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Many years ago when I started seminary, I received some of the best leadership advice I ever received. It came from Pastor Arthur Pace, who was going to be my “field education supervisor.” In other words, I was Arthur’s student pastor. Before I started my year of working with Arthur he sat me down and said, “Chris, over the next year you are going to watch me lead this church and I will do many things well. If you learn from them, you will become a better pastor when you move into the full-time ministry. As you watch me over the coming year, you will also see me make many mistakes and do things poorly. If you discount me as a leader in those moments, you will miss a valuable opportunity: the opportunity to learn how NOT to lead and how NOT to be an effective pastor.” The point is obvious: we can learn from every example in life, not only the good examples, but also the poor or bad ones.

I have always remembered that lesson. I have found myself in many negative experiences and situations over the decades since Arthur offered those wise words of leadership insight. In each of them I have sought to glean the lesson it contained. I have learned how NOT to manage my time, how NOT to lead others, how NOT to respond to criticism, and dozens of other valuable lessons, simply by going through a negative experience and asking how it could have been a positive one.

We can even apply this lesson to ourselves. We all make mistakes. We all sin. Sometimes we even stay in cycles of poor performance or sin, because we fail to learn from them. For example, if I consistently treat others as if I have the right to command them to do what I want since I’m the “leader,” and they don’t seem to respond the way I want them to respond, instead of asking, “What’s wrong with ALL of them?” I will benefit from asking, “Is there something wrong with the way I am leading?” If I’m self-aware at all, I will eventually realize there are many things wrong with the way I am leading, and in this particular case what’s wrong is I am failing to value the people I lead first as people, and then for the gifts and skills they bring to the work environment. Once I realize that I’m part of the problem, and perhaps the biggest part of it, I can change, and the whole environment will change for the better. After all, leadership is influence, so when the leader changes, the environment will change as far as the leader’s influence extends.

Think of your own leadership right now. Is there an area or areas where you don’t seem to be effective, or where you think others aren’t taking you as seriously as they ought to as a leader? Ask yourself: Is it their problem or am I part of the problem? Just asking the question increases our self-awareness, and moves us to greater effectiveness as leaders. If the problem is with the team, then asking the question, can help you see that you’ll need to address the matter and lead the change that’s necessary for the whole team to be more effective.

I hope you’ll take the next opportunity to learn from the next negative situation you experience, because as you do, you’ll become doubly more effective than if you tend to learn only from the positive examples around you!

Here’s to leading better by turning a negative example or situation into a positive learning opportunity–today!

Today we’re going to talk about margin in the area of time. If I could have a “do over” in area of my life to this point, it would be in this area. Time is a precious gift from God and once we have invested it or spent it that particular moment is gone. We don’t get to live yesterday, or last week, or a particular situation over again, no matter how much we wish we did. When I think of all the times I have let time slip away unredeemed, I am reminded again of how important it is to make the most of this moment.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to creating margin in our lives when it comes to time is that we assume we have both more control over our lives than we do AND less. Let me explain. I regularly sit down and plan my time. In fact, thanks to Michael Hyatt’s book Living Forward, I sat down for an entire day several months ago and planned out the entire coming year. I included mission trips, vacations, conferences, and the regular daily and weekly commitments. I scheduled time to reflect on the week, and to plan the next. I even scheduled margin. On paper it seemed perfect. That’s the part where we assume we have more control than we do. We CAN schedule or plan our lives and if we’re ever going to have margin in the area of time we must, just as we must create a spending plan if we’re ever going to have margin in the area of money. The challenge is life doesn’t go the way we plan or schedule it.

For example, on Monday morning, I received a phone call that a dear friend of ours from the days we served a church in Cincinnati decades ago had died. Her family asked whether I “had time” to come out and officiate at the funeral. The short answer was, “No, I did not have time.” This is one of the fullest weeks I’ve had for a long time from a schedule standpoint, because of the 15th anniversary celebration of New Life. Saying, “Yes,” would mean a 5-6 hour drive each way, an overnight stay in Cincinnati, and a morning devoted to the funeral. I didn’t have anything specific planned on my calendar for Thursday, since I typically keep it open for big picture planning and writing. I knew the right thing to do: say yes. Doris, the woman who died, wasn’t just a friend, she and her husband had adopted us into their family for the five and a half years we served in Cincinnati. I said, “Yes.” That commitment took up all the margin in my week–but I had margin in my week. I had already completed my message for the weekend. I had already completed my daily blog on the church website for the week. Everything I “had” to get done was already done. That’s what planning does in our lives. It lets us get to the important matters first, and then when life happens-which is where we have less control over time than we think we do–we have margin to address it. Without margin, when the unexpected situations of life come up, are best planned schedules go by the way side.

