Wildwood 75th Anniversary Celebration

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Wildwood Lifestyle Center

Leadership in Ministry

Steven Grabiner

1. Leadership Foundations

Father in heaven, we thank you for this opportunity to be together and to discuss leadership.

We pray that your presence would be with us, give us your wisdom and guidance.

And we thank you so much in Jesus name, amen.

Okay, well, today we're gonna be talking about leadership foundations, actually leadership in ministry is our title for our entire day, thank you so much.

And this morning, I'd like to talk about leadership foundations, And just to introduce, let me talk to you a little bit about OCI, which is the organization I work for.

Some of you know about it, but it's a organization that supports supporting ministries, that nurtures supporting ministries.

We have 120 members in 44 different countries.

And as Michelle said earlier, I sit on a lot of different boards, more boards than I would care to count, actually.

And being on those boards has given me a lot of windows into different leadership situations.

Some of those leadership situations have been good.

And so what I'd like to try to do in our time together today, both this morning and this afternoon, is share some lessons that I've learned in relation to leadership.

But since we have such an intimate group this morning, I'd also like to make this very practical for you.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of go through a number of issues this morning, and then I'd like to get some questions from you.

There may be issues in leadership that you particularly want to discuss.

So for example, this morning, our first thing, I was talking about leadership foundations, what is the foundation for good leadership, which really is a knowledge of self.

There's a lot of leadership books out there, a huge number of leadership books, especially recently.

You could drown by surfing the internet on leadership things, but it's a very booming business, and there's a great need for it, as we'll see momentarily.

But a lot of the leadership presentations focus on how to do certain things.

There's a practical aspect of leadership.

But I really wanna start our presentation not focusing on how to do certain things, but on how to be a leader.

The personal qualities of leadership, which I think are really essential.

I've called this slide the American Leadership Crisis.

And whatever your political stance might be, it's okay with me, but it's really clear that both presidential candidates are disliked by the vast majority of people in America or not trusted by them.

Now that's an amazing situation where both candidates have these very low approval ratings.

Now if you think back to the founding of our country, I'm reading an autobiography, not an autobiography, a biography on Thomas Jefferson right now, and if you think back to the founding of our country, There was about 3000000 people in the United States at that time, 3000000 Europeans not counting Native Americans.

And yet think of the number of world-class leaders that arose at that time.

Okay, so you have individuals again like Thomas Jefferson, like Benjamin Franklin, we may not agree with their morality of their life, but to be able to think of how to create an entire government, James Madison, John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Monroe, just numerous individuals that you could just kind of rattle off there out of a population of 3000000.

So give me the top 10 leaders in the United States right now that you really respect and think have real leadership skills.

We could have a conversation about that, but all right.

But really there's very few, out of a country of 300 million, there's very few really what we would call world-class leaders.

And so not only is there a leadership crisis in the United States, but let's think momentarily about England, the recent Brexit vote, where David Cameron, who was the Prime Minister, said, okay, well, let's do this vote, and he really did it as a political ploy to squelch the opposition, not thinking that it would pass.

And then the opposition leader, Johnson, was like, yeah, yeah, let's do this, let's do this.

And then he's like, oh no, man, what am I gonna do?

So, you know, the whole history of the country, and it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds with Great Britain, but again, you know, where are the world-class leaders?

And then we can just think of our local church levels, or, you know, a handful of good pastors, or good conference administration.

There's really a dearth of leadership and it's important for us to think through, welcome, to think through what would help this, help remedy this issue of a lack of good leadership.

So, here's a definition of leadership which I like except for 1 thing.

Notice here's a leadership definition, and there's lots of them around here, but this is kind of helpful.

It says a leader knows what to do, knows why that's important, and knows how to gather resources to accomplish the task.

And so that brings a lot of components together.

They know what to do, why it's important, and then how to gather the resources, which would clearly be the team, the people, the finances, whatever's necessary to accomplish the task.

And so this is an important component or an important aspect of leadership.

I use this definition a lot, but there's something missing out of this definition.

Yeah, the spiritual or the ethical or the moral component of leadership.

I use an acronym in a lot of my leadership classes called ACE, from the idea of a flying pilot ace or somebody that's really good at something.

To talk about 3 aspects of leadership, there's the aspirations, that would be the vision, the leader knows what to do.

