It was Saturday evening; the second evening of a youth camp at a camp-site called Cedara, just outside Pietermaritzburg, South-Africa. The youth leaders and I were standing around the bon-fire with a few of the teenagers. From the darkness between the bungalows, we could hear the shouts and screams - the results of the Shaving Cream War. It was more than just shaving cream. Eggs, shoe polish, shaving cream, real cream, toothpaste -- if it could make a mess, it was a weapon.
At the beginning of the war there had been two groups, but mistaken targets have caused the desire for revenge to flare, and so it was now pretty much anyone against everyone. Alliances were made and destroyed in minutes. It seemed impossible to end this war, because there was no longer a count of when the revenge truly balanced out the initial attacks. It was now revenge for revenge for revenge. A bit like the Middle East.
The bon-fire was the "place of safety" for those who needed respite, or like myself and most of the other leaders, maybe feeling a bit old for this.
It felt as if God had nothing to say!
We tried to calm the war down, and get all the teenagers around the fire. I spoke a few words of what was on my heart, but really felt my heart empty. I had been spending time earlier, praying, asking God what He wanted to tell these youngsters, but I seemed to find nothing, and so I spoke a few words in general, encouraging them to holiness and a deeper Christian walk - but my words felt powerless.
Wesley led us in a few songs of Praise and Worship, which were great as always, but I couldn't help closing the meeting feeling somewhat as if God had not touched us.
Supper was almost ready. Hungry, and forgetting to be careful, I stepped out of the safety zone, and then it hit me. First a raw egg against the head, then a spray of shaving cream right from the front, forcing me to close my eyes - and then I felt it all come down - shoe polish in my hair, toothpaste being smeared in my ears! I could hear the victorious shouts.
Finally Ashton had been hit. The prime target! There was great celebration as the bell went for supper, and the wars ended.
But God wanted to speak to me!
As the teenagers lined up for dinner, Inba and Lovina called me aside. We normally waited for all the teens to eat first, before we would get our food.
"Ashton, can we talk to you?" Lovina and Inba had come from their bungalows, and it was only as I stepped into the light, that they realized what I looked like. They both burst out laughing, but quickly became more serious as we stepped away from the crowd to a quiet spot beyond earshot of the
others.
"Ashton, we have been praying, and we really believe God wants to do more." Without a moment of delay, I felt my self-defence mechanisms kicking in.
There are few things as threatening to a Christian leader as the implication that he has missed what God wants to be doing. That is, after all, your entire reason for existence - to hear from God and lead accordingly. I suppressed this, and listened. And how glad I was that I did. They went on to tell me what they believe God had told them, and we spent some time praying together. I searched my heart, asked God for wisdom, and I really felt that there was not more that God was going to do that evening. I knew that it was near impossible to calm these teenagers down now. The wars would continue into the early hours of the morning.
Listening to my people, prepared my heart for listening to God
But my heart had been set on alert. My ears were more open than before. And herein really lies the reason for my recounting this. If you are a Christian leader, and some of your people come to you and tell you that you're missing what God is doing, don't go into self-defence mode. Go into self-humbling mode. I learnt the lesson that day, and have found it so precious ever since.
We decided to skip dinner and breakfast, and called on the other leaders to do the same. We invited the teenagers that wanted to join us, to fast these two meals. We were asking God to do something special the next morning. I went to have a shower, spent some time worshipping and praying, and then went to bed.
The next morning, I rose early. The camp was now dead quiet. I went to the hall where we would meet later that morning, and started praying. I practiced some of the worship songs I would use, and prayed that God would move amongst the youngsters. I didn't feel God giving me much of
a message. It was really just an invitation to come to Him.
And there God met with me. It was as if He had been sitting in that hall, all night, just waiting for the day to break, for me to come there, and meet with Him.
Outside, I could hear the camp waking up. I heard the calls for breakfast. The leaders came into the hall one by one, joining me in prayer. After breakfast, some of them went outside, to quieten the teens down before letting them come inside. They sent them in, one by one, through the four doors.