Yesterday I gave you some specific ideas about what has worked for Nancy and me when it comes to creating and living by a budget or spending plan when it comes to money. When it comes to creating a budget for our time, I commend Michael Hyatt’s Living Forward model. I’ve tried most of the time management planners on the market over the years. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. For me, the most helpful has been the Living Forward model, because it starts with the true end in mind. It has you write your obituary–yes, your obituary. You consider how you want to be remembered in the various areas of your life, and then write that as the beginning of your “Life Plan.” Then you add specific areas that are vital to you. I started with “Quadrant II” areas, things that are important, but not urgent, and wrote a plan for each of them. For example, two of my areas of focus are Spiritual and Physical Growth and Development; and Intellectual and Emotional Growth and Development. In each area I wrote a preferred future, the current reality, and then the steps I’ll need to take to get where I want to go.  The process was challenging, but also encouraging, because it has shown me how having a plan–and implementing it can move me toward being who I believe God created me to be.

The key in whatever planning method you use when it comes to time is to SCHEDULE margin for those times that will come up when our schedule is disrupted. We need to have at least an hour each day of scheduled margin, and it’s always best to schedule more time to do tasks around the house, and time with our family than we think we need. That last statement may strike you as strange–schedule time for our family? Yes, because unless we schedule it any block of time is open to the whim of someone else. If we don’t schedule our lives, someone else will. We must schedule family, and reflection, and margin into our lives, so when someone calls or texts and says, “Do you have time to go out for breakfast on Friday,” we can say, “I’m sorry but I have an appointment.” That appointment may be with a spouse, or with yourself. It’s easy in such a moment to say, “I can forego that and make up the time later. Don’t fall for that. We don’t make up time later. Time is a finite “commodity.”

I urge you to invest the time to schedule your time, and to create a spending plan for your money, so that margin may become a reality in your life if it isn’t yet. That way you will be available in those moments when you’re needed for those unexpected opportunities that make life fuller, and you’ll have the money to do those things without having to use credit. Margin is a great blessing that comes to us when we live our lives intentionally.

Here’s to leading better by pausing to make room in our lives to be available for the important and urgent moments we didn’t expect–today!

Yesterday as I was talking about expecting the unexpected, and kept mentioning making sure that when we have unexpected interruptions that we respond to them when they are important and urgent, it reminded me of one of the classic little booklets I’ve read on time and really life management titled Overcoming the Tyranny of the Urgent. In the book Charles Hummel points out that in life events come in four different types, which he divided into four different quadrants: Quadrant I: urgent and important; Quadrant II: not urgent and important; Quadrant III urgent but not important; and Quadrant IV: not urgent and not important. Hummel contended that in order to overcome the tyranny of the urgent, which would often mean succumbing to Quadrant III activities those things that are urgent but not important, one must invest a great deal of intentional planning and time in Quadrant II activities.

If you think about it matters that are not urgent, but important include all kinds of things that develop us as people whether at the physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual level. For example, I am engaging in a Quadrant II activity right now. Writing this blog is important. When I complete this post, I will have written more than 17,000 words about leadership in the past seventeen days! I will have gathered my thoughts, done research, reflected on what it means to be a leader, and passed on helpful insights to you who take the time to read them each day. These are important matters, but they are not urgent. I won’t get paid for writing these posts. If I “forget” to write them I suffer no penalty. No one will scream at me, or tug at me. On the other hand, if I fail to take the time each day to stop, think, reflect, and then write these posts I miss out on the opportunity to focus my thoughts on leadership, and thus grow as a leader. I also take away your opportunity to grow as leaders.

