The Sixth Sense

Connecting with students

I’ve been working over the weekend on an idea for connecting with students in Sheffield. There are over 50,000 students at the two main universities and it is definitely a group of people we want to serve and impact.

We are looking to create some movement around two different areas really:

1. Gallup StrengthsFinder
2. Vox Sheffield

We really want to get the Gallup StrengthsFinder tool out to as many students as possible. It is such a helpful tool for understanding ourselves better and figuring out how we can play to our strengths.

And with Vox Sheffield, we’d love to create a student stream to this. Vox Sheffield is a movement we have set up to showcase creativity in Sheffield and work together to create a better world.

Our intention is to try and connect with 10 to 12 key students who we’ll invest in with a view to them becoming the catalysts that make this idea a reality.

I am confident about every stage of this apart from the first really. And that is the key to it all: connecting with the right students to lead this. We don’t really have many natural links into the universities at this stage and so I’m looking to come up with creative ways to try and attract the right kind of people.

Should be fun!

Inclusive vs. Exclusive

Yesterday I got an exclusive invitation to be part of an online tribe at www.triiibes.com. It’s tied in with something Seth Godin is heading up linked with his forthcoming book entitled ‘Tribes: We need you to lead us‘.

This got me thinking about organisations that are inclusive and others that are more exclusive. I guess, to be fair, I’ve veered towards being anti anything exclusive.

This stems from my frustration with churches in particular which seem to take pleasure in keeping people out rather than welcoming them in. Not all churches, but more more than it should be.

Tied in with this, as Mosaic here in Sheffield, we have often talked about the need to be an inclusive community. We don’t want to exclude people. We want to be welcoming, no matter who the person is.

But then yesterday, a big part of the draw to accept this invitation to www.triiibes.com was the very fact that is was exclusive. That was a big part of its appeal. In fact, if it was just an open group, I’m not sure that I’d of been that bothered about it.

What does this tell us though? Does the very nature of the role and function of a church or charitable organisation make this a totally different issue than for businesses? Or is the same?

Is exclusive always bad? Could charities and faith based organisations leverage exclusivity to attract proactive, highly involved people to work them? 

I’m still trying to get my head around this. What do you think?

A great time in London

I’m on the train back from London now. Quite a bit of travelling in one day, but well worth it.

It was great spending time with Ellie, Gabriel, and Rhiannon who are really keen to start something to serve humanity in London.

I love spending time with passionate people who want to DO something and not just talk about. They are all very different but I could definitely see the start of a great team.

Exciting stuff!

On route to London

I’m on the train as I write this heading down to London. I will be spending several hours with some great guys looking to pioneer some innovative ways of serving humanity, fostering community, and generally change the world.

It’ll be great to serve these guys and see what they start to create. I’ll keep you all posted with the developments.

Hancock (lessons in character)

We went to see the Will Smith movie ‘Hancock’ last night. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t a great movie, but was definitely entertaining.

It was interesting from a character perspective. We did a series called ‘Heroes’ last year at Mosaic and one of the things we covered then was that we all have super-hero potential. The problem however is often not a lack of talent in our lives which stops us becoming great, but a lack of character.

Seeing the transformation of Hancock’s character and the resulting change in how he used his super-powers was fun to watch and something relevant for us all in different ways.

So yeah, not a must-see movie. But if you have a free evening, then it’s worth watching.

Anyone else seen it?

I’m back

Well after a fun and relaxing week in Orlando, Florida, we are back. It was so good to be away having a proper break. Whilst we’ve done quite a bit of traveling this year, very little has been of the holiday variety.

I enjoyed having time to devour books without feeling like I should be doing something else! One book I picked up over the the States was ‘Screw it, Let’s do it‘ by Richard Branson. I read it on the flight home and loved it. I love his entrepreneurial, non risk-averse approach to life and business.

I found myself being stirred up to not settle for where I am, to keep stretching forward, and to not give up on ideas or hold back because something appears not to be possible or hasn’t been attempted before.

I thought it was funny that that Richard Branson is known as Dr Yes within Virgin circles! I love that.

I also really enjoyed Erwin McManus’s new book called ‘Wide Awake’. I particularly enjoyed the second half of the book and, specifically, a great chapter on focus. It was great because I resonated with Erwin as someone who, like me, struggles with the whole focus thing!

Ok, that’s it for now. I’ll catch up more during the week.