Preparing the Teenagers to listen
I started playing a worship song, and the teenagers started coming in - one at a time through each door, quiet, separated from the pressure of their peers. They seemed to feel God's presence too, because they just remained quiet, and quietly joined in the worship songs that I was playing and
singing. As the numbers increased, the worship became louder, and it felt as if God's presence became stronger and stronger.
Youngsters started weeping. I saw one boy, who had been as hard as stone -- the ultimate cool kid - lying on his face, shaking with sobs.
If it had not been for Lovina and Inba coming to speak to me that evening, I might have just gotten up the next morning and had another normal meeting. Some praise and worship, preach a little - and that's it. Maybe God would have moved, but I seriously doubt that we would have had the impact that God had on those teenagers, that morning.
A Lesson Learnt
God really touched us that morning, and I learnt a lesson. As a leader, it's so easy to be all insecure and over-sensitive about doing the right things, that you can end up doing the wrong things. Listen to your people, even when it threatens, for you never know who God is going to use, to prepare your heart for what He wants to do.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Don't take responsibility before God's timing is right
Ex:2:12: And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was
no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.
Moses seems to have already been carrying the burden in his heart for his
people, but he did not know what to do with it, or how to channel it. So,
he messed up and tried to hide the mess.
Be careful! Don't try to take responsibility for things that are not yet
your responsibility, simply because you already have the burden for it.
no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.
Moses seems to have already been carrying the burden in his heart for his
people, but he did not know what to do with it, or how to channel it. So,
he messed up and tried to hide the mess.
Be careful! Don't try to take responsibility for things that are not yet
your responsibility, simply because you already have the burden for it.
Sunday, 18 January 2009
The importance of a leader, focusing on people
One of my girls in youth was very downcast tonight, and I sort of quickly spoke to her, but I was actually focusing on getting things done for the coffee bar.
Afterwards I realized the importance of not having to worry about the humdrum of keeping things running. If my focus was on being available to minister to my youth, I would have been much more effective tonight.
Extract from Journal 26 September 1999
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Distill those vaguenesses into observable behaviour
The problem with non-observable measurements.
Who was it that said that you can't manage what you can't measure? Darn clever whoever he was.
But it was said a long time ago, and it has become common knowledge. The problem for most managers is no longer that they don't know that they can't manage what they don't measure, but that they can't measure what they can't see.
The most common place where this dilemma faces organisations, is in areas such as values. A value can be as vague as: "We are a warm-hearted organisation."
The problem is not that the organisation does not know that values are really important. They might even have paid a consultant a sizeable sum of money and spent a significant amount of expensive senior management hours in brainstorming and facilitating workshop sessions to define these values. The problem is that it is very difficult to measure the warm-ness of the the hearted-ness of the organisation.
So the challenge they face here is to distil the value into observable behaviour.
The observable behaviour could be called the manifestation of the value. This manifestation might not be the same in various areas of the organisation. So when going through the process of identifying the behaviour that shows the existence of this value within the individuals that make up the organisation, it is advisable that every team goes through this exercise. This would be a better approach than simply prescribing behaviour from the top.
Ownership of Values
Maybe I should pause here for a moment, whilst on the thought of prescribing behaviour.
A value is something which is supposed to be a higher motivator, a higher driving force, than rules and regulations. Most people consider a man who lives true to his values, to be a greater man than one who is held in check merely by the force of rules and regulations. We have expressions to describe people like this: "A person of integrity; his own man; a person of truth; a solid person," and so I can go on.
This then is one of the utopian promises of a "Value Driven Organisation." If every person in a society truly lived values of honesty, respecting another's property and privacy, we would not need elaborate security systems and bookkeeping procedures aimed at preventing fraud.
The more behaviour is driven from within a person, the less there is the need to monitor or control such a person's behaviour through external measures.
