Issue No. 39 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a Memorial Day parade insight from The Customer Bucket and Bill Hybels’ list of 10 leadership styles. To read the reviews of the last 38 books, send your team members to the Buckets Blog at www.JohnPearsonAssociates.com.
Bill Hybels was almost lifeless on a couch in the back room of a conference center. He had a high fever and nausea, moments before his major speaking engagement. Then Mega-Motivator John Maxwell joined Hybels backstage with the perfect prescription for him.
Hybels writes that Maxwell knelt by the couch and whispered, “I think you’re much too sick to handle this final talk…But don’t worry, I can handle it for you…You just snuggle down under those blankets and suck your thumb…I’ll patch together a talk and bail you out.”
The response was immediate from Hybels, who serves as senior pastor at Willow Creek Community Church and chairman of the board of Willow Creek Association. “Get out of my way,” he told Maxwell. “I’ll fall over and die before I let you do that!”
Maxwell has honed the motivational leadership style, one of 10 styles described by Bill Hybels in his book, Courageous Leadership. Ask a team member to order the book and report on all 10 styles at your next staff meeting. The other nine leadership styles are: visionary, directional, strategic, managing, shepherding, team-building, entrepreneurial, reengineering, and bridge-building.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Strong, charismatic leaders often skew our understanding of the varieties of effective leadership styles. Describe a leader that comes to mind. What is her or his style?
2. Hybels writes that “the managing leader salivates at the thought of bringing order out of chaos.” Does anyone fit that description here?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Insights from the Management Buckets Workshop Experience
If there’s a Memorial Day parade in your community today, here’s a powerful metaphor to go with it: “You are talking not to a crowd but a parade.”
Advertisers use the term “frequency of message.” One brilliant full-page, four-color ad won’t do it. Some will miss the ad, others will forget it—and others will not like it. It takes frequent repetitions to get your key message across. Effective communicators understand that. Great leaders practice it. Thoughtful managers create frequency systems so everyone stays in the loop.
If you announced a new program in your January newsletter—you’d be shocked how many people didn’t read it, don’t care, or never understood. If your “Vision 21st Century” initiative was launched last year, you may already be using the acronym, “V21C” this year. Guest what? Few people have a clue what you’re talking about!
My good friend and mentor, George Duff, served 27 years as the president of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. This anonymous quotation hung on his wall:
Last month’s important email blast has been deleted. People in your parade need new inspiration today, new stories today and new reasons to join your team today.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions: The Customer Bucket
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.Thanks for marching in our parade today! Please form a single file parade line and jump in based on the number of years and months you’ve been on the team. Longest at the front. OK, now what do people at the front of the line know that has never been communicated to the back of the line?
2. Now let’s create a customer parade. What do our long-term donors, recipients, guests, members, etc., know that our newest customers don’t know? Have any of our old-timers changed their thinking since we last communicated? How are our customers changing?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Future dates will be announced in June for the Management Buckets Workshop Experience (two days) and the Nonprofit Board Governance Workshop (one day) at the scenic Blue Lantern Inn in Dana Point, Calif. If your organization would like to co-host a workshop, please email me.
Download the Management Buckets brochure
PS. Click “Forward Email” below to recommend this free eNews to a colleague.
