Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands
Read Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands Online
Authors: Nancy Ortberg
Stretch without breaking—every good leader lives in that tension, and makes sure followers do too. Nancy Ortberg’s combination of practical experience and communication skills makes her a leader worth listening to. This book is not just moving—it will help you move your team to a higher level.
Bill Hybels
• senior pastor, Willow Creek Community Church; chairman of the board, Willow Creek Association
If you are looking for a book that will guide you in polishing your leadership instincts and skills, you have found it. Nancy Ortberg has given us an exciting and authentic look at right leadership.
Max DePree
• chairman emeritus of Herman Miller, Inc.; author of
Leadership Jazz
Good leaders get results. Great leaders get results and develop people. Nancy Ortberg is a great leader. She gets it! She knows what it takes to get something done while doing something great in people.
Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands
is an authentic, practical, and compelling look at what it takes to do that with excellence. If you lead people, ignore this book at your own risk . . . or theirs.
Jim Mellado
• president, Willow Creek Association
This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to become a better leader!
Ken Blanchard
• coauthor of
The One Minute Manager
Rarely do I read a book on leadership that leaves me feeling more free and lighthearted than when I started reading. With her non-linear approach (don’t go looking for ten steps to anything), delightful humor, and refreshing honesty, Nancy Ortberg writes the same way she lives her life. This is a leadership book for people wired like me, who wonder if we can ever fit a profile of the “typical leader.” Thank you, Nancy, for this highly practical, engaging, and totally fun book.
Nancy Beach
• teaching pastor, Willow Creek Community Church; author of
Gifted to Lead: The Art of Leading as a Woman in the Church
A refreshing and delightful departure from the top-down, out-of-touch drivel of management books. Rubber bands are in and T-shirts are out—read the book to find out why.
Guy Kawasaki
• cofounder of alltop.com, author of
The Art of the Start
Nancy gives each of us hope that maybe God can use our lives and our leadership, no matter how messy it might look, to make a real difference in this world.
Greg Hawkins
• executive pastor, Willow Creek Community Church; author of
REVEAL: Where Are You?
TYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.
Carol Stream, Illinois
unleashing the
POWER
of rubber bands
lessons in non-linear
leadership
NANCY
ORTBERG
Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at
www.tyndale.com
TYNDALE
and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands: Lessons in Non-Linear Leadership
Copyright © 2008 by Nancy Ortberg. All rights reserved.
Cover photo copyright © by Image Source/Getty Images. All rights reserved.
Author photo copyright © 2007 by Jeanne dePolo. All rights reserved.
Designed by Jennifer Ghionzoli
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION
®
. NIV
®
. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ortberg, Nancy.
Unleashing the power of rubber bands : lessons in non-linear leadership / Nancy Ortberg.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4143-2164-6 (hc)
ISBN-10: 1-4143-2164-3 (hc)
1. Leadership—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BV4597.53.L43O78 2008
253—dc22 2008009924
Printed in the United States of America
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Jamie Barr,
who told me, when I was nineteen
years old, that I was a leader . . .
and then made sure I lived up to all that meant
Contents
Bad Person . . . Bad Fit . . .
Big
Difference
Teamwork Is a Strategy, Not a Slogan
What You May Not Know about Mongooses
What’s Barcelona Got to Do with It?
The world is full of advice, much of it wonderful, about how to be a better person or parent or leader. Sifting through it all and deciding what warrants your time and energy is a nontrivial challenge. Nancy Ortberg makes that challenge easier here because of her unique insights, effortless storytelling ability, and genuine humility and self-deprecation.
Nancy is a person who walks through life with both eyes wide open, taking in everything available to her and searching for meaning and connection. In
Unleashing
the Power of Rubber Bands, she provides her readers with thoughtful advice and disarmingly selfless perspective on everything from personal development and empathy to innovation and teamwork. And she does it with a deep sense of the fundamental place God has in it all.
Like Nancy herself, this book will be hard for readers to peg, as it rolls around and touches upon so many topics that are seemingly diverse but inextricably linked. And because it is as inspiring as it is practical, you may find it difficult to decide whether to take it to work, keep it on your nightstand, or tuck it away into a suitcase. Whatever you do, keep it handy for those times when you find yourself with a few spare minutes that just might transform your life.
Patrick Lencioni
Author of
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
President, The Table Group
Very early in my career I learned that my understanding of people would rival my job competencies in determining my leadership success. There have been a number of places where I have been fortunate enough to have been given roles in which to learn that.
For ten years I worked as a registered nurse, in such varied fields as medical-surgical, the emergency department, and home health. I was, for approximately nine years, on staff at Willow Creek Community Church, in roles of teaching pastor and leader of a strengths-based ministry as well as the post-modern expression of the church, called Axis.
Finally, the last few years I have been a consulting partner of Patrick Lencioni with my own leadership consulting firm, Teamworx2, and partners David, Kent, Rick, and Linda.
