What’s Shakin’ Your Ladder? | Samuel R. Chand

Samuel R. Chand. What’s Shakin’ Your Ladder? 15 Challenges All Leaders Face. Mall Publishing, 2005. 192 pp.

What is blocking you from your destiny? If handled successfully, what is it that could move you to where God has called you to be?

The Ladder Analogy

The ladder represents a vision. The ladder climber is the leader who pursues that vision. But he or she can’t do it alone. To climb to the top of that ladder, the leader must have someone holding the ladder. As leaders, it is our job to learn how to hold on to the ladder even when it is being shaken. It is also our responsibility as leaders to figure out how we can prevent or minimize shaking in the future.

Understanding these challenges will help us to secure our foundations. Challenges will continually shake our ladders, but we can learn how to anticipate when they are coming, hang on while it sways, and keep it from shaking all day.

Leadership Challenge #1: FOCUS

Focus is reflected in the capacity to identify and devote the majority of your time and energy to the critical few objectives and issues, while still managing to deal with the important many.” — Sam T. Manoogian, leadership consultant

As leaders, we often have so many opportunities before us that it’s hard to focus on only one. This dilemma isn’t unique to pastors or churches. Business leaders also face the same struggle when adding new products and services, changing their marketing approach, or evaluating opportunities to expand. When presented with overwhelming choices, how do we focus on the “critical few” while still managing to deal with the “important many”?

Finding Focus Is Not Difficult; Keeping Focus Is

Focus is the biggest challenge we face at every level of leadership. Employees, customers, and church members have their own agendas for us, making focus the biggest challenge we face at every level of leadership. While their ideas may be worthy of consideration, they can distract us from our mission. Each morning we come to the office with a plan, but if we’re not careful, our plans get shifted by the plans of others. Our calendar will get filled. We should be the one to fill it.We’ve all had days when we didn’t feel like we accomplished anything. We feel like a Ferrari driving through a school zone; we can’t give it our full power. We’ve given 10 percent to this project and 12 percent to that project, but we haven’t pushed the gas pedal all the way down on one project. How can we ever accomplish anything this way?Satan may never tempt us to rob a bank, sniff cocaine, or cheat on a spouse. If he can keep us from accomplishing anything, he doesn’t have to. Rather than knock us out of our jobs through sin, he can keep us in our jobs doing nothing. We can stay and be ineffectual, and he wins. What he can’t pollute, he will dilute.

Growth Multiplies Our Distractions

As our organizations grow, there will always be more to distract us. When we start a new church, all we want to do is get a few people to work alongside us to provide a great worship experience. We’re not worried about office space, land acquisition, PA systems, or payroll benefits. We’ve got a single focus: We want to find five people who are breathing and willing to help.

Five people soon grow to 15 people. As the number of people increases, the work environment becomes more important. No longer can they work out of borrowed space, they need an office of their own. So now we have people and place as our focus. As the staff increases to 25 or 30 people, we need to have programs in place. Managing those programs requires systems and procedures. Suddenly, the focus is now people, places, programs, and procedures. Our focus gets diluted.

If we look around at our growing organization and see that the people are confused, before blaming them we need to stop and ask, “How focused am I?” When we get out of focus, our people are unsure how to respond and unable to move forward. Other signs of being distracted include the following:

1. Getting Marginalized. Marginalization happens when our input and influence is reduced or limited to only a few areas. Decisions are made without our input or we attend meetings to vote on an issue; and it doesn’t matter because the votes needed have already been decided.
2. Being Diverted. When nonessential things occupy our time and thoughts or when resources are used for things that aren’t necessary, we’ve lost focus.
3. Getting Attacked. Resistance and overt attacks can remove our focus from the main issues. As I said earlier, it may not be a headlining sin that Satan uses to attack us; it might be a whole lot of small distractions.
4. Getting Seduced. When pleasing our allies becomes more important than staying on a difficult course, we’re definitely distracted.

The Meaning of Focus

So what exactly is focus, and how do we keep it? Pastor Scott Wilson of Oaks Fellowship Church in Red Oak, Texas, and I were talking about focus when Pastor Scott gave me a great insight. He told me that while he was praying, the Lord helped him to understand the meaning of focus. Here’s what he said:

F = First things first;
O = Other things second;
C = Cut out the unimportant;
U = Unify behind vision
S = Stick with it.

Focus means putting the important things first and leaving everything else for second. If we can cut out the unimportant and unify behind the vision, we’ll always have focus. Of course, the most important thing is sticking with it. Pastor Scott’s definition is practical. It systematically tells us how to have and maintain focus.

But to have focus in our church or business, not only do we have to be focused, but so does everyone who works with us. We have to teach them to be focused as soon as we hire or recruit them.

Most leaders can do eight things at once and do them all well. But sometimes we mistakenly have the same expectations for the people who work for us.

Here is a List of the 15 Challenges Common to All Leaders:

1. Focus: Finding and maintaining what is important.
2. Vision Casting: Learning how to cast vision in a way that causes people to respond.
3. Communication: Saying it in a way that everyone gets it.
4. Decision Making: Understanding how we make decisions, so we can make them better.
5. Choosing the Team: Making critical decisions as to who is on our team.
6. Leadership Development: Growing our self and others.
7. Change vs. Transition: Intentionally planning transitions for smoother change.
8. Conflict: Understanding the importance of health during conflict.
9. Organizational Congruence: Aligning formal and informal structures with the vision.
10. Financial Management: Seeking advice from knowledgeable counselors.
11. Time Allocation: Distributing the resource of time effectively.
12. Control vs. Delegation: Learning when to hang on and when to let go.
13. Execution: Getting the job done.
14. Future Thinking: Focusing on what comes next.
15. Legacy: Passing our values on to future generations.

Excerpted with permission from What’s Shakin’ Your Ladder? by Dr. Samuel R. Chand.

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