On the other hand, the Quadrant III matters of life break the silence of our Quadrant II times through the ringing of a telephone, the “ding” of a text message or e-mail coming to our inbox. When Hummel wrote The Tyranny of the Urgent back in 1967, he pointed to the telephone as the primary culprit in Quadrant III. He noted that so often when the phone rings we feel obligated both to answer it AND to respond in the affirmative with the requests that come from the callers. That’s what I was talking about yesterday when I mentioned that when I first started in the ministry, I felt that when someone called or stopped by my study, I felt obligated to respond. It was Hummel’s Overcoming the Tyranny of the Urgent that helped me to see that urgent demands need to be assessed and then assigned to Quadrant I or Quadrant III. Matters that are truly urgent AND important, must be addressed. It’s the matters, which are urgent BUT NOT important which must be dismissed.

It isn’t easy to say, “No,” to any urgent request whether important or not. That’s why we tend to rob Quadrant II time from our lives. Our exercise equipment won’t scream at us to use it. The latest business journal or book sits silently on our night stand or in our computer waiting “patiently” for us to read them. As much as we need to invest time with God, He will not yell for us to invest time with Him in prayer. In the same way, if we’re married, our spouses may or may not remind us of how important it is for us to invest time with them. When it comes to time and money we can only do two things with each: 1) spend them; or 2) invest them. When we spend time and money they are gone. We will never see any return from them. But when we invest time and money, over time they give us returns on the investment. I am already experiencing a return on my time investment in writing these posts. My leadership skills are improving. I think more about leading effectively all the time, and as a result I’m becoming a more effective leader on a daily basis.

Some have already asked me, “Do you have the time to write a DAILY blog with all you have going on?” The short answer is, “No. I don’t HAVE the time. I have to carve out the time.” One of the key differences when it comes to time and money is while each of us may make and have vastly different amounts of money, each of us has exactly the same amount of time: 24 hours each day. How we use those 24 hours makes all the difference. For this season in my life, I have committed to writing a daily post on leadership. I may find that I need to make that a weekly invest over time, but for now, even if no one reads what I’m writing, the return on investment for me is worth it.

As I was writing this post I had an instant message “ding,” a phone call from Nancy, and a second phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. I nearly laughed out loud. What a confirmation that interruptions come to all of us, and that if we don’t have a filter, we will fritter away our time. Both the instant message and phone call from Nancy fell into Quadrant I, so I took a moment away from my writing to respond to each. I answered the second phone call, because I was expecting an important call from a person at a business that I hadn’t yet spoken to over the phone, and I couldn’t remember the number he gave me in his latest e-mail. After about ten seconds I realized it wasn’t the person I was expecting, and while I DID want to talk to the person on the line, it wasn’t a good time, so I asked if I could call back later. He said, “Yes,” so I moved that Quadrant I call, to my to do list, and will schedule it for tomorrow, at my convenience. That’s the blessing of filtering as many things as possible through the grid of the four quadrants.

You may have noticed that I didn’t mention Quadrant IV yet, those matters that are neither urgent nor important. I can sum up that quadrant in my life in two letters: TV. For some it’s spelled: video games. I’m not saying we ought never to spend time in this area, but that we must be extremely cautious in doing so, because when we say, “I’m just going to sit down and play a game or two, or watch a few minutes of television,” it is almost never a game or two, or a few minutes. We often invest our time in minutes and spend it in hours!

Here’s to leading better by filtering our time and thus our lives through the grid of the four quadrants–today!

I’m an avid Pittsburgh Pirate fan, which means I’m not thrilled about the performance of our team right now. The Pirates have gone into an extended period of not being able to win. On May 27th they were 9 games over .500 and today they are 3 games under .500. They have lost 15 of their last 20 games. While baseball is just a game, professional baseball is a business. What can we  learn about leadership in our workplaces from the Pirates “June-swoon” and the organization’s response to it? Here are four leadership lessons I see in the current downturn of the Pirates:

