ABOUT RICK

It has been said of me that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

I’ve made a living in a variety of ways in my life from working cattle on a ranch to making lumber in a sawmill. I’ve been an oilfield worker, professional photographer, carpenter, minister (20 years), realtor, developer, writer, speaker, founded an organization that empowered 120,000 volunteers to provide 20 million meals for disaster relief in Haiti and spend a great deal of my effort empowering people to feed the hungry.

I’m exactly what I want to be: curious and flexible. I leave very few stones unturned.

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Old Lady Praying

Lessons Learned From Little Old Ladies on the Back Row of the Church

04/22/2014

If you want to cause someone to lose their religion in church, take the seat of a little old lady who has been sitting in the same pew since Noah beached the ark.  If you didn’t need salvation before you sat down, you will afterwards.  Hell hath no fury like that of a little old lady who finds someone else sitting in her pew.

In my early days as a minister, I assumed that real leadership in the church came from those who had been appointed by the selection committee; one ordained by God himself and the Church Constitution.  Most folks knew the church constitution better than the Bible and, in fact, when a scrum broke out, the only chapter and verses quoted as proof texts were from Article 3; Section 4; Paragraph 1; Sentence 2.

Each year the constitution required the appointment of a selection committee. The selection committee would pour over potential victims, er, nominees for the various positions and the church would vote in a congregational meeting more highly attended than Easter or Christmas.

We were masters at putting square pegs into round holes.

I’m a pretty slow learner so it’s not surprising I have to retake the same test numerous times.  I used to assume that influence in the church came from the folks who got elected in leadership positions with cool titles like Chairman, Vice Chairman, Deacon, Elder, and Bouncer. Okay, maybe we didn’t have a Bouncer, but if you’ve ever served on a church board, you know you need one occasionally.

Karl Beck wasn’t joking in Pastor Karl’s Rookie Year (Never Trust a Spiritual Revolution You Can’t Dance To), when he said, “It’s easier in most churches to introduce a fourth person into the trinity than it is to change the color of the carpet in the foyer.”

The real power in the church was in those little old ladies that sat on the back row. However, they wouldn’t serve in an official position because, “they had done their time and it was time for the young people to run the church.”

Ha! Those little old ladies stopped fooling me by my third year.  They might not have had official constitutionally-ordained positions, but they could change the tide of opinion with just a few comments of support or criticism. John Maxwell came up with this axiom after hanging around little old ladies: leadership is influence.

The Kansas Leadership Center believes that our world will be a much better place if we can reframe the antiquated idea that position equals leadership.  I wrote about their first principle in my last blog, Leadership is an Activity, Not a Position.   When I think of the second KLC principle -Anyone can lead, anytime, anywhere - I am reminded of those little old ladies on the back row of the church:  

KLC Leadership Principles

      1. Leadership is an activity, not a position.
      2. Anyone can lead, anytime, anywhere.
      3. It starts with you and must engage others.
      4. Your purpose must be clear.
      5. It’s risky.

If you have any leadership tendencies at all, you might be like me and want to be Charles in Charge.  I’d encourage you to spend some time leading from the back pew of the church.  Here’s some pointers I observed from the little old ladies:

      • Keep quiet and observe
      • Wait for the right time then speak your mind
      • Don’t editorialize your remarks
      • Be as direct as possible so there is no room for misunderstanding
      • Don’t apologize for what you think
      • Smile

Have you seen others who have been effective leading from anytime and anywhere? I’d love to hear about it.

Check out KLC:  www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

Buy CEO Ed O’Malley’s book (co-written with David Crislip):  For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership

Do whatever you can to go through their training!

Photo purchased from iStock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kansas-Leadership-Center_1886_1000x667

Leadership as an Activity, Not a Position

04/09/2014

If you have to say you’re in charge, you’re probably not.  -Tammy Duvanel Unruh

I hated choosing teams during recess.  The teacher would choose either the two most popular kids to be the “captains” or, in an occasional move of gratuitous justice, would chose two of the biggest nerds. Although I hated this system, it did assure me I got to be captain every once in a while.  I didn’t mind that charity had chosen me; I was Captain and, by golly, I controlled the fate of the other minions waiting to be picked. It was good to be King.

I was taught that leadership is a position and that position has a Grand Poobah-like title; Captain, President, Chairman, or Chief. The janitor is not a leader unless, of course, he is the “Head Janitor,” and has his own minions to dominate.

However, some time spent recently in some leadership sessions af the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) has caused me to re-think this. The KLC believes that everyone can exercise leadership at anytime and anywhere.

