The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 39 – How to Build a High-Performing Team from Scratch—An Interview with Chris Lema
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhof Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal to help you lead like never before in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhof. - Well hello everybody, and welcome to episode 39 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhof, and I hope our time together helps you lead like never before. That's my goal, and my guest today should help with that an awful lot. His name is Chris Lemma, and Chris has been a friend for a few years, and a guy who actually has helped me out an awful lot behind the scenes. He's sort of been my unofficial blog developer. I know a lot of you found out about the podcast through the blog, or some of you have discovered my blog through the podcast. Anyway, I've been blogging longer than I've been podcasting, and Chris has helped me with that. In fact, for those of you who've been around for a long time, you remember when my blog was kind of hard to read on mobile, and then just under a year ago, totally redesigned it. Like from the ground up, that wasn't me, that was Chris. Chris just decided to help out and built a phenomenal site. He's well qualified to do it for over 20 years. He's been a leader in the online community, and currently he serves in his day job as the CTO, that's Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Strategist at Crowd Favorite. He's also a daily blogger, a public speaker, a product strategist, and he really helps companies leverage WordPress, which is what my website and a ridiculous number of websites around the world are built on, and Chris designed from the ground up. He was such a treat to work with, and really a leading designer, and his blog is actually one of the top, like consistently, one of the top 15,000 in the world, which is not bad considering there are hundreds of millions of websites, and he's well read, very well respected if you know WordPress at all, or you're part of that community. You probably know Chris from that, or maybe you read his blog, but today he's gonna talk to us about, not about blogging, not about redesigning my site, as awesome a job as he did, not about WordPress, but actually about leadership, and how to build an incredibly high performing team, which is something he's had to do in his role in corporations over the years, and Chris is kind of like a machine gun of just brilliant leadership insights. This guy doesn't have an off switch, he's a serial entrepreneur, and I mean, in the time that you're gonna be listening to him today in this interview, you're gonna go, I think I learned more about team development in 40 minutes than I have in 40 years, or for 40 months, or whatever, like it's just incredible. So fortunately we have some show notes, so you can go to carrynewhop.com/episode39, and we'll have some show notes there for you, and you're gonna be really glad for the rewind button on your podcast as well. If you use the overcast player like I do, it's got the 30 second back feature, you can just hit a button, go back 30 seconds. You might be doing that a lot in this episode, so hopefully this is gonna help you build a better team, and even help your team lead like never before. Hey, I also wanna thank you. If I sound a little bit tired today, it's 'cause I am. This is the first podcast I'm recording after the grand opening of Kinexis Church, where I serve our brand new Mills Road facility. It's a 24,000 square foot facility, which is, we've been a portable church for seven and a half years, and so our berry campus moved there. We are so excited, and you ever been in one of those seasons as a leader where you're just exhilarated and exhausted at the same time. I mean, we are so over the top excited, and I'm recording this a few days after the grand opening, but I'm also exhausted because, man, our team has pulled so hard for this day. We had some 20 hour, some people had 24 hour days, like trying to get the last bit of the building done, and we opened it, and you wanna know it's really cool, and we're just so thankful to God for this, but we saw literally a 50% attendance boost overall on our opening Sunday. Actually, at the berry campus alone, it was like double the normal attendance, and we're so excited. So many people invited unchurched friends, which is kind of our mission, and man, for all of you who prayed for us, for all of you who have sent notes of encouragement, and there have been so many for so many of you, like just social media shout outs of encouragement, they've gone a long, long way, and we're just so excited about the season ahead. So lots of unchurched people in the room last week that weren't there the week before. I'm so proud of our team and the job that they did on the building, and just excited about everything that's happening in the future. So for all, you know, that could happen through all of this. So for all of you who have been just real encouragements, thank you so much, and if my voice sounds a little bit flat, I'm really looking forward to tomorrow off. That's gonna be great every once in a while you need a day off, right? So anyway, we have a high performing team, they crushed it, they just knocked it out of the park. I mean, volunteers who literally did their day job, and then volunteered till three o'clock in the morning trying to get the last bit of the building done, and we wanna pour all that passion, the mission now that the building's completed, and we're so excited about the Sunday and beyond, and for all of you who have ever been down that road, where you built something or opened something or launched something, you know how exciting that is, and I just want you to know, I'm in your corner too, thanks for being in ours. So without saying a whole lot more, we are gonna jump into what is a fascinating and rapid fire interview with Chris Lemma on developing outstanding teams. I am super excited to have Chris Lemma as my guest today. Chris, welcome to the podcast. - Hey there. - Hey, Chris, we were just