1. Managers (leaders) always look good when their team is winning, but as soon as the team starts losing people look immediately to the manager (leader) as the problem.  It’s interesting that when a team is winning everyone says that it takes everyone contributing to win, and the manager just needs to “stay out of the way,” but when the team is losing it’s always the manager’s fault. Indeed, a manager/coach/leader can and DOES make a major difference in any group of people. Consider that the Pittsburgh Penguins were a below average team in the middle of their most recent season. They fired the coach (leader) and hired a new one. From that point forward the Penguins were the best team in hockey, and recently won the Stanley Cup. Does that mean if the Pirates fired Clint Hurdle right now they would start winning? I don’t think so. The situation among the Penguins and the Pirates is different. While it’s easy to point fingers at the manager/coach/ leader when things are going wrong, and sometimes replacing the one in charge does makes an immediate difference, in this case it’s unlikely that replacing Clint Hurdle would “turn the team around.” Why? Because Clint Hurdle HAS turned the team around. Before he became Pittsburgh’s manager they hadn’t fielded a winning team in half a generation. Now, they’ve made the playoffs, albeit via the wild card game the past three seasons. All indications in April and May were that this was another playoff contender. It’s far too early to say the team’s losing streak is due to Hurdle’s leadership or to write them off. In this case, we need to look somewhere else to find the cause for this extended slump by the Pirates.

2. If you don’t score runs and stop the other team from scoring runs you will lose a lot of baseball games! Early on the Pirates were either leading the league or near the top of the league in team batting average, scoring runs and many other offensive statistics. Not so during the losing streak. If you don’t score runs you can’t win baseball games. At the same time, the starting pitching has become as ineffective as the middle and short relief crew had been throughout the season. In April and May the Achilles’ heel of the Pirates had been their middle and short relief pitchers. Now their starting pitching has given up a boat load of runs and the with the Pirates’ bats not providing much punch on most days, the team isn’t winning. While this isn’t rocket science it points out that in any organization that relies on different people, groups, or divisions to do specific jobs, when the people, groups, or divisions DON’T do their jobs the organization loses. Leaders from the top of the organization to the bottom must apply effort to determine the cause of the ineffectiveness and then make necessary corrections in order to stop the losses. In baseball, you can win games if your hitters aren’t doing so well, if your pitching is great. Or of your middle relievers are giving up runs, but you’re scoring a lot of runs you can win, too. Right now, the combination of few runs scored and many runs allowed is producing the predicted results: losses.

3. You have to “play” with the personnel you have. I’ve noticed that the string of losses the Pirates are enduring at the moment have taken place concurrently with a lot of players experiencing “discomfort,” which seems to be the new term for injuries in major league baseball these days. In one game they lost four of their starting players during the game. Three of them had been hit by pitches, which undoubtedly will cause “discomfort.” All organizations go through stretches when key personnel experience “discomfort” and are out of the “line up”. In those times, the leaders’ task  is to put the best available replacement in the situation and make the best of it until the “first string” returns. Clint Hurdle has done his best to put together a starting line-up that has not included all his best players on a consistent basis in June.

4. Perseverance is the most important attribute during downturns in an organization. It’s easy to quit or give up when your team is losing. If you’re just a fan then it really doesn’t matter, but if you’re one of the players or leaders, it’s essential to keep playing through the tough times, because tough times nearly always come. AND just as important, sometimes the team with the best record through the course of the season, doesn’t win the games when they count the most. (Just ask the Golden State Warriors who won more regular season games than any team in NBA history, but fell one win short of their goal of a second straight NBA championship.) We all want to be the champions in whatever endeavor our organization pursues. The reality is no one wins the championship every year. No one is the sales leader every quarter. Sometimes people don’t commit their lives to Jesus even when everyone on the church staff has done their best. In those times, it’s vital to continue to analyze the situation, to confirm that the leadership is headed in the right direction, keeping working at improving or correcting your skills, encourage folks through their times of “discomfort” and keep showing up for the “game.”

I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. As a pastor I believe it ALWAYS matters whether we win or lose, because the stakes of the “game” are eternal, but whether we’re talking about the eternal souls of men and women, or the success of a business, or the health of a family or the wins and losses of a sports team, the goal is to win. Perseverance makes winning much more likely over time. After all, character is seldom built during winning streaks. It’s when we face a week or month of losses that we’re tested to keep working on the fundamentals, honing our skills, giving our best efforts and to keep on showing up. Those are the traits of winners in any area of endeavor and over time winners tend to win.

Here’s to leading better by persevering through the tough times–today!