They believe this because they make a difference between a position (authority) and leadership (activity).   The KLC recognizes the need for a title and a position- they have an amazingly brilliant, passionate, and energetic CEO, Ed O’Malley- but they reason that anyone can exercise leadership without being in a position.

Therefore, leadership has little, if anything, to do with a position or title. Leadership is not a noun- something you are; it’s a verb-something you do.  KLC’s first principle is, “Leadership is an activity; not a position.”

Making that distinction between activity and position is like saying a baseball player is only a baseball player when he’s on the field playing baseball. He is not a baseball player unless he’s actively engaging himself and others in the game of baseball.  So anyone at a meeting who is actively engaged, even if they are sitting clear at the back of the room is just as much a leader as the person standing up front. Conversely, anyone in the room- even the person at the front- who is not actively engaged is not practicing leadership.

The fundamental principle in this model is really quite simple; human dignity.  KLC’s model gives equal value to every voice in the room.  This model assumes that answers to difficult problems will arise when every voice in the room contributes to the common good.

Changing the traditional concept of leadership is about as easy as reversing the laws of gravity. I’ve rewritten this blog several different times; it’s hard to explain because of preconceived notions of leadership.  I’ve been around the KLC model for years and still find my old defaults of leadership equals position getting in the way of productivity.

This all sounds like high-falutin’ theory until you put in practice and then it gets very interesting because the actual practice of this kind of leadership is an activity versus leadership is a position can, as the KLC commonly says, raise the heat in the room.

As you read the 5 leadership principles of KLC and you will go, well, duh, of course, that’s what leadership is. It’s when I get to the, “Yeah, but” that the game changes.

KLC Leadership Principles:

    • Leadership is an activity, not a position.
    • Anyone can lead, anytime, anywhere.
    • It starts with you and must engage others.
    • Your purpose must be clear.
    • It’s risky.

I’m right, aren’t I?  Those make sense and you wonder what is revolutionary about it.

Here’s the Yeah, but; when you really apply the model in a meeting, it’s like the bus driver passed out and all 37 passengers start screaming like little kids in a horror flick trying to grab the wheel and slap the bus driver at the same time.

KLC uses a simple mechanism to change the dynamics; instead of the person facilitating the session (formerly known as the real leader) providing the answers when someone asks a question, they ask a question in return; then another question; then another; then another; then another; then another to the point that someone usually yells “just give us the freaking answer!” This is the point the passengers start slapping the bus driver. 

The response from folks in the meeting from the person in front deliberately not giving answers but asking more questions can be surprisingly adverse.  The KLC folks call this reaction, raising the heat; I call it slapping the bus driver.

The KLC’s model assumes that everyone in an organization or a community can be engaged in leadership regardless of whether or not they have a position.  And if everyone is engaged, then the organization or community will operate at maximum capacity and effectiveness.

Check them out.  www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

Buy Ed’s book (co-written with David Crislip):  For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership

Do whatever you can to go through their training!

The photo on the blog is of their beautiful new facility in Wichita!

Rick

Growing Up Country: Things That Could Have Killed Me

04/01/2014

 

The fastest form of transportation is fear - Interview with a 2,000 Year Old Man

It’s no small miracle I made it to my 54th birthday alive. I grew up a largely unsupervised surrounded by 1,280 acres of Kansas prairie full of farm ponds, gullies, dilapidated barns, rattlesnakes, and hitchhiking hippies.  Oh yeah, don’t forget the herd of cows whose favorite form of merrymaking was scaring the daylights out of me. “Chase him, Ethel,” Maude the cow shrieked, “let’s see if he wets himself again!”

An article in the Atlantic Monthly, Hey, Parents! Leave Those Kids Alone!, suggests that parents are over-protective of children and, therefore, impeding their healthy psychological development.  Some suggest that kids should be exposed to more things that could send them to the emergency room.  The basic thesis is that playgrounds and parks are too sterile and foam covered with too many adults hovering so kids don’t develop risk-assessment capacities.

I’m surprised people are just now discovering it’s actually healthy for a kid to have dangerous options for stupidity to be scared out of them.  Most of the owies I got as a kid did not elicit a kiss from Mom and Dad; instead, they would generally remark that I should know better and to wait a few days; the hair on my eyebrows would grow back.

