Will Mancini

Last week I enjoyed an evening with Chris Willard and Tom Wilson who work with the OneHundredX family of ministries, Leadership Network and HalfTime.

Tom is currently the President of OneHundredX, a new company that was developed in a clarity process with Auxano. Before coming to this ministry Tom served for over three decades with Young Life, concluding his time as a VP of field operations. While talking shop on vision, Tom recalled a year when he made special trips to motivate Young Life camp counselors.  Currently Young Life has 20 camps that bring in over 90,000 students a year. 

One hallmark of the Young Life camp experience (from which many Christian camps take their cue) is the exhilarating welcome that campers get the moment they arrive. As a high-school sophomore, I visited Frontier Ranch and can still remember the thrill of the cheering tunnel of counselors who screamed like they won the lotto when we showed up. It was big. 

Over the years,  Tom said  he watch energy of the welcoming experience cool off. So one year, he decided to address it by systematically vision-casting at all of the camps. What did Tom say? He told them the creation story of the first camp welcome.  He reminded them of the deepest why behind the hype that had grown hollow. 

Early in the camping ministry camp counselors committed their precious summer time to serve the younger high school kids who would come in from across the country. The problem was, in the early days, awareness of the camps had not grown, and not every week of camp had campers. And if campers didn’t come, that meant more boring project work for counselors like painting fences and repairing sheds. With a drought of campers, the counselors began to passionately pray for God to bring students. All they wanted to do was to love on kids! After a few weeks an old beat-up van pulled up the mountain with a dozen or so brand new campers. When the counselors saw it, they were so excited that they spontaneously erupted in applause to God, ushering in the first unforgettable welcome.

One simple story of how it all started brought tons of meaning to the camp counselors that year. 

I just about lost it as I heard the story,  because I still remember the incredible welcome I received at Frontier Ranch. It made me want to be a counselor all over again! 

What about you? Hearing the why behind what we do is an easy way to refresh motivation. Where do the motions of ministry under your leadership need more meaning? What story can only be told by you? What story would people love to hear?

Thanks to all the folks at the C3 Conference (Creative Church Culture) who quickly sent this video as it brought to mind Church Unique.  Ed Young Jr’s creativity is off the charts as usual, and this time he brings a video with a message close to my heart. Enjoy! He is the pastor of FellowshipChurch.com

Vision Sunday 2010 from Hillsong Church on Vimeo.

If communicating vision is important to you, then consider listening to this 25-minute vision casting experience with the attached evaluative tool.  What makes this Hillsong vision casting piece uniquely effective?

• The visual medium is fantastic
• It’s invitational tone is incredibly engaging
• The substance of life-change is palpable
• It’s kingdom driven rather than church driven
• But, the kingdom values don’t dilute the church’s  identity
• The testimonial “weaves” don’t  fragment the power of one visionary voice
  
• It forges bold newness and continuity with the past

 Before hitting play, here are two recommendations;

 #1 Listen to the entire 25 minutes in one sitting. I was moved the most at 22 minutes.

#2 Listen with the Vision Casting Spider Diagram from Church Unique. You may want to do this as a team exercise.

Team Exercise:

 Listen to the video as a team.  Write down the most powerful phrases, metaphors, and stories to you as they corresponds with the six elements of vision on the spider diagram. Discuss them as a team, and how your team can improve their vision casting skills this week.

More free resources from Church Unique

Like many leaders I want to lead a world-class team. But I don’t think you can without a core commitment to managing dreams. We talk a lot about managing people and we get specific by talking about their talents, personalities, resources, motivations and strengths. But what about their dreams? Are you as a leader so wrapped up in your own vision, that you don’t take the time to really see how the dreams of your top leaders, dovetail and intertwine with the organization?

Why is this important to me? Years ago I realized that my greatest convictions as a leader were formed not through postive modeling, but by the weaknesses of the leaders above me. Before starting my own ministry, I had served on many teams led by strong and effective leaders. But none of them demonstrated willingness or skillfulness in attending to my personal aspirations. Conviction created: I don’t want to be a dream-dumb leader.

Here is what I have learned thus far on my own journey toward managing dreams.

#1 Clarify your own dreams. You can’t have a meaningful conversation about the dreams of others without your own dreams clarified. In fact, so few people have ever really clarified their dreams, they will probably need you to model it as the first step of helping them access it.

#2 Connect your personal dreams to the organization’s vision. It’s very important that people see how organizations are vehicles to realize their personal dreams. Too many times, the agenda of the organization is something totally different from what your people daydream about. For some, “org-speak” even becomes a necessary evil. You’ll never hear it, but it is there and lives for years, totally disguised. You must manage the gap, and it starts by modeling it again yourself.

