About a year and a half ago I was the spear head of a new
ministry launch at my church. Energy
started off very high and people were excited with what we were about to
partake in. In fact, at one point I had
more people willing to help and support than we had a need for. Clearly the initial launch was an out of the
ballpark success. I was feeling great
about the direction of this new initiative.
I remember heading home and thinking to myself in the car, “People are
bought into the mission!”
Several months later I was in a completely different
spot. I was feeling stressed out, tired,
and over stretched. I had made a big
leadership mistake. There were so many
people willing to help, however, I wasn’t willing to delegate responsibilities of
this new ministry to them. In a short
time I was overwhelmed with other aspects of my position and was unable to
focus on the new ministry. People were truly
bought into what we were doing, but as a leader I hadn’t encouraged or given opportunities
for people to use their talents, resources, and time to advance this area of
ministry. Something had to change…
I remember sitting down one night to write down all the
things that I had to take care of in a day.
The sad results of this showed that at the time this new ministry wasn’t
on the list. I realized that NO ONE WAS
WAKING UP THINKING ABOUT IT. Quickly I
pulled together different members of the team and asked what areas they were
willing to work with and even take over.
To my surprise people were ready and willing to take over different
aspects of the ministry. At this point
things turned around, at this point there were people waking up thinking about
the ministry.
Realizing this concept has changed the way I lead. Recently I was working with a group of
teachers on a school wide behavior program.
We had a full afternoon to brainstorm and create new ways to improve school
wide behavior. The afternoon was filled
with fantastic new ideas and modifications that we could implement at our
school. However, there was one problem. We had all these ideas written down and that
was it. If we would have left it at that
I guarantee that we all would have woke up the next morning and went on with
our normal way of doing business, but we didn’t end it at that. With about 20 minutes left in the meeting we
went through the “Who is going to wake up thinking about this” exercise. Using our notes we read off ideas and people
volunteered to take ownership of it and see it through to completion. In the end there were several good ideas that
we simply didn’t have the time or energy to tackle at this point, and this was okay
because we knew that the things taken ownership of will be achieved.
Using the “Who is going to wake up thinking about this”
exercise has been a game changer in my leadership experience. It takes us from a place of cool ideas and
thoughts to a place of reality and results.
So I encourage you in all aspects of life (your work, church, or family)
to ask yourself, who is waking up thinking about this?
