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I have decided to take the “my 500 words” challenge by author Jeff Goins.  This challenge is to help writers to develop the daily habit of writing and to become better writers.  Jeff Goins is a successful author and has a popular blog here.

 

I am excited about writing and have always loved to write.  I have been writing now most of my adult life, before I started to blog 3 years ago I journaled and have years worth of journals stored away, going back over 15 years.

 

Writing is an outlet for me and helps me to organize my thoughts and clear my mind. I will categorize my daily writing as my500words if my writing makes it to a blog post, I will also use the hashtag #my500words on twitter and FB. I plan to write on a variety of topics and hope to do at least one guest blog post.

 

Most of these posts will be on this blog, some may be in the e-book I am finishing up, other posts may be in my other blog here.

 

Either way, first thing in the morning I plan to write at least 500 words from 2/12/14 to 3/15/14.  There are almost 1000 other bloggers and writers doing this.  Find out more about this challenge here.

 

 

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Families Also Need Leaders

 FamilyMeeting1

 

“My family comes first” – almost every father I know.
There is a ton of content out there for business leadership, for church leadership, for every type of leadership. There are books, consultants, coaches, blogs, podcast’s and even mastermind groups.  I consume some of this content and I have learned some good stuff.

 

Business and church leaders often work on leadership skills so that they can lead their business or churches more effectively.

 

Most would say that “family comes first”or “my family is the most important thing in my life”, we have careers to support our families. But think about it, how much planning, how much strategy, how many goals and how many meetings do we have about our family lives? I think most of us just allow our family lives to happen as they will.  What if we applied our leadership wisdom, skills and talents to our families? starting now!

 

Families need leadership as much or more than do businesses.  We can shape our children’s lives with our parenting skills. This can effect our children for a lifetime, for good or for bad. The concept of family leadership goes beyond parenting only.  Parenting is just one of subset of family leadership, because not all families raise children.  Family leadership embraces what is unique and special about a family. It doesn’t try to change or manipulate and make a family into something it is not.  It accepts the family for what it is, it helps and guides family decisions and focus for decades and for generations.  Families are the foundation of a civilized society and provide stability, so of course we should strive to lead our families well.

 

There are three things that the leaders of families can do to lead well.
Assumptions: there is a roof over the family’s head, adequate clothing on everyone, enough food to eat and plenty of love in the home.

 

  1. Define the family’s mission.
  2. Create a sense of unity and oneness in your family.
  3. Set specific goals for the family.
A family mission is that one most important thing that your family focuses on in the near-term. Perhaps it is improving relationships with one another, perhaps it is teaching our faith, perhaps it is doing something together like a big vacation, perhaps it is working on a financial struggle.  Don’t spend too much time on this, just pick something you can agree with and go for it, there are no rules and you can change things on the fly.  Is your family just existing, or does it have a unique mission? whatever you think that mission is or should be, start to talk about it, write it down, discuss it with your spouse, tell it to your children until they know it by heart.  I am just beginning this process with my kids and they seem to enjoy the guidance.
Does your family have a sense of unity and oneness, is your family united? do family members suffer alone with problems? Does everyone tend to dump things on mom? or dad? everyone should share the burden of life together, help one another, defend one another and forgive one another.

 

As part of that mission and unity it is a good idea to set yearly goals for your family. Set less than 10 goals and write them out, make them achievable but ambitious and make sure everyone in the family knows them.

 

These all sound great right? But how to begin?  We can start by coming up with a family mission then simply say it out loud often, talk about the goals for the year, start creating that UNITY that ONENESS in your family by teaching unity and expecting it from everyone. This wont happen overnight but with consistency over time we get there.

 

Family life is important, more so than is our careers, our businesses, even more than our churches, so lets strive to lead our families well.  Children are counting on us, our spouse is counting us. When death comes many years from now our family is what will matter to us, not our nest egg.
Don’t continue another day in an unhealthy or toxic family life, make effort to restore and to lead our family well. If necessary get marriage counseling or parenting counseling, there is no shame in that, determine to fix what is broken.

 

The only thing more painful than confronting and uncomfortable topic is pretending it doesn’t exist.

 

 

Most family members will respond to leadership and will freely follow…or will at least tolerate it.

What are some other ways we can lead our families well?

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When The Score Is On Display

scoreboard

 

A friend pointed out to me the other day that when a group of guys get together to play hockey everything is all fun and games…until someone sets up a scoreboard.

 

The presence of a scoreboard often brings out the competitive nature in people.

 

Scoreboards do two things, 1) they keep a record of performance relative to other players and 2) publicly display the comparison of performance for all to see.

 

It would be one thing if scoreboards were kept private, if one scorekeeper in the crowd were writing the score on a napkin.  But adding that comparison up in lights for all to see, this creates another level that changes player’s behavior.

 

We can lead people in a way such that our behavior is like the presence of a large scoreboard up in lights. The way an employee or team member is promoted or rewarded and the way they behave after the promotion can have same effect on other employees as does a scoreboard on an athlete, it causes competition. It can create insecurity in the majority of employees and can put people in their “corner”. Comparing employees especially in large companies is only really necessary in times of decline when cuts need to be made and these comparisons can be done in a private way among leaders. To make ongoing, public comparisons, comparisons where the winners then are given freedom to dominate the culture is needless and is destructive to an organization’s culture.

 

A better way is to only evaluate an employee against her accomplishments, her objectives, evaluate an employee based on measurable criteria, not based on how she compares to colleagues.  A company’s or any organization’s team members should behave not like weekend warrior hockey players or a wrestler under the spotlight and score board, shoving their way to a win, competing against their opponent.  Instead it should behave like a basketball team under a great coach cooperating, communicating, assisting and encouraging one another so that they all together can compete against the external opponents.

 

Lead like a great coach, not like a lit scoreboard!

 

What are some other ways to cause employees to work together and to not compete, leave a comment below?

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