Then there's the competency, that would be the C under this acronym ACE.

So there's aspiration, vision, goal, direction, but then there's the competency, there's the skill set that's necessary.

And most leadership talks really focus on these 2 things, the aspirations and the competencies.

But there's an ethical or moral or spiritual dimension of leadership.

So for example, we could take this definition, knows what to do, why it's important, and how to gather the resources, and we could apply that to, we could apply that to say, Adolf Hitler, for example, or Idi Amin, or your least favorite political character, anybody that, you know, knowing what to do, why it's important for them at least, and then how to accomplish it.

But it's important for us as Christians, as Seventh-day Adventist Christians, as Seventh-day Adventist Christians living at the end of time, that we don't lose the ethical component of leadership.

And that's really what I wanna drill down on as our leadership foundation for this first section this morning is this important aspect here.

And so again, in our first section, we're gonna be talking not so much on how to do certain things, but on how to be the leader.

If you have any questions, feel free to raise your hand.

I like to canoe and kayak, different things.

In fact, my family, my daughter and myself and her husband just took a seven-day trip in the Alaskan wilderness where it was totally fantastic, and we were paddling.

And so this is a little different chart, you know, it shows depth of water and it's got currents on it, it would be for a larger craft than a canoe or a kayak.

But if you were using this chart to navigate, what would be the most important thing to know about it?

Okay, landmarks, how to understand what the landmarks are, very important.

The most important thing is where you are on this.

Because if you are over here and you think you're over there you're gonna be making decisions that are inaccurate about the depth and your landmarks and everything else.

Now, your landmarks might help you know where you are.

But the most important thing is where are you.

So if you're out at sea, you want to know where you are so that you would avoid any dangers to your ship, any submerged rocks or anything like that.

So it's also very important for us as leaders to know where we are in our leadership growth.

That's really the most important thing, is knowing where we are.

2. Working With Boards

Gracious Father, thank you again for caring about us, caring about the organizations we work with, and desiring to make us better leaders, better workers, better coworkers with you above all.

So in the first section in this track, Leadership in Ministry, we talked about leader foundations.

And what I'd like to do now is talk about boards and decisions.

And I'm gonna kind of pick up some of the conversations that we had earlier.

And truth of the matter is, I don't know if this program is still on television.

I'm out of the loop on things, but there used to be a program called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

The idea developed was that they would ask you questions and if you answer the questions right, you would continue to win money.

What was really intriguing was You could call to a friend if you needed help on some of the questions, or you could also ask the audience.

Now what's intriguing here is that if you, in the United States, you ask the audience for the answer to the question, the audience was right over 90% of the time.

So, you know, they would get an aggregate of what the answer was, and the answer was right over 90% of the time.

So that's really amazing, but it points out to me the power of teams, the power of teams.

And a good leader realizes the value of a good team.

And in our previous session, we were talking a little bit about how to develop that good team, what are some of the aspects about the team, work, et cetera.

If you played this game in France, The answer was wrong the majority of the time.

And some of the answers were like patently obvious.

So it was really hard to think that the audience didn't know the answer, but researchers were concluding that the audience intentionally misled the contestant.

Now, that's a whole interesting dynamic into French society, which you could study later.

But in the United States, at least, if you had a good team, it would work well.

Some of the researchers thought that the French felt the person should know the answer, and if they were dumb enough not to know the answer, they weren't going to help them.

Earlier as well, we talked about the value of being able to confront a leader.

We had a couple of examples where perhaps you're in a constituency meeting, how difficult it is to say something, or if you're in a board meeting, or you're in the presence of a very strong leader.

We talked about elder Frizee and the difficulties of sometimes going against an individual like that who has a long history and is well respected, almost venerated.

And so I want to talk about an illustration here, an example that highlights the importance of a leader creating a comfortable atmosphere in which people can raise objections, is what I want to say.

In, back in the 1980s I think it was, there was a flight, KLM flight 4805, And this flight was headed to Tenerife, little island in the Pacific, and yet he got diverted, excuse me.

He was supposed to land in Los Palmos in the Canary Islands, but he was diverted to Tenerife.

The reason was on Los Palmos in the Canary Islands, but he was diverted to Tenerife.

The reason was, on Los Palmos in the Canary Islands, there was some kind of like a terrorist activity.

