If there is one book I could say would most practically help every Pastor, both lead and associate, function in a healthy way, this would be it. I’ll be honest and say that if I knew what I have just read in this book before going into the “workforce”, I wouldn’t have had to learn most of these principles “The Hard Way.” Notice I didn’t say “ministry”. Why? Because this book isn’t written to Guys in ministry. It was written to people out in the secular workforce. But…all the “Feiner Points” apply to healthy, functioning leadership because Pastoring/Ministering is leadership.
The subtitle of this book is, “The 50 Basic Laws That Will Make People WANT to Perform Better for You” but this book is so much more than that. When picking up the book, you can feel like this is going to be ANOTHER book on leadership. I’ve read tons of those, and while I was excited to read this book because of another pastor who said he liked it, I was a little skeptical of what this was going to bring new to the table.
“The Feiner Points…” is more than a typical leadership book. It’s a book about “follow-ship”. Not many of us are or will be the CEO or “Top Executive in our field, but almost all of us are subordinates. This book is great for giving practical principles for success as a leader who is subordinate to someone else.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
- Leadership can never be something practiced by an individual in isolation.
- …leadership is like an iceberg: Ninety percent of it is hidden below the surface
- …every High-Performance Leader…had both strong management and strong leadership skills
- …an imbalance between leadership and management can lead to problems not just for individuals, but also for an entire organization
- To lead your people, you must know your people (The Law of Intimacy)
- The Law of Intimacy does not mean you need to become friends with your subordinates, or that you need to socialize with them outside of work. You do not and you should not…knowing your people stops short of befriending them.
- If a leader wants a subordinate to be committed to the succeess of the leader and the leader’s organization, then the leader must be committed to the subordinate – to his or her growth and development, and to what’s important to him or her both inside and outside the office.
- (The Law of Feedback) It means telling a subordinate what he or she needs to do more of, needs to do less of, or needs to do differently to improve performance.
- Bosses should encourage feedback from their subordinates, who will often have a much better idea of their boss’s effectiveness than the boss will.
- To be effective, feedback must be camera-lense: he leader should indicate the specifics of what he or she observed that led to his or her judgement of the subordinate’s performance.
- (In relationship to bosses) Respect the office even if you don’t respect who sits in it.
- You must preserve your self-esteem and integrity by knowing how to push back, by knowing how to tell the Emperor that he or she is wearing no clothes…the hardest concept to get people to acept is that, as a leader, they’re obligated to tell bosses when they’re naked (not doing things right)
- You should never apologize for leading a group of your peers.
- Each meeting nees an agenda….the team must own the agenda for the meeting, which means not that the leader tells them that they own it, but that everyone has a role of shaping it.
- If you’re having a problem with a colleague…you must assume you’re the cause and you’re the source
- People look to a leader’s substance, not style, to validate their leadership value.
- High-Performance Leaders…seek to create healthy conflict…
Ok, there is so much more I could write, but you have to check out this book for yourself. If you buy it and don’t like it, send it to me. I’ll find someone who could benefit from it!