Team members leave, or are let go, most often because they should never have been hired in the first place. Every pastor knows this is true. They have volunteers that shouldn’t have been given leadership roles, staff members that they want to fire or are firing that they should never have hired.
- Hire people you like; you will be trusting them and spending lots of time with them. I’ve made this mistake in the past and it hurt me. I overlooked something, whether in ability or simply personalities clashing and it hurt my team every time. Now, I spend lots of time with people before I hire them. I went to see someone in another state once just to get a feel for them before bringing them to Revolution.
- People whose first question is about pay are not people you want. I had a mentor in college tell me this, so I never brought money up in an interview. Now that I’m interviewing people, it tells me a lot about someone. While pay matters, buy in to a vision matters more. Sometimes people will sacrifice pay to be a part of something great. This doesn’t mean you pay people pennies, but it means the DNA and vision lining up is more important.
