Relevant links:
Join me at:
- Traditional Fatherhood Intensive: Purpose, Provision, Protection
- Rogue Food Conference at Polyface Farm
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00]
Welcome back to the life on target podcast. I’m your host, Nathan spearing, bringing you my episode today on leadership. Fresh off of reading or I should say listening to the book, the motive. Why so many leaders abdicate their most important responsibilities by Patrick Lencioni. And I just got to recommend this book to anyone who is running a small business, anyone who is in a leadership position in a company. Or someone who is the head of the household. Working in their church. Leading a group locally in their community. Or. Hopes to attain any one of those positions hopes to be married and have his own family that he’s leading hopes to lead in the church or in business one day.
It is a really great narrative based at the beginning, giving you some good stories, primarily set in the business setting, but there’s also some great. [00:01:00] Um, stuff about marriage and things in there, if you’re reading between the lines. Um, but he basically breaks down that there are two types of leaders. There’s a reward centered leader.
There’s a responsibility centered leader. There’s one motivated. To take on leadership as a reward for hard work and having more power, more influence, more attention. And then there’s one that does it to serve employees and the company and to lead and to take the organization in a better direction.
And he says that the five things that a reward centered leader will avoid. Or won’t do because it’s hard and uncomfortable for them are one developing team and leaders managing their direct reports, running effective team meetings, having difficult conversations and communicating consistently with employees.
And no one that I specifically want to focus on today. The one that I felt hit me, the hardest as I was listening to, it was [00:02:00] number four. Having difficult conversations. And I think that this is one of the biggest problems that we have as a society today. And Christians are not immune from this problem. It is infected our circles as well. We are not willing.
To go right to somebody and have a difficult conversation about something. We are willing to talk to two or three people. In adjacent circles or that have a little bit of information about the problem and build a little coalition about our position and get it accepted but we’ll never.
Take responsibility and go right to them and tell them they have an issue. And I think it’s important. To realize that we are not doing that because it’s just something that annoys us, but we’re actually taking the time and looking at it and seeing that, [00:03:00] that behavior or that lack of skill that they’re exhibiting or what they’re doing is actually having a negative effect on the organization, the institution, the team, the group of people that they’re a part of.
And that by. Being in relationship with this person by leading that person, by having authority over them in the business sector, or if it’s your wife, as the husband having being the head of the home and your wife. Being a submissive to you. If there’s an issue that your wife has, and you’re not willing to go and talk to her about it, then.
Things fester dysfunction is amplified. Just like you will get a return on investment interest on money that sits in there over time. Compounding. If you won’t go and have a hard conversation and address sin address, dysfunction address annoyances. That are happening and causing things [00:04:00] to be ineffective of around that particular person.
Then you’re actually allowing dysfunction and annoyances and sin to compound in their life to have a negative effect on the relationships in the organization. And so I would encourage you this week. As a man or a woman, wherever you are in leadership. You’re doing stuff for the church, or you’re a man that said. An elder in the position where, where have you avoided hard conversations? Where have you. Abdicated. And where have you not been willing to go directly to a person and say, I just want to bring this to you brother. This isn’t obviously me knowing all the story. But from the position. I I see that you’re doing this. Whatever those things are, obviously this is not becoming the world police, but this is looking at where am I responsible? Where am I in charge? Where do I have authority and what dysfunction[00:05:00] am I allowing to exist in my organization. And so I, this hit me like a ton of bricks and I immediately put on my big boy pants and went on and had, uh, three or four really difficult conversations. And they all went differently. Some of them. Are going to require more difficult conversations with the person.
Some of them. Immediately we’re reciprocated by some other stuff that I did wrong that I had to own up for. That’s another side of it. Not wanting to bring it up because you’re worried about what they’re going to say about you, because you haven’t really been doing the work. You haven’t been living really the right way. And now when you bring it up, they’re going to attack you over those things that may be legitimate. It may hurt. You may have to acknowledge that you made to be, need to be transparent and admit that you were wrong and that you need to change. And that actually, what the problem was you the whole time, that’s dangerous territory to be in, y’all,
So my admonition to you this week is to do some [00:06:00] soul searching. Maybe get the book it’s a less than three hour. Listen, it’s really quick. I listened to it pretty much straight through. As I was running around, between different jobs this week. And it was incredibly enlightening and emboldened me to take responsibility in some areas that I hadn’t been doing well in N two.
To go right in for the hard conversations and to actually have a little soundtrack that I added. That’s like, I have hard conversations. I have hard conversations. That is part of who I am. I’m willing to go right at problems and in a transparent, bold way. But there’s still been this threshold that I think is in the wrong spot and there’s a giant need for this. To have hard conversations. To open up that box and to get in there and get messy and figure it out and actually emerge on the other side as a more functional.
Individual. Enabling people in your team [00:07:00] and in your circles to be more functional, to achieve more. And specifically as Christians. This is you looking at someone else’s life and saying, how is their behavior? Manifested negatively in the church or the family doing God’s will. How is it? Subtracting from that. How is it sinful? does it need to be put to death in a way that enables. All of us to do a better job at serving the heavenly father our behavior more aligning with the. Character of Jesus Christ and enabling more. Function more productivity, more ability to serve the Lord where we are now to maximum effectiveness. So. Share this with a friend. Go sit down and have coffee with someone this week and have a hard conversation that you’ve been [00:08:00] putting off that you’ve been scared to have because you’ve abdicated your responsibility of this area. Shoot me a message. Let me know how it goes. I don’t want to know specifics.
Just let me know if you experienced the same thing I experienced the last week or so of continually iterative benefit. Your organization becoming more functional your family becoming more functional, more peace sleeping at night, knowing that I didn’t. Cower away from saying something I needed to and just continually every time just.
Developing the ability to say, Hmm. This is going to be hard and just take a breath. Say a quick prayer and then get in there. And have the conversation with love, with respect, but not leaving out a little bit of it, not backing off the gas a little bit, not pulling the punch that needs to be landed in that person’s life for their benefit, for the benefit of everyone, around them, for the collective benefit, going towards Jesus [00:09:00] Christ, serving the mission that we’ve been put here to do.
And not just because it’s. Bothering you and it’s inconveniencing you, but it’s actually affecting the team, the mission, everyone get in there and have those conversations. Let me know how it goes. If you got any value, share it. Uh, let’s, you know, I send out one email this week to a portion of my list that is interested in going to the fatherhood intensive, but it wasn’t quite as hard as I thought it was to draft an email and to fire it off. And it’s actually been fun to see some of the feedback. So if you’re on my greater email list, I don’t have been saying this for a little while, but I’m going to start sitting down and drafting some more content there, go over to my website, spearing.co there’s a sign up in that in the footer that says that you want to join the newsletter. It’ll pop it up. You can put your email in, you can sign up. I just, I’ve really enjoyed using that just the one time that I used it for a small portion of the audience that asks for, um, that kind of stuff.
And I’m going to do more of it. Also check out the show notes. Links for the three [00:10:00] upcoming events that I will be at in the next month, month and a half with me, my family and my son.
I’m going to be speaking at a couple of them. I’ll be attending some. So I’m just going to drop those in the show notes. For you to be all, to check out and sign up and hang out. One of those is as early as a digital conference tomorrow with a Renaissance of men online at the links in the show notes there. And looking forward to seeing you there, seeing you at the traditional fatherhood intesive or the rogue food conference
as always have a good one.