talking about how to introduce you. I've known you for a number of years. I think we actually had got introduced by a mutual friend at a dinner in Dallas, was it in Dallas or Houston? - Yeah, yeah. - And just ended up talking all night, and you've helped me on the backend of the blog. Chris, by the way, if you visit my blog, karaenuhoff.com, Chris is the genius who completely redesigned it in 2014. So if you've been with us for a while, you remember my old theme, which was, content was okay, but to navigate was really challenging, and then we got this beautiful, brand new site, and Chris is the architect behind that. So Chris, thanks so much for that. And you are a blogger extraordinaire at chrislemma.com, one of the top ranked sites in the world, crazy Alexa ranking, well read by literally hundreds of thousands of people a month, and also a software developer and speaker, and you speak all over the world for WordPress, and you also happen to be a follower of Jesus who loves the local church. - Yes, all of the above is true. - And a family guy, on top of that. - And Chris has really done a lot of leadership development as well, and authored a few books, so we'll link to all of that in the show notes. But Chris, today I want to zero in on teams, because there were a lot of directions we could have taken this interview, and we've already had a few podcast episodes that are really all about creating high performing teams, but it seems to me like it's the inexhaustible issue. There are some questions I just get asked over and over again, like time management is one of them, and other questions, and this one like, how do you find great people? How do you build great teams? Just never goes away, and it feels like, it's sort of like when you're a preacher, and you want to preach about suffering in God, and you think you've given the best explanation ever, and then the very next day someone says, so what about like God and suffering, and you're like, ugh, you know, but this issue never goes away, but you have some really cool thoughts on it that I think bring a different perspective to it. So why do you think it's so difficult to build a great team in your view, Chris? - I think fundamentally it's because most of us have a singular perspective or a singular experience around the teams that we've been in and the teams that have performed, so we come at it with our default perspective, we come at it with that kind of default approach to who is the right team person, right? And so what happens is the default, our default approach is we keep looking for the one kind of person who's going to be the perfect team member, the high performer, and that's not really the scenario. Maybe the best lesson I learned was watching Jay Leno, who if you know Jay Leno, he has myriad cars. I mean, just a ridiculous number of cars, right? And you think, well, that's just silly, except that he has a car for just about every situation, or he has a motor vehicle, 'cause he also has motorcycles, right? For every situation. And I took that early days when I found out, and I started looking at leadership from that perspective, right? And you think, well, there are, if you think about the race car, right? The race car is a car that goes very, very fast, but requires a ton of maintenance, six people in a pit crew to make it go fast, but it only fits one person in the seat, right? Yet, if you need it to deliver speed, it can deliver speed, but you would never ask someone to take you to the airport in a race car, right? And you look at a tow truck, right? The tow truck can hold an incredible amount of weight and pressure, but again, it seats two or three, right? - Yeah. - And not, you know, it burns through gas like a race car, but it's also not something you're gonna take in terms of cargo to an airport. A minivan, on the other hand, is something that, you know, everybody will jump into, but it's not gonna go very fast, but you can easily take shuttle to the airport, right? What you start discovering is, if you're going to build a high-performing team, there's not one perfect team member. There's a whole series of different kinds of people you'll need to assemble, but that makes it really difficult for a team leader because it means you have to be versatile in leading remarkably different kinds of people, right? And that makes leading high-performing teams really, really hard. It means it's a lot of work, and it means that as a leader, you have to rethink how you lead because you're no longer using a cookie cutter approach. How you manage a race car versus how you manage a tow truck versus how you manage a minivan versus how you manage a Honda Civic, those are very different kinds of people, but you're gonna need a team of all of them. - And so you're using that analogy to basically say there is no one size fits all when it comes to building a great team. - Yeah. - Okay, so that's why it's so complicated. That's right, that makes a lot of sense. Chris, we all have this idea, and this is why I loved how you handled this subject. We all live in this fantasy world where if we could just land this really high performer, right? If we could get this person on our staff, or if I had this guy or this woman come and join my team, and it could be somebody in corporate, it could be somebody at a church you admire, a famous person or whatever, but if they would come, we'd just solve everything and make our church so much better, and yet you make the argument that superstars don't perform well when you hire them away from their organization into your organization. That's really surprising, why? - So the data just doesn't bear it out, right? I mean, and that's the core of the issue is, I think we would all love to believe. If you're leading a church, and you're sitting at 190 people, and you're trying to get to 300 or 500, and what do you think? You think, man, if I get the right youth pastor, this thing's gonna blow up, or if I get the right preacher, right? The right guy to come and speak, I mean, I'm okay, but if that guy, man, this would just blow up. And yet what you don't realize is that fundamentally, the data