The process of communicating the values, allowing employees to think about those values and then come up with their own definitions of the behaviour that would be visible manifestations of those values, goes a long way to making people think about that behaviour. Generally, the people in a certain society have a remarkably similar set of values. Chances are good that you will find that even a set of values forged by the senior leadership of an organisation, would probably resonate with most of the people in the organisation. (Assuming, that said leadership are actually considered men of value in their society. If they are viewed as a bunch of scoundrels or outcasts by most of their society, their values are likely to NOT reflect that of their society.)
Global Differences in Values
Apart from the parenthesised comment in the above paragraph, it probably should be mentioned that this will also not work in the following scenario: If you are in a global organisation, where the bulk of your senior leadership are from one nation or country, and that senior leadership forged the values of the organisation, there is a pretty good chance that some of those values will not find any resonance in some of your offices in other areas of the world. Not only that, but you will also most likely find that what you consider to be an expected set of behaviours manifesting a certain value, might be totally different to what some of your colleagues in another country might consider to be an expected way to live out that same value.
A good example of this last point comes from a little story told to me by a good Chinese friend of mine, to show the difference between the way duty and responsibility was perceived by him as a Chinese, and his perception of the American view of the same values. The tale itself is a bit beyond anything that I could put any sense of realism to, but the illustration did make the point clear.
A situation called for the death of two people. One Chinese and one American. The two people had been selected, and it was explained to both of them that their country needed them to commit suicide.
The American refused, explaining that because he had a wife and family, who needed him, he had to give up the opportunity to go down in history as a an American hero, for the sake of surviving and caring for his family. This, to him, was of greater importance than serving his country.
The Chinese accepted and explained that he could not refuse, explaining that because he had a wife and a family, he could do his family no greater service than to become a national hero. That would be his greatest responsibility, setting such an example for his family. Refusing, would dishonour his family, causing them to live in shame forthwith.
The point of the story is not to try and create an argument about whether or not either of these two are accurate in terms of likelihood, but merely the fact that it is possible that two people, driven by the same value, namely responsibility towards their family, could act in totally opposite ways, when facing exactly the same situation, due to a difference in definition in their values.
Distilling the Vagueness into Measurables
Having said that, let's now return to the concept of turning your vague but important items into measurables.
When you decide that you want to define how to measure a vague goal, such as being warm-hearted, the art of successfully doing this lies in the art of observing human behaviour. There are two ways of doing this. The first, is using your imagination to imagine what you think a warm-hearted person would behave like. The second is, to think of someone that you actually consider to be a role-model of warm-heartedness, and consider their behaviour.
The question you then ask yourself is simply this:
"What does that person do, that makes me think that he is warm-hearted?"
The following are the kind of answers you might come up with, if you were trying to describe "warm heartedness" in a manager or supervisor:
1) He smiles whenever he sees me.
2) He always has time for me.
3) He does not ignore my errors, but gently corrects me, thus helping me improve myself.
Now in this list, there are things that are still vague. What does "he always has time for me?" mean?
You could possibly think about this and realize that it means:
1) He doesn't just say "I'm too busy." If possible, he helps me whenever I approach him. If he does not have time, he takes a moment to schedule time to meet with me when it would suit both of us.
And what does "gently corrects me," mean?
Maybe you will say that it means:
1) He doesn't make any derogatory comments when noticing me making a mistake.
2) He points out the correct way of doing it, with words that encourages my faith in myself that I can do it correctly.
3) He concludes with a word of praise.
You now have a revised list:
1) He smiles whenever he sees me.
2) He either deals with any issues I raise immediately or schedules time to deal with them.
3) He doesn't make derogatory comments when I make a mistake or behave incorrectly.
4) He teaches and encourages correct behaviour, and doesn't ignore incorrect behaviour.
5) He finds good behaviour and praises it.
Now you have a list of things that you can measure.
Use a 360 Degree Review
One of the best ways now to measure this, is using a 360 Degree Review.
You create a short questionnaire and assign scores to every question. Then get peers, superiors and subordinates to rate people based on this questionnaire, and let the person rate himself also.
