Span of Care by Mac Lake

Mac Lake is the Leadership Development Pastor at Seacoast Church.

I've appreciated his blog and will no doubt be posting a lot of his material here but i thought i'd start with this little video teaching he did on what he called span of care - which is essentially an attempt to address the questions, "just how many people should one leader be overseeing?"

would love your thoughts.


What Is A Good Span Of Care For Leaders? from Seacoast Church on Vimeo.

Empowering Leadership

We've been talking a lot the language of Empowering at our church lately. We know we cannot continue the way we have been but we are struggling with what empowering leadership will look like in our setting.

Though we might not be willing to admit it I suspect that many around us are skeptical as to whether anything will get done in an environment of empowering leadership when what we are used to may look more akin to hierarchical or control based leadership.

Ron Edmondson has been writing on this lately so i wanted to share with you his list, not on how to define Empowering leadership, but on how not to define empowering leadership.

Read his whole post here

Here are 10 reasons you may want to reconsider calling yourself an empowering leader:
Your number one answer is “NO”.
You have to personally approve every decision and control every outcome.
Everyone on your team works “for you” and not “with you”.
You use the word “I” more than the word “we”.
Your idea of delegation is telling people what to do, when and how to do it.
You say “Do this” far more than you ask “What should we do?”.
Nothing happens in your organization without your knowledge.
You consistently reverse the decisions of the team.
You control information because information is power.
You crush people when they make a mistake.

I'm going to be spending time over the next few weeks thinking about what empowering leadership means.

I'd love your thoughts.

A second look at an unknown commodity

Through twitter i stumbled on the Harvard Business Review. Not sure why it hasn't been on my reading list in the past, but it is now.

Today i read an article about "confirmation bias" which is the human predisposition to look for ways it is right. In other words, I am always looking for the evidence that i'm right and i don't seem to see the evidence when i'm wrong.

The article was talking about how expectations affect behaviour and outlook.

It got me thinking about all of the teams that need to be built and invested in around the church that I work at.

I've only been here for 3 or 4 months but i'm already subconsciously putting people into categories with regards to what I can expect from them.

I should also tell you that already, there have been a number of occasions when someone has approached me and demonstrated capacities and aspirations that far exceeded what I had expected or more truthfully predicted.

I'm not embarrassed to say that I make predictions about people. We all do. All of our experience in leadership and teams, added to our history, however brief, with people shapes our predictions as to how people will perform in a given area.

But all of our experience in leadership and history with people can also negatively skew our expectations as well.

I'm going to work more on inspiring aspiration and developing people instead of simply predicting outcomes.

Predictions will no doubt take us down a shorter road, and we can expect to see all sorts of signage confirming our choice of paths but I can't help but wonder where that other road might lead.