Since I spent most of it as an unsupervised country kid, I made up a list of I made a list of things of relatively dangerous things;

      • Drowning in Hobsons Pond – I lost count of the near misses
      • Midnight diving off the 15’ Stone Arch Bridge into 5’ of water
      • Rattlesnakes that hid under the rocks that we flipped over looking for, of course, snakes
      • Screaming down the flooded ravine n Hobson’s Pasture in the middle of raging Kansas thunderstorm in an inner tube with bolts of lightning lacing the sky
      • Falling through the ice in the middle of Bergen’s 3-acre pond
      • Trusting that my nephew, Leroy, cleaned the shotgun; thankfully, my Dad taught me always to check the gun first. Sure enough, the barrel was hard-caked with foot of dried mud.
      • Jeff Miller- he was another nephew and, even when we were babies, started daring me to do stupid things. After he’d convince me, he’d turn to his sister Colleen and say, “Here, hold our baby-bottles.”
      • The UFO that was coming to get us. Okay, so maybe that one wasn’t real, but Jeff had the rest of us convinced and perception is reality.

As John Wayne would say, “Courage is being scared to death…and saddling up anyway.”

The photo on the blog page is of me when I was ten.  It was shortly after I nearly blew my fingers off with a firecracker.  Of course, my mother warned me not to try to throw firecrackers.  Jeff convinced me she was alien life form and, therefore, not to be believed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dad

One Question I’d Ask My Dad If He Were Still Alive

03/26/2014

Some say the most significant life-change in a woman happens when she has her first child. Some say the most significant life-change in a man happens when his father dies.

Last week marked the twenty-seventh year since my Dad died. I was the youngest of six and considered by my siblings to be the boy with the coat of many colors. Odd that they saw it that way; I never felt like I was special.  However, I’ve often told my older five siblings that Mom and Dad were nicer to me because they had given up after raising them. That, and our parents saved the best for last.

For the first twenty-one years of my life, I was not close to my Dad.  His blue-collar job in the oilfield put food on our table, but Dad’s real love was the little country church he pastored. My Dad never had an official education, but was a brilliant man who consumed voluminous books on theology and history like they were novels.

Most of what I learned from him was from listening to him preach. We never had a sit-down-and-let’s-talk-about-this-son kind of relationship, but three times a week I listened to my Dad’s thoughts on life while my feet dangled over the edge of a creaky old wooden pew in a small country church.

At twenty-one, I discovered Dad to be a lot nicer than I remembered.  For the remaining five years of his life, we grew much closer.

However, for as close as we were, there were still things we never talked about that I wished I would have.  If I could have Dad back for a bit, there is one thing I’d ask him about:

What did you like about me? I knew you loved me, but I often wondered what you liked about me.

I can only guess what my Dad liked about me; he showed me but never told me. I like words; I’d like to have heard them.

Even though I can’t ask him, I can tell my kids what I like about them. I don’t want them to have to guess.

Excuse me; I have a few letters to write.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Globilisation

The World is Flat After All

03/21/2014

I kicked the red African soil off my shoes as I walked into the classroom of the Gunda Secondary School in Nkungi village, Tanzania.  The school was built by Floyd and Kathy Hammer, founders of Outreach, Inc. Floyd and Kathy traded the mamas in Nkungi grain for their beautiful hand-woven grass baskets, then brought the baskets to the US to sell so they could raise money to build the school.  The student/teacher ratio is one teacher per 77 students. (Floyd and Kathy have purchased over 65,000 baskets in the last ten years! You can buy some here)

The writing on the black board impressed me; a student had written the definition of globalization.  In essence, it said that the world is connected and is one large village.  This same student would pick up a hoe lying by his or her desk later in the day and work in the little farm outside the school where they grew crops to feed themselves. Even though they are years behind the developed world in technology, they understood that we are one big village.Nkungi Classroom

Economist Thomas Friedman uses another word to describe globalization; flat. He argues that technology has truly flattened our world.

In college, I discovered that Christopher Columbus did not sail the ocean blue in fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two to prove that it was round.  He did it for the typical reasons; greed, national domination, and religious proselytization.  He did not do it to prove it was round. But it turns out the world is flat after all.

My heart spends a lot of time in Africa even though my body doesn’t.  Although the connections are sometimes spotty, I can call, Skype, email, and text pretty easily. I no longer think of Africa as over there. It’s my next-door neighbor- just takes a while to get there.

The world has become much flatter which affords a lot more opportunities:

      • A changing economy offers entrepreneurs new ways to do business
      • Political pressure can happen more easily via social media
      • Financial investments in social impact can be more easily monitored
      • International relationships can be developed (I communicate frequently through Facebook and Twitter to my African partners)
      • Greater accountability is offered (cell phone videos are a powerful tool)

Maybe technology will advance enough so it doesn’t take so long to get to Africa from Kansas. A Star Trek-like teleporter would be a nice.

Beam me up, Scotty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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© 2014 Rick McNary | Writer and Speaker