So your questionnaire could be something like this:
1) Does Joe smile when he sees people?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
2) Does Joe make time to deal with issues brought to him?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
3) Does Joe ignore incorrect behaviour?
Never / Seldom / Mostly / Always / I don't know
4) Does Joe make derogatory comments when he sees wrong behaviour?
Never / Seldom / Mostly / Always / I don't know
5) Does Joe teach and encourage correct behaviour?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
6) Does Joe find and praise correct behaviour?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
You can now simply assign a 1, 2, 3 and 4 to each answer, and consider "I don't know" to be a blank.
Calculate the average score, remembering to simply leave the blanks from your calculation. So if there was one blank, you will divide by 5, and not 6, to get your average.
The maximum score anyone can get is 4, the minimum is 1. in between there somewhere is the target for warm-heartedness that you want to set for your yourself, your team, your department or maybe your organisation.
Now you might say that this will encourage "fake" or hypocritical behaviour. People who actually are totally heartless, are suddenly going to start acting warm hearted, but it's going to be shallow and empty.
Some Answers to Objections
I have two things to say about that.
Firstly, if they can act well enough to make everyone around them believe that they are truly warm-hearted, well, then it probably wouldn't bother anyone. Everyone are likely to believe that they are truly warm-hearted - and they might just, over time, start believing it about themselves.
You cannot change a man's heart. But you can at least get him to behave in a way that reflects your organisation's heart, whilst he is representing your organisation.
Secondly, no-one can really fake it for too long. If someone is really a block of ice, they can only act warm for so long before the cracks will show and their true character will come out. If you are serious about going down the value path, you would do well to also teach your employees about integrity and living true to themselves.
As a Christian, I have watched people go through amazing transformations, having their entire value-systems changed overnight, and I've seen the new values stand the test of time. So if you really want people to change from the inside out, I suggest you start by praying for them.
Then you might also ask whether it is not unfair. Could you penalise someone by measuring their performance on something that they essentially cannot change? For instance, if I am by nature hard-hearted and void of all emotion, is it fair for you to identify this through a set of measures, and penalise me for this? The penalisation could be merely the emotional impact of experiencing failure, or it could even be linked to my career success?
My answer to this is that if your organisational values are right values (and the philosophical debate that could ensue from trying to define "right" is way outside the scope of this article) and your entire organisation subscribes to these values, then the damage that can be done by allowing people to simply trash these values, is potentially as dangerous as allowing an accountant to be negligent in his accounting, a relationship manager to blatantly aggravate customers, or a security officer to leave your IT infra-structure insecure.
The Critical Nature of Values
I am, in fact, of the opinion that it is sometimes easier to repair the damage done by failure in the hard skills - e.g. an accountant submitting an erroneous tax return - than the soft skills - e.g. values. Your values reflect the values of your society. A society will forgive an organisation they like, for making all sorts of mistakes. But if your organisation is forever treading on the toes of their society's values, they will simply walk away from you, and support someone else. You will quietly starve to death.
Who was it that said that you can't manage what you can't measure? Darn clever whoever he was.
But it was said a long time ago, and it has become common knowledge. The problem for most managers is no longer that they don't know that they can't manage what they don't measure, but that they can't measure what they can't see.
The most common place where this dilemma faces organisations, is in areas such as values. A value can be as vague as: "We are a warm-hearted organisation."
The problem is not that the organisation does not know that values are really important. They might even have paid a consultant a sizeable sum of money and spent a significant amount of expensive senior management hours in brainstorming and facilitating workshop sessions to define these values. The problem is that it is very difficult to measure the warm-ness of the the hearted-ness of the organisation.
So the challenge they face here is to distil the value into observable behaviour.
The observable behaviour could be called the manifestation of the value. This manifestation might not be the same in various areas of the organisation. So when going through the process of identifying the behaviour that shows the existence of this value within the individuals that make up the organisation, it is advisable that every team goes through this exercise. This would be a better approach than simply prescribing behaviour from the top.