The common thread in these varied fields has been leadership . . . and this book is a consolidation of what I have learned, through success and failure, as well as what I deeply believe to be true of great leadership.
One of my kids always used to read the last chapter in a book first (and probably still does). That’s what I would recommend you do with this book: Read “Understatement of the Year,” and that should help you decide if what is in the other chapters is what you are looking for.
I love great leadership. I love it when I’m able to observe it, love it when I’m the recipient of it, love it when I’m able to do it. Great leadership takes my breath away, and I have seen it in some of the most surprising places.
It is often spotlighted in large corporations, but I have seen it in a rural McDonald’s, a library, a veterinary office, and a small church. I’ve seen it in a waitress, a salesclerk, and a bus driver. I’ve seen it in an accounting group, a public high school, and a nursing home. I’ve even seen it at the DMV, but only once.
Great leadership is occurring in the hands of quiet and unnoticed people who are creating environments where people can bring the best of what they do to what they do best. But you will never see these inspiring leaders on the cover of a magazine or in the six o’clock news.
We greatly underestimate where great leadership is to be found and what we can learn from it. If we only expect to find it in the hands of those select few in positions of obvious power, we are poorer for having overlooked the beauty and strength that’s to be found in unexpected places.
Most leaders want to lead in strong and admirable ways, even if what they lead is never the biggest or the best. And most leaders who do it well find ways to develop strong leadership at every level in the organization. They know how to unleash the power that is already in the organization and how to fan the flame of that power in productive and transformational ways.
My hope is that in this book you will find a simplicity and practicalitythat inspires hope, and come away with a sense that
you
can do leadershipbetter as a result. And by practicality, I don’t always mean a clear, step-by-step plan. While that is important, I believe that if plans precede the “why,” they nearly always result in less-than-optimal performance. I hope that this book provokes, stimulates, irritates, and ignites you to better leadership. Great leadership is much more about creating a culture, and cultures transform people in much more profound ways than systems do. Systems and processes should always support the vision, but they should never
be
the vision. When you spend time plumbing the depths of “why,” you will then be free to formulate the “how,” and you will see that there are many great ways to tackle that “how.”
I also want to show how closely leadership is tied to both character and to God, because I think the leader ought to be the most transformed person in the organization. A leader works with everyone, sets the tone for an organization, and creates a culture in the office. If you are reading this book and are not a Christ-follower, I guess you could just substitute “higher power” for God, but I would invite you at least once or twice to consider how deeply great leadership is tied to the nature of God.
Much of what gets done in leadership has a strikingly non-linear approach. There is no clear-cut, step-by-step equation that guarantees results; it’s the convergence of conditions that creates a climate where people and organizations prosper. I’m guessing since you opened this book after reading the title, you are not looking for a book that presents a linear approach to leadership. But just in case that
is
what you are looking for, I recommend you put this one down and keep looking.
I have read many linear books on leadership, some of which have been enormously helpful. This book is not one of those linear books. Some of my best friends think in that sequential, ordered way, and do great leadership from that perspective. I have even hired, worked with, and benefited greatly from them.
But that is not how my mind works.
Which brings me to the Post-it note.
The first year I led Axis, I was sitting at my desk one morning before the rest of my staff arrived and the meetings and flurry of activities began. On the corkboard that hung above my desk were pictures of my kids, a copy of our vision statement, a strategy spreadsheet (created by some of the aforementioned friends), and a postcard of Bora-Bora.
I really liked our vision statement, and our strategy was well thought out. I had little doubt that if we continued to pray and execute against the strategy, we would make significant progress toward the vision. Everything in the previous sentence is just what a leader is looking for. But for me, something was missing. Turns out it was just a word, but a word that encompassed everything.
So I pulled out a Post-it and wrote the word
Flourish.
Then I stuck that Post-it up on my corkboard, where it stayed for the next five years. Perhaps it was my own personal vision statement—or vision word, I guess. But whenever I looked at that word, I knew what to do.
I guess we all need different things. Some people need a spreadsheet or a detailed plan to know what to do. I needed a word. That word, hung where I could see it every day, went with me in my heart and head and spirit into each meeting, each interaction with people, each conversation I had with myself.
It motivated me to lead well, to build a culture where people and programs and systems could flourish. For me,
flourish
is a very powerful, visceral, and prompting word.
We all have certain conditions under which we flourish.
The coastal hills near our house are lush green right now, bursting with the color of wildflowers. They are so beautiful that driving is dangerous: You can barely take your eyes off of them. The perfectcombination of spring rain and sunshine has created this spectacular sight.
There is no exact equation for these conditions, no spreadsheet thatmonitors and quantifies the correct mixture of rain and sun. People and organizations are no different. Given certain cultural climates, they will grow and accomplish and learn and flourish.
Which leads me to the rubber bands . . .