Leading Lazarus Update:
One week. I can hardly believe it. Leading Lazarus launches September 6, and this is the last stretch to preorder with all the bonuses before they’re gone.
I’m not going to run a big pitch at you. You’ve been my first circle through this entire thing. You’re the reason it’s a bestseller and will continue to change how people lead.
Thank you for being here.
Years ago I kept a struggling team member on staff long past the point where keeping him helped anyone, including him. Everyone else could see it, but I handed out one more chance, then another, and I called it loyalty, because loyalty sounded better than the word that actually fit.
A younger leader on my team watched it all.
Two years later I watched him do the same thing with someone on his own team. He held on well past the season, let it quietly cost the people around him, and told himself a version of the story I had told myself first.
He copied my blind spot.
Nobody sat him down and taught him that, but he spent enough hours near me to absorb the way I over-trust and stay too long, and he carried that instinct into rooms I will never walk into. The moment I recognized my own reasoning coming out of his mouth, my whole understanding of leadership rearranged itself, and I have watched the same transfer in nearly every organization since.
You are shaping people this week, out of material you never sat down to prepare.
The Example Gets Set Whether You Mean It To or Not
Paul wrote to a church in a city known for its appetites, and he handed those believers a line that sounds strange coming out of anyone’s mouth.
Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.
1 Corinthians 11:1 NIV
Hear that as ego and you miss what he was doing. Paul was naming something already underway in Corinth and putting a rail alongside it. Those people watched him eat, argue, take criticism, and handle money, and they were copying him with the flaws included. His only real decision was whether the copying had a direction.
You do not need a pulpit for that verse to land on you, but you do need to know who stands close enough to copy you.
Run a company, lead a team, or raise kids in a house where somebody sees you at seven in the morning, and it reaches you at full strength.
Proximity teaches, and titles have nothing to do with it.
Here is an exercise I give executives in almost every coaching intensive. Write down the names of the people who spend the most hours near you, and set the org chart aside while you do it, because the chart will lie to you about this. List the people who are actually in the room, on the calls, at your dinner table, watching how you carry the weight on days you assume nobody is paying attention.
When Jesus began his ministry he appointed twelve, and Mark records the first purpose plainly.
He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach.
Mark 3:14 NIV
Sending and preaching come second in that sentence, but the being-with comes first, and that is where most of the shaping happened.
Most organizations act like formation comes off a stage or out of a module. The real curriculum is you on an ordinary Tuesday.
We Turned Development Into a Program and Missed How It Moves
Every company I have consulted with runs some version of a leadership track for the most part. A workbook, a start date, a certificate somebody frames for a wall. Those have real value and I have built several of them myself, but the deepest transfer happens nowhere near them.
It happens in the moments nobody scripted.
It shows up in how you talk about the person who burned you, and in what your face does when the goal is missed. It shows up in how you treat the person who cannot do one thing for your career, and in whether you keep your word on the weeks when keeping it turns expensive.
Paul told the Philippians to act on four channels of what they had received from him.
Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me, put it into practice.
Philippians 4:9 NIV
Three of those channels are words, but the fourth one is his life on display, and he weighted it the same as everything he ever taught them.
People forget most of what you teach them. They reproduce what they watched you do under pressure.
Pick one name off your list and write down what they are learning from watching you handle things that matter. This could include money, pressure, and inconvenience. Write the honest answer down. That page is your actual syllabus.
You Set the Temperature of Every Room You Lead
A room takes its temperature from whoever leads it.
Walk in anxious and edgy, and within twenty minutes the meeting turns anxious and edgy with you, though nobody in it could explain why the mood moved. Walk in settled, and something loosens without a word being spoken about it.
Scripture puts this gently, in a line about what people read off each other before anything gets said.
As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.
Proverbs 27:19 NIV
People read your heart off your face long before they read it off your announcements, and then they hand back whatever they found there.
This gets overlooked in leadership development, where we train communication, strategy, and delegation, but almost never train a leader to notice what their presence is already teaching.
Moses handed Israel’s parents a plan that fits every room I have sat in.
These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 NIV
The whole strategy was ordinary life narrated out loud, in front of people who were already watching. Your team and your kids learn the most from you in moments you would never think to script.
Your Private Life Sets Their Ceiling
This lesson cost me years and a few regrets before it settled, and it comes down to one line.
The people you lead will rarely rise higher than the person you are when nobody is watching.
You can teach a discipline you skip, or preach a peace you have not felt in months, and people will sit there taking notes on it as though the teaching were the real thing.
What reproduces in them is the real version, because they absorb your baseline rather than your material, and your baseline lives in private.
Jesus said this without softening any part of it, in a sentence that ought to sober everyone who trains anyone.
The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.
Luke 6:40 NIV
Fully trained people end up as a copy of whoever trained them. Notice how tightly that runs against Paul’s line to Corinth. He could say follow my example only while he stayed serious about the clause behind it, as I follow the example of Christ. An invitation to be imitated is safe in the hands of somebody who is still following.
If you want your people growing past where you are, keep growing past where you are.
Your Move Before Friday
For a long stretch I discipled people by accident and hoped the accidents were good ones. Then a mentor asked me to tell him who I was intentionally building, by name, and I had nothing for him. The silence in that moment embarrassed me the way it should have.
These four steps came out of the years after that question, and each one sets up the next.
1. Write the five names
Put down the five people who spend the most hours near you, without consulting a title anywhere. Proximity is the only qualifier that counts here.
2. Read what each one is catching
Beside every name, write one sentence naming what that person is picking up from your normal week. Some of those sentences will be uncomfortable to look at, and those are the useful ones.
3. Close the loudest gap
Take the widest distance between what you teach and what you model, then fix that one thing before you attempt anything else, because your people are already copying the modeled version rather than the taught one.
4. Pick one person and say it out loud
Choose one name, tell that person you want to build into them on purpose, and name what you hope they carry a year from now. Then live like it starting Monday.
Most of us became who we are partly by studying somebody up close, a boss or a coach or a pastor who never once knew how carefully we were watching. Nobody called it discipleship at the time, and it was exactly that.
Shaped people start shaping people. It moves quietly and mostly by example, which is the whole weight behind the line he first sent to Corinth.
Somebody is watching you right now the way you once watched someone else.
Lead like it.
Amen!