Happy Fathers’ Day to all for whom that greeting applies! I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post by adding a couple more leadership lessons I learned from my dad. These were lessons I didn’t learn directly from my him, but rather because he was my dad. The first of these lessons came when I was in fifth grade. I was walking across a parking lot near Punxsutawney, PA after a guitar lesson. I had my guitar in my hand, and was focused on getting back to the family car where my mom was waiting. As I walked, a man who looked to be about the age my dad was at the time said, “Son, are you Clyde Marshall’s boy?”

I said, “Yes, sir. I am. Why?”

He said, “I knew it. I could tell not only because of your facial features, but also because of the way you carry yourself. Your dad is a fine man, and I’m sure you’ll grow up to be like him.” I remember those words all these years later for two reasons: First, I realized that while I didn’t always experience my dad as a “fine man” others often did. Whether they knew him for his diligence at work, for his prowess as a baseball player and boxer, or his ability to tear down and rebuild a car engine, they saw my dad as someone who did what he did well. They also saw him as a man of his word. The second thing I realized was I was already a reflection of my dad. I knew that I had either inherited or learned his tendency toward anger, but apparently I was already exhibiting some of his purposefulness even in the way I walked across a parking lot. I realized that how I lived would one day reflect on my dad, too. My dad had built a “name” for himself. The Marshall name was held in honor by many who knew him, because of him. That mantle would soon fall to me. My actions would add to the  measure of the Marshall name either positively or negatively depending on how I lived. That has been an important reminder to me over my life. I haven’t always lived up to the challenge, but my goal has been to reflect the good qualities of my dad, and to change the ones that weren’t so good, so others would think positively when they heard the  Marshall name.

The second lesson, which I learned more through reflection than through life experience with my dad is that we can always learn from another person whether he sets a good example worthy of following, or a bad example to be avoided. I never thought about this fully until it was brought to my attention by a pastor named Arthur Pace, for whom I served as a student pastor in my first year of seminary. Arthur pointed out that during my year of serving with him, he would do many good things, and if I learned from them I would become a more effective pastor as a result. Then he said, “I will also do many things wrong. In those moments if you discount me as a leader, you will lose the opportunity to learn form those negative lessons, and you may repeat them yourself.” Over the years I have returned to Arthur’s admonition time and time again, and have done so specifically when it comes to what I learned from my dad.

We’re all mixtures of good and bad. The Apostle Paul helped us to see that clearly in Galatians 5:17 and following when he reminded us that even after we trust Jesus as Savior and Lord and are born again, we continue to live in a battle between the Holy Spirit–God’s presence in us–and our old natures, or what Paul called the “flesh.” How wonderful it would be if we would simply lose our old natures once Jesus became Savior and Lord in our lives, but we don’t. We have the power of God in us to do good and reject evil, but we also have the vestiges of that evil in us and we can will to do it. I saw my dad struggle with his weaknesses all his life without the benefit of being a follower of Jesus until nearly the end of his life. He often succeeded, and he often failed. What I learned from that is I needed a lot of help if I was ever going to overcome the anger that came so naturally to him and to me. For decades after trusting Jesus as Savior and Lord, I continued to let the old nature win all too often in many areas, but particularly in the area of anger. I have many struggles still, but what I learned from my dad was that trying hard wasn’t enough.

The human will is an incredible thing. The Bible would call it our soul, because the soul is the seat of the mind, emotions, and will. My dad’s soul struggle was evident quite often. What I learned from reflecting on his struggle was that I needed Jesus. I knew HE needed Jesus, but when I saw the bad traits he exhibited also being part of me, I knew that I couldn’t will myself out of them. I learned from him just how much I needed Jesus. I also learned that from myself!

As you go about your daily life, what positives and negatives do you remember or still see in your dad from which you can learn? Lifelong leadership requires lifelong learning and a key part of lifelong learning is reflecting on our experiences–not getting mired down in them–but reflecting on them, praying through them and gleaning the positive or negative example that we can either emulate or eliminate in order to become the man or woman that God created us to be. I’m grateful for all the ways my dad showed me how to be a better man, and for Arthur Pace’s reminder that sometimes he was doing it by not being all that great of a man at the moment. Even then there were lessons to be learned, if I was open to learning them.