Ownership of Values
Maybe I should pause here for a moment, whilst on the thought of prescribing behaviour.
A value is something which is supposed to be a higher motivator, a higher driving force, than rules and regulations. Most people consider a man who lives true to his values, to be a greater man than one who is held in check merely by the force of rules and regulations. We have expressions to describe people like this: "A person of integrity; his own man; a person of truth; a solid person," and so I can go on.
This then is one of the utopian promises of a "Value Driven Organisation." If every person in a society truly lived values of honesty, respecting another's property and privacy, we would not need elaborate security systems and bookkeeping procedures aimed at preventing fraud.
The more behaviour is driven from within a person, the less there is the need to monitor or control such a person's behaviour through external measures.
The process of communicating the values, allowing employees to think about those values and then come up with their own definitions of the behaviour that would be visible manifestations of those values, goes a long way to making people think about that behaviour. Generally, the people in a certain society have a remarkably similar set of values. Chances are good that you will find that even a set of values forged by the senior leadership of an organisation, would probably resonate with most of the people in the organisation. (Assuming, that said leadership are actually considered men of value in their society. If they are viewed as a bunch of scoundrels or outcasts by most of their society, their values are likely to NOT reflect that of their society.)
Global Differences in Values
Apart from the parenthesised comment in the above paragraph, it probably should be mentioned that this will also not work in the following scenario: If you are in a global organisation, where the bulk of your senior leadership are from one nation or country, and that senior leadership forged the values of the organisation, there is a pretty good chance that some of those values will not find any resonance in some of your offices in other areas of the world. Not only that, but you will also most likely find that what you consider to be an expected set of behaviours manifesting a certain value, might be totally different to what some of your colleagues in another country might consider to be an expected way to live out that same value.
A good example of this last point comes from a little story told to me by a good Chinese friend of mine, to show the difference between the way duty and responsibility was perceived by him as a Chinese, and his perception of the American view of the same values. The tale itself is a bit beyond anything that I could put any sense of realism to, but the illustration did make the point clear.
A situation called for the death of two people. One Chinese and one American. The two people had been selected, and it was explained to both of them that their country needed them to commit suicide.
The American refused, explaining that because he had a wife and family, who needed him, he had to give up the opportunity to go down in history as a an American hero, for the sake of surviving and caring for his family. This, to him, was of greater importance than serving his country.
The Chinese accepted and explained that he could not refuse, explaining that because he had a wife and a family, he could do his family no greater service than to become a national hero. That would be his greatest responsibility, setting such an example for his family. Refusing, would dishonour his family, causing them to live in shame forthwith.
The point of the story is not to try and create an argument about whether or not either of these two are accurate in terms of likelihood, but merely the fact that it is possible that two people, driven by the same value, namely responsibility towards their family, could act in totally opposite ways, when facing exactly the same situation, due to a difference in definition in their values.
Distilling the Vagueness into Measurables
Having said that, let's now return to the concept of turning your vague but important items into measurables.
When you decide that you want to define how to measure a vague goal, such as being warm-hearted, the art of successfully doing this lies in the art of observing human behaviour. There are two ways of doing this. The first, is using your imagination to imagine what you think a warm-hearted person would behave like. The second is, to think of someone that you actually consider to be a role-model of warm-heartedness, and consider their behaviour.
The question you then ask yourself is simply this:
"What does that person do, that makes me think that he is warm-hearted?"
The following are the kind of answers you might come up with, if you were trying to describe "warm heartedness" in a manager or supervisor:
1) He smiles whenever he sees me.
2) He always has time for me.
3) He does not ignore my errors, but gently corrects me, thus helping me improve myself.
Now in this list, there are things that are still vague. What does "he always has time for me?" mean?
You could possibly think about this and realize that it means:
1) He doesn't just say "I'm too busy." If possible, he helps me whenever I approach him. If he does not have time, he takes a moment to schedule time to meet with me when it would suit both of us.