And so the island shut down, they didn't want the plane to go there, and so the plane landed at Tenerife.

Now, Tenerife was a much smaller island, and wasn't really equipped for these jumbo jets to land there.

It wasn't just this KLM flight that landed there, there was a Pan Am flight, and several other flights landed there as well.

First of all, there's no lodging for the passengers.

The runways really aren't equipped for these larger airplanes.

To make matters worse, a fog settled in on the island.

And the head of the, or the pilot rather, of the KLM flight, a gentleman by the name of Jacob Van Zenten was the head pilot of the KLM flight.

Van Zenten was the individual who was responsible for all of KLM's safety instruction.

He had written a manual on safety, he instructed all the other pilots on safety, He was an expert on safety.

He's there, his co-pilot is there, fog descends, and they're sitting there, they're waiting, they're waiting, and they're waiting, and hours pass by.

He knows that they only have a certain time window with which they can take off, or they have to get off the airplane.

And if they get off the airplane, then all these people are stranded on this island because there's no other replacement crew.

And so he's thinking in his mind, what are we going to do?

Why did they have to get out of the plane?

Because they can only be on active duty for a certain length of time.

And they were approaching the limit of time they could be in the plane.

Pilots, just like truckers, have only a certain limit where they could be on active duty.

And he knows this, and so he's worried about this.

And so he gets the idea, you know what we're gonna do?

We're gonna get out of our queue, get out of the line, and we're gonna go refuel.

That'll save us time when he gets to Tenerife and then he can maybe make it back to Amsterdam, which was his ultimate goal.

So he gets out of queue and starts fueling his airplane, the KALIM airplane, and as he does, you know, the fog begins to lift, everything gets clear, and so now everybody's like, okay, we need to get going.

So now he's lost his place in line, he gets back in line, and he's got this whole anxiety.

Fog comes back down on the island, And he is on the runway, and he's communicating to the tower, we are ready to take off.

And the tower responded in a certain way, and he says we're ready for takeoff.

Tower responded, and then his co-pilot says, I don't think we have clearance for takeoff.

And he ignored the co-pilot and he made another communication to the tower and the co-pilot again said, I don't believe we have clearance for takeoff.

And as he's barreling down the runway, there's a Pan Am flight, which is crossing the runway trying to get out of the way.

As inspectors went back to try to look at this disaster, here you have the best, safest pilot in KLM.

Wrote the book, gave instruction, but he made a tragic mistake.

You could say, well, you know, he really wanted to get the people to Tenerife.

There were all sorts of these pressures on him, but the biggest single flaw that was discovered was the inability of the co-pilot to say, we are not taking off.

In those days the working relationship between the pilot and co-pilot was much more hierarchical than it is today.

They've actually changed laws based on this disaster where co-pilots have more authority than they did in those days.

You could hear the co-pilot timidly saying, I don't think we have clearance.

Rather than saying, we don't have clearance.

And it was this dynamic that brought about this disaster.

Now, the lesson clearly is leaders need to create and foster an environment in which people are not afraid to say to them, I think this is wrong, and say it in such a way that they listen.

In our earlier presentation, I told you about a situation in which there was a leader who needed to be removed, and I had invested a lot of personal energy, time, and friendship into this leader, and I was blinded to the fact that he needed to be removed.

I hoped that we could work out the situation where he could stay.

After it happened, I talked to some of the other board members, who are also friends of mine, And I said to them, now this is in a different country, so there's all sorts of cultural dynamics.

And I said to them, why didn't you tell me?

And they said, well, we tried to tell you.

And then they told me when they tried to tell me.

3. Leading Change

Father in heaven, thank you for the opportunity to come together once more time.

Thank you for the blessing of our meal and our day.

And we just ask your blessing on Wildwood.

75 years, we pray that you'd continue to bless the ministry here.

So we've been doing in this session leadership in ministry and earlier this morning we talked about the personal aspect of leadership and things that leaders need to know about themselves, that self-knowledge is 1 of the greatest foundations for leaders.

And then we started talking about boards, and I said this afternoon we're going to talk about change.

So we are going to talk about change, but before we do it, I just wanted to go back to the conversation on boards momentarily.

This diagram looks like a diamond or a gem of some kind, and there's an organization that uses the acronym GEM as a way to think about board governance.

I think their website is STRIVE, I'm not really, I don't remember exactly.