Here’s to leading better by reflecting on your dad’s impact, and the lessons you learned from him–today!

I turned 59 on June 7th. It has taken me an extremely long time to realize that my calendar is my friend. During my twenties and thirties I spent a lot of time trying out different time management tools: Day Timers; Day Runners; Covey Planners; and many more. What I found out from that pursuit was it took a lot of effort to organize my life, prioritize my life and then actually carry out the plan for my life based on all that organizing and prioritizing. Too often it didn’t seem important enough to invest the time. My calendar often seemed like my enemy. It wasn’t–I was.

What do I mean by that? I mean that thinking our calendars are our enemy is misguided at best and foolish at worst. A calendar is an inanimate object on which we write or record the plans and priorities of our lives. As leaders we need to be the ones who control our calendars priorities. Often we think that if we’re leaders, we must be accessible to others as much as possible. The truth is if we’re always available to everyone, we will neglect the most important areas of life, the areas that have been called the important, but not urgent. The important but not urgent areas of our lives include prayer and Bible reading, which build our relationship with Jesus; building our relationships with our spouses if we’re married, and our children if we have them. If our parents are still with us they are on the important, but not urgent agenda of our lives. What I have often called “offensive reading,” meaning reading to gain information that will help me lead more effectively even though I may not need the information today, is also important, but not urgent. Exercise is also important, but not urgent. How do we make sure that all of these things “fit” in our lives. We schedule them when we are at our best.

I’ve found that if I scheduled prayer, Bible reading and exercise between 5:00-7:00 am no one will interrupt me, or want me to do something else. Occasionally, someone may ask me to go to an early breakfast meeting, but not often. My point is this: if we schedule what’s most important, but not urgent FIRST, our calendars will reflect our true priorities. After that we must schedule “margin.” Margin is extra time, with no specific agenda. Why do we need margin? So, when the car breaks down, we have time to get it fixed without messing up our whole schedule. Of course, we have regular items in our schedule: worship, work, recreational activities, but even those need to be scheduled intentionally. That way when someone calls and says, “Hey, do you want to go to the movies on Thursday night?” You can look at your calendar, see that you have scheduled family time, and say, “Sorry, I have an appointment, but I’m free on Saturday afternoon. Most people don’t schedule their lives, so they’ll probably adjust to your plan. That’s what leaders do.

How do I know this? Because I’m 59 years old and I’ve failed to do it far too many times. No matter whether we’re 19, 59 or 89 life is too short to let others set our agenda 24/7. It’s also to short to live without a plan. Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” I know his words are all too true. Here’s a challenge for you if you are not a planner, or if you think your calendar is NOT your friend: Sit down sometime in the next couple of days and look at July’s calendar. What do you have scheduled on it so far? Do you have a July calendar? Okay. If it’s blank, schedule the important but not urgent things right now. Then schedule an hour of margin each day. Next fill in the things you have to do.  If it doesn’t all fit, you need to redefine what you “have” to do. Put the July calendar somewhere you’ll have it with you and the next time someone calls and asks, “What are you doing next Thursday?” If next Thursday is a Thursday in July you will know whether you are doing anything or not. If you are suggest an alternative date if you want or need to get together with the person. If not, just say, “I’m sorry by I really don’t have time to get together in the near future. It’s a really full time in my life right now. That will be true, if you have scheduled your life with important, but not urgent matters first, and then filled in some margin (which is ALSO important, but not urgent), and then filled in the rest.

If you want an actual plan for how to do this planning, Michael Hyatt’s recently published book Life Planning is the best book I have ever seen for prioritizing your life and then planning it in an effective way. He offers some annual calendar, and monthly calendar templates, along with a template for an overall life plan that are outstanding. It has been a big help and blessing to me, because as a natural non-planner, he makes the process clear, simple and it appeals to the leader in me that what’s to make a difference now and to leave a lasting legacy when I’m gone. Since I’ve implemented the plan, I’ve been more effective at doing everything I’ve mentioned above in the way of positive planning and living. My final challenge for today is: DO IT! Don’t say you don’t have time. You do. Don’t say you’ll do it next week. You won’t. Do it today or in the next day or two. “It” is something tangible in the way of making your calendar your friend!

Here’s to leading better by making your calendar your friend–today!