And what does "gently corrects me," mean?
Maybe you will say that it means:
1) He doesn't make any derogatory comments when noticing me making a mistake.
2) He points out the correct way of doing it, with words that encourages my faith in myself that I can do it correctly.
3) He concludes with a word of praise.
You now have a revised list:
1) He smiles whenever he sees me.
2) He either deals with any issues I raise immediately or schedules time to deal with them.
3) He doesn't make derogatory comments when I make a mistake or behave incorrectly.
4) He teaches and encourages correct behaviour, and doesn't ignore incorrect behaviour.
5) He finds good behaviour and praises it.
Now you have a list of things that you can measure.
Use a 360 Degree Review
One of the best ways now to measure this, is using a 360 Degree Review.
You create a short questionnaire and assign scores to every question. Then get peers, superiors and subordinates to rate people based on this questionnaire, and let the person rate himself also.
So your questionnaire could be something like this:
1) Does Joe smile when he sees people?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
2) Does Joe make time to deal with issues brought to him?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
3) Does Joe ignore incorrect behaviour?
Never / Seldom / Mostly / Always / I don't know
4) Does Joe make derogatory comments when he sees wrong behaviour?
Never / Seldom / Mostly / Always / I don't know
5) Does Joe teach and encourage correct behaviour?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
6) Does Joe find and praise correct behaviour?
Always / Mostly / Seldom / Never / I don't know
You can now simply assign a 1, 2, 3 and 4 to each answer, and consider "I don't know" to be a blank.
Calculate the average score, remembering to simply leave the blanks from your calculation. So if there was one blank, you will divide by 5, and not 6, to get your average.
The maximum score anyone can get is 4, the minimum is 1. in between there somewhere is the target for warm-heartedness that you want to set for your yourself, your team, your department or maybe your organisation.
Now you might say that this will encourage "fake" or hypocritical behaviour. People who actually are totally heartless, are suddenly going to start acting warm hearted, but it's going to be shallow and empty.
Some Answers to Objections
I have two things to say about that.
Firstly, if they can act well enough to make everyone around them believe that they are truly warm-hearted, well, then it probably wouldn't bother anyone. Everyone are likely to believe that they are truly warm-hearted - and they might just, over time, start believing it about themselves.
You cannot change a man's heart. But you can at least get him to behave in a way that reflects your organisation's heart, whilst he is representing your organisation.
Secondly, no-one can really fake it for too long. If someone is really a block of ice, they can only act warm for so long before the cracks will show and their true character will come out. If you are serious about going down the value path, you would do well to also teach your employees about integrity and living true to themselves.
As a Christian, I have watched people go through amazing transformations, having their entire value-systems changed overnight, and I've seen the new values stand the test of time. So if you really want people to change from the inside out, I suggest you start by praying for them.
Then you might also ask whether it is not unfair. Could you penalise someone by measuring their performance on something that they essentially cannot change? For instance, if I am by nature hard-hearted and void of all emotion, is it fair for you to identify this through a set of measures, and penalise me for this? The penalisation could be merely the emotional impact of experiencing failure, or it could even be linked to my career success?
My answer to this is that if your organisational values are right values (and the philosophical debate that could ensue from trying to define "right" is way outside the scope of this article) and your entire organisation subscribes to these values, then the damage that can be done by allowing people to simply trash these values, is potentially as dangerous as allowing an accountant to be negligent in his accounting, a relationship manager to blatantly aggravate customers, or a security officer to leave your IT infra-structure insecure.
The Critical Nature of Values
I am, in fact, of the opinion that it is sometimes easier to repair the damage done by failure in the hard skills - e.g. an accountant submitting an erroneous tax return - than the soft skills - e.g. values. Your values reflect the values of your society. A society will forgive an organisation they like, for making all sorts of mistakes. But if your organisation is forever treading on the toes of their society's values, they will simply walk away from you, and support someone else. You will quietly starve to death.
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