Humble and Ferocious

It is probably fair to say that I spent far too long in front of the television yesterday. Yes, I got totally caught up in the Federer vs. Nadal Wimbledon tennis final. I don’t think I missed a single point!

It felt like a real privilege actually. It was the best game of tennis I have ever seen. And it seems like I’m not the only one. Pretty much everyone is hailing it as the greatest game of tennis that has ever been played.

One of the things I love about Federer and Nadal is that they are both amazing tennis champions. They are both in a class of their own. No one else can get near them. And yet, they are two of the must humble, genuine guys around as well. Neither of them has a trace of arrogance.

I was reading how after Nadal thrashed Federer in the French Open, he deliberately waited to go into the locker room to give space to Federer who he knew would really be feeling down. And, just this morning, Nadal got onto a plane to Stuttgart to apologise in person for having to pull out of their tournament this week due to a knee injury. Not only that, after winning the Queen’s tennis tournament a few weeks ago he flew home via an Easy Jet flight - Europe’s low cost, budget airline.

Nadal in particular seems to combine real ferocity on the tennis court that is fueled by absolute humility. So many sports stars are undermined by arrogance. And arrogance is such an ugly quality. I love it that both Federer and Nadal show us that you don’t need to be a horrible, arrogant person to make it to the top. In fact, I would argue that their humility is perhaps the reason they are so consistently at the top of world tennis year after year.

It may not be a quality that is massively valued, but I’m convinced that one of the keys to lasting success - individually or as an organisation - is humility.

What do you think?

Staying people AND performance focussed

It doesn’t matter what type of organisation it is, finding the balance between being people focussed and performance focussed is a challenge. And obviously the two are completely linked. 

If people are not valued and engaged then the performance of the organisation is going to suffer. And yet, if we become so people focussed that we stop challenging, setting goals, and raising standards, then the performance will also drop.

Of course, if the entire focus is on endlessly improving the performance, then we are going to end up losing people and leaving them behind. Then we are left without the very people who are essential to the performance of the organisation.

So the question we need to grapple with is: how do we keep a healthy balance between focussing on people and focussing on performance?

To propose an answer, here is a paragraph from an article in the Harvard Business Review on this subject. After studying lots of different CEO’s handing the balance between people and performance, the ones who did it best did so my combining four strategies:

“First, they earned the trust of their organizations through their openness to the unvarnished truth. Second, they were deeply engaged with their people, and their exchanges were direct and personal; employees in the companies we studied had a particularly close connection with the CEO and were seldom surprised to meet him or her. Third, having earned legitimacy and trust, these CEOs were able to mobilize their people around a focused agenda. Finally, while they were all strong individuals, these senior leaders realized that they could succeed only as part of a committed leadership team, and they devoted considerable efforts to building their firm’s collective leadership capabilities.” (Emphasis mine)

What do you think?

Implementing change

The world we live in is constantly changing. As a result, the businesses, organisations, churches, etc, we are part of also need to be constantly changing. This is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue as the speed of change continues to increase.

This begs the question of how do we go about building flexible and adaptable organisations that are able to change in order to stay relevant to the changing world outside.

I was reading a great article in the Harvard Business Review entitled: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (subscription required for full article). The article by John Kotter lists eight reasons for failing to implement change. I’ll mention just the first one today: Transformation efforts fail because of a failure to establish a great enough sense of urgency.

The article then quotes someone who said the purpose of establishing a sense of urgency is “to make the status quo seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown.”

This really makes sense. If people don’t sense how important it is for the change to occur, why would anyone be motivated to get onboard?

Have you had experiences of trying to implement change in a team you lead or an organisation you’re part of? How was it? What did you learn?

Bringing out the best in people

Whether we are a leader, a manager, a parent, or any other role where we are responsible for influencing others, we all have the challenge of trying to bring out the best in people. How do we do this though?

Clearly everyone is going to have their own unique approach but, at the same time, there must be some good practices that run true for everyone.

And clearly the person we are trying to bring the best out of is going to affect our approach too. How we handle the passionate but clueless person is going to be very different from how we handle the knowledgeable but apathetic person.

So, linked with this, I wanted to try and start a conversation today and invite as many of us as possible to share our stories of both success and failure in our efforts to bring out the best in people.

Feel free to use this as an opportunity to raise questions and struggles too. I certainly have a ton of questions and I have lots to learn. Hopefully this can be a mutually beneficial process for us all!

What do you think?