While serving as president of the University of Cincinnati, leadership guru Warren Bennis was teaching a course at Harvard’s School of Education when someone asked him, “Do you love being President of the University of Cincinnati?” After an uncomfortable silence, Warren replied, “I don’t know.” He wrote about this incident in Managing The Dream: The [...]
The terrible cost of “supervision”
I was struck by a description in Jim Collins’ book, How The Mighty Fall, of the administrative burden caused by poor employee performance: Any exceptional enterprise depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people – the #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline… If you have the right people, who accept responsibility, you don’t need to have [...]
Require and Relate: The paradox of good leadership
A ministry leader told me that he bases his leadership style on R&R. No, he’s not taking it easy all the time. I’m sure he gets an appropriate amount of rest and relaxation, but he defines R&R as “Require and Relate.” Requiring happens when a leader sets out performance standards and evaluates to see if the standards [...]
Storytelling: The key to retaining your ministry’s Christian identity
Do Christian ministries lose their Christian identities? Yes. Could it happen to your ministry? Yes. Can you prevent it? Yes. How do you prevent it? Well, you have to tell stories. But let’s lay the groundwork for storytelling first. Christian Horizons is fighting to retain its Christian identity by appealing a ruling of the Ontario Human [...]
Theology in action
Your faith is seen by what you do (James 2:18), so what are you preaching through your ministry’s deeds? In How Christian is my ministry?, I dealt with the same issue in terms of the employment relationship, but now I want to approach it from a different angle: What do your programs and practices say about your theology? How can you ensure [...]
Rev. John Pellowe, MBA, DMin
