Monthly Archives: September 2016

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Why You Need To Take Small Steps

For those of you who have children, you know there’s a special day every parent anticipates and dreads. It’s a day of great joy. It’s a day of great fear. That day? The day your child takes his or her first small step.

You sit back and cheer him on. You tell him he’s doing great. Just a little bit further. He only needs to take a baby step for you to have your world change.

What if I told you that you need to begin to take baby steps? Would that excite you like seeing your child take her first steps?

Baby steps are the steps to success

Probably not. You’d think tiny steps forward in business are not for you. They’re definitely not exciting.

Yet these small steps are what we need to be doing.

Why Small Steps Rock

You have lofty goals. I know you do. You’re the kind of leader who wants to change the world.  Read more...

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Blogging Feels Like Hard Work

Those looking for blogging advice are often told that they need to blog consistently. You need to create a blogging schedule and stick to the schedule.

So, you dutifully go about creating content on a regular basis. You feel great. Until you hit the point where blogging feels like work. Hard work, at that.

Anything worthwhile is hard work

I know. Because I’ve been there. And I’m there right now.

There are days I don’t feel like creating blog content. I don’t want to sit in front of my computer.

Yet I do this anyways. I sit down to write a blog post.

Why I Blog

There are many reasons to blog.

You may want to blog:

To help people become a better leader

To share what you know with others who are a few steps behind you

To have fun

To turn a profit  Read more...

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4 Ways Complacency Will Damage Your Organization

Every leader wants to see their organizations become successful. There’s a problem that comes along with success:

Complacency

That’s when you reach a level of self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies. You no longer feel that urgent need to be on top of things.

Don't let complacency kill your organization

This is a scary place to be. You’re satisfied with where you are. You no longer pay attention to the dangers surrounding you. You’re vulnerable and don’t even know it.

How do I know this? Because I was there. Recently in fact.

One of my responsibilities is to maintain our system network and it’s backups. I’d checked and rechecked our system backups. They were good.

Then I stopped checking. That’s when things got bad. A perfect storm hit.

First, I was told we may have been infected with a virus. I checked and confirmed this. We were hit with the Locky ransomware.  Read more...

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Lead Simply To Lead Well

In my years of leadership, I’ve noticed a frustrating phenomenon. That is the process in which we make simple concepts into extremely complicated and convoluted processes.

Instead of leading simply, we make it so that we’re leading complexly. Then we wonder why leadership is so hard.

You can lead simply and lead well

We Make Leadership Harder Than It Needs To Be

Leadership can appear very complex when you look at it from the outside. Heck, leadership appears complex from the inside as well.

Or that’s the way we make leadership appear.

Over the course of our time as a leader, we can make it much more complex than it needs to be.

We begin using corporate jargon that takes a practicing lawyer to understand. We create process flows that only a structural engineer can decipher.

We place barrier after barrier to leadership. We make leadership way harder than it needs to be.  Read more...

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The 4 Dimensions Of Extraordinary Leadership With Jenni Catron

The Answers From Leadership Podcast Episode 21

Today’s guest on the Answers From Leadership podcast is Jenni Catron.

Jenni is a writer, speaker, and leadership expert committed to helping others lead from their extraordinary best. Jenni’s passion is to lead well and to inspire, equip and encourage others to do the same. She speaks at conferences and churches nationwide, seeking to help others develop their leadership gifts and lead confidently in the different spheres of influence God has granted them. Additionally, she consults with individuals and teams on leadership and organizational health.

Jenni is the author of several books including Clout: Discover and Unleash Your God-Given Influence and The 4 Dimensions of Extraordinary Leadership. Jenni blogs here and contributes to a number of other online publications as well. Outreach Magazine has recognized Jenni as one of the 30 emerging influencers reshaping church leadership.

Jenni Catron speaking 4 Dimensions of Leadership  Read more...