So, but there are different aspects, just like on the GEM has different facets of it.

And all of these relate back to key areas of board governance.

So for example, we talked about earlier, it's the key part of the board to direct the organization.

That is, it's a key part of the board to lay out the vision and the mission of the board and clarify the values.

So there's directing there, but then also the board wants to protect the assets of the board, the assets of the organization, the name of the organization in terms of its credibility.

So directing and protecting, giving guidance and then putting things in place that direct.

This would be underneath like organizational performance.

We talked also about how it's the job of the board to select the right leadership.

That's a very key task of a good functioning board.

How does the board want to relate to the management?

And as we talked about earlier, if we have a governance model of a board working, then it would be inappropriate for a particular board member to jump over the president and begin to meddle or demand from his staff.

Expectations both on how the board's going to relate to the management and then again expectations on how the board is going to relate to itself, how the board is going to evaluate itself, what would be some of the responsibilities there.

So direct, protect, select, expect, and then another function of board is the board connecting with other entities.

How does the board connect both internally, how do the board members connect with 1 another, but how does the board itself connect with other organizations?

For example, at OCI, it's part of our strategic plan that the board has directed the administration to make intentional connections with other significant organizations like ASI and ESA, EA Sutherland Educational Authority, division presidents.

That's part of our strategic plan that we would intentionally connect with these other entities.

That is the thinking of are we attaining the results that we want?

Have we made clear what we would like to see for the board, for the administration rather, to accomplish?

This really is, again, 1 of those areas where, from my view, as sitting on a lot of boards, supporting ministries are weak, where they don't do very well in saying, this is what we'd like to see next year, and then coming back and getting reporting and reflecting on what has been accomplished.

I'm happy to say that the OCI board is moving in that direction lately, that There's a lot of engagement in our strategic plan by the board members.

Over the past X number of years, OCI actually, in addition to donations that came to OCI for other ministries, which is the predominant way it comes, OCI itself gave away around $4 million to different ministries at different times.

That resulted in a situation where OCI was in a very weak financial position.

We really, at 1 point, we had about $100, 000 left in the bank and that was it.

And so it created a little bit of crisis, at least from my point of view.

And we laid out this plan to try to make OCI self-sustaining, self-supporting.

And so we came up with the idea of buying apartments and having these apartments and then renting them out and creating income from it.

And so it's been a process, and the process is continuing.

We're about, I think at the end of this year, we will be about half to 3 quarters of the way to funding our entire budget through our rental properties.

And in this time, we have kind of put a moratorium on giving money away.

What's really encouraging to me is when somebody comes and they ask for money and I want to give it to them, I go to my executive committee, we go to the board, and the board's like, no, we're not doing that, remember?

We just contributed $100, 000 to buy a property in Israel to start a new ministry.

So It's not an entire don't do anything, but it's very very selective very selective And so you know we're reflecting on what the organizational results are and the board members I really appreciate are holding me accountable Where are we How are we doing?

And then the last part here on this diagram is respecting owner expectations.

If you have a for-profit organization, an organization that's lifted on the stock exchange, who are the owners of that organization?

Shareholders are the owners of that organization.

They're the ones that you need to respect their expectations, And the way you would do their expectations would be in creating value for them.

So we might have to think through who would be the owners, like for example, OCI, who would be the owners of OCI?

Well, we could say maybe the members, the member ministries, those are the ones who are really serving, so that would certainly be in my mind a large category of the owners of the organization.

We would need to be thinking, are we respecting their expectations?

People we're serving in a non-profit, the owners in concept is usually those individuals that you're serving.

So this is just another way of pulling together 7 key components of board governance.

Directing the organization, protecting the organization's interest, selecting the right leadership, expecting, holding expectations out for board and management interaction, connecting with other important organizations, reflecting on the organizational results, and thinking about the ownership, the owners, respecting the owners.

So like the example that we have here, the board itself doesn't elect leadership.

And the interesting part of the way things have worked up to this point, the board doesn't direct the vision either.

It's directed by the leader with his team, which gets presented to the board and they approve it.

I would agree with that last statement, that it's kind of the wrong way.

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Series

Leadership in Ministry

3. Leading Change

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

1. Leadership Foundations

59m

2. Working With Boards

50m

3. Leading Change

1h 20m

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