#3 Warning: If you can’t separate out your personal dreams from the vision of the organization you are leading, you may be too captive to the organization. I have been there myself and had to discover what I call a “healthy detachment.”

#4  Operate with a dangerous promise. I lead with the promise that if the vision I am leading toward is not in line with the dreams of my team, I will help them find a better fit in another organization. In the last 6 years at Auxano, I have helped two on my leadership team find more fulfilling roles. There is an important belief behind this promise for me. I believe that God is always going to provide for the dream-vision alignment, so if that alignment is no longer there, I WANT to help those people off the bus.

#5 Cultivate, cultivate, cultivate the conversation. My biggest disappointments in managing dreams come from assuming that its easy to have the conversation for my team members. The truth is, it is extremely difficult to foster this type of dialogue. It requires relationship, connection, authenticity, transparency, trust, etc. If there is fear, then game over. Hence back to imperative #4 above. Just remember you can’t just “have” the dream conversation, you must farm the conversation; plant seeds, provide water and tend to it.

#6 Start with satisfaction. Yesterday one of our teams met to talk about our direction and our next vision milestone. I started the time by asking each team member to describe which Auxano project, initiative or event gave has given them deepest sense of satisfaction. It was the best team time all year! This exercise does not automatically reveal dreams, but it creates a climate and provides clues for the ongoing journey of dream management.

#7 Be flexible and experiment. In the end people dreams cannot be realized if there is no organizational flex and flow. Only you can provide this. Also, you may need to operate with some tentative thoughts or aspirational probes. Don’t be afraid to tweak roles and responsibilities for a season. The best visionary organizations I have worked with are always willing to adapt leadership structure and key responsibility areas.

#8 Don’t let failures slow you down. Even in writing this post, I am more aware of my insufficiencies as a dream manager than anything else. But I keep pressing on.

Over the last few years I have enjoyed attending and speaking at conferences.  Yet staying on mission for me means having to miss some. Now with twitter, you can have an entirely new experience of attending a conference virtually. In fact I have found a new reality that twitter creates, enabling a preferred experience to watching a conference on DVD.  I call this new reality anEmotional Resonance Spectrum (ERS).

So why do I call it an ERS?  If thousands of people attend a conference, then hundreds will be tweeting. This stream creates an entirely new snapshot and experience of the conference. (I am not saying “more” or “better” but definitely new.) Imagine that every minute you receive from 5 to 30 short responses from people that include:

• Favorite quotes
• Bursts of emotion (good and bad)
• Questions
• Humor
• Web links to related content
• Links to typed summaries on blogs
• Side commentary from notable leaders
• Gateways to side conversations about content

Here are some huge benefits that emerge from watching a conference using a tweet stream. (It kinda reminds me of looking at “reality” through the vertical streams of random green digits in the movie The Matrix.)

Absorb the conference while multi-tasking: It’s easy to keep a tweet stream up while working at the computer on something else (for example I typed this while attending Leadership Summit 2009) Or, you can check what’s happening on your phone at a stoplight while running an errand.

Enlarge your perspective on the teaching: Every person or team that attends a conference has built-in biases. Watching the comments of hundreds provides radically different perspectives that enlarge my own.

Feel the collective soul of the conference: I am a quote junkie, so certain phrases will always get to me.  BUT, I love watching what touches the heart of the collective soul of the conference.  Some quotes are repeated and retweeted scores of times, while others are a single burst. This learning enables a unique discernment as I serve the wider body of Christ through my consulting. What struck a chord with attendees of the Leadership Summit  last year? Dave Gibbons said, ”Your failure is your platform to humanity.”

Follow up on the content that most interests you: Last year as the conference ended, I looked for summaries of all of the talks via blogs referenced in the tweet stream.  I saw two that I followed up with- Tony Morgan’s and Dave Ferguson’s. Keep in mind there are two kinds of summaries, aggregators and specialists.  An aggregator (like Tony Morgan) are masters at building info hubs and they do it fast. A specialist, like Dave Ferguson (in this case a senior pastor), summarizes the conference from his point of view. By the way, I plan on following up on one of the speakers (Gary Mamel) and will purchase his book today on my kindle.

Build relationships and extend your influence: I traffic in the arena of clarity and vision.  Several people yesterday attending the conference tweeted references to me and my work.  For example a guy named Kevin tweeted, ”Jessica Jackley just nailed the clarity and uniqueness quotient for Kiva. @WillMancini would be proud. #tls09″  How cool is it that I get to have a conversation with Kevin, even though I am not at the conference. Another example is that Bill Donahue and I, a staff guy and Willow, were able to comment and critique publicly on one of the speakers quotes (again while I was typing this).

When it’s all said and done, I am somewhat hooked on attending conferences via twitter. Sure, it may not replace being there, but this is a learning strategy I will engage for now.

I would love to hear your thoughts.