suggests that success, and success for high performers, is about 30% weighted on the individual, and 70% weighted on the environment, the context, the processes, the organization itself, the culture, the DNA, all these other things come together to create the environment for the right match between the person and the context. And the data, and when I say data, right, you go, okay, well, just 'cause you say it doesn't make it so, right? Yeah. Ashish Nanda, who is a Harvard professor, published research, right? And it was almost like nine years of research, longitudinal study, looking at all the top performers in the stock space, right? Because it's one of those places where you can get data, right? Another place you can get data is looking at performers in terms of sports, right? Athletics, you can look at their stats, right? But Ashish Nanda looked at, stepped away from sports, and looked at stock analysts, right? And these are people who know their space. These are the top people. I don't know if you know this, I don't know there'd be any reason for you to know. But if you're at Merrill Lynch, and you want to suddenly start analyzing a particular sector that you haven't analyzed before, it will often take you two years to find the right analyst, right? I didn't know that, really. You will leave that, you will leave that, imagine if churches left the youth pastor role or the college pastor role empty for two years because they're like, because we're gonna wait till we find the exact right person, right? But Merrill Lynch will wait two years. They finally find someone and they groom them and they become a high performer. And there are journals and other places where they track these kinds of things. So these are just to catch everybody up. These are the kind of people who just always get the stock picks right, correct? And they analyze the data. So they're the famous people in their field. These are the people just to put a pin on it. These are the people that take home millions of dollars a year in salary because they made others billions of dollars a year, right? - Gotcha. - So these are-- - I ask performers. - Top, top, rock stars. - And you know what you discover when they leave their organization because they eventually become superstars. Everyone sees them and goes, "Wow!" And they leave the organization and they join another and they perform poorly, 20% poorer performance over a five-year continual span, not like poor performing for a couple of months. - Six months, let me get my feet wet. - Half of these people that were tracked, right? Half of them performed 20% worse over a five-year period and a third of them left the new organization within three years. - Isn't that interesting? So the question is like, "Why, why?" - 'Cause it turns out that we all, you know, we all look at the famous names, right? - Right. - And you may not be a person, I'm not a person that tracks these people, but when you look at sports, right? You think, "Okay, here's the Green Bay Packers," right? And you're like, "Hey, look, "they have a great superstar quarterback." And then he leaves and you think, "Oh, the team's gonna be horrible." And then the team spins up the next quarterback and he's just as great. Eight years ago, San Francisco 49ers had that, right? Where the lead guy walks out and then the next guy comes in and you're like, "How are they still doing this?" Right, and you go, "Wait a minute. "What's going on here?" Because I thought that the performance was tied to a single person, a superstar. And again, what you discover is that it's not just the person, it's the context, it's the environment, it's the organization, it's the processes. And when a high performer leaves one place and comes to another, imagine you hire, right? The perfect, amazing youth pastor. Well, what you also did at the exact same moment is you didn't promote any of your people inside the organization. So you're saying to your organization, "I need to go outside to get the right talent." So immediately, right? Performance across the organization is gonna dip because there's a demoralizing factor, right? On top of which, when the new guy shows up and starts looking around for like, "Hey, how does this work? "And how do you guys do this?" Is that team likely to say, "Well, we'll give you all the news." Well, they'll put a smile on their face, right? But deep down inside, it's a lot harder to bridge that dynamic of getting them up to speed. And on top of that, especially if you go from say, large church to small church or large organization to small organization, you leave the infrastructure and the support that used to exist in the big place. You show up in the small place. I knew a really well-established worship leader in a very large church and she came to a small church and the small church was thrilled. Like, "Oh my God, I believe we got it." - We got a rock star, yeah. - We have our rock star. And then she said, "Who prints out the sheet music "for the team before the rehearsal?" And they're all looking around like, "That would be you." And she's like, "Well, and I'm going to this conference, "who's booking the travel and the..." And she, to be clear, right? She's a good friend of ours. She's not a pre-medana. - No. - It's just that when you come from an environment and a culture and a context in a business where, or an organization where these are things that are done, these are things that are managed for you and you step into a different organization where now you have to do it yourself. And maybe that's not your core competency, right? And so all of a sudden you see, and this is why I say, the data, whether you're talking about stock guys or you're talking about athletics, whatever, the data is clear that hiring the high performer and bringing them in, it's a 50/50 shot that you're going to see real benefit. And that often means that you're overpaying as well, right? - Yeah, and that's shocking. - Yeah. - So you kind of pulled the person at what I hear you saying is there's an ecosystem. So if somebody becomes, let's just use Merrill Lynch, all right? Somebody, they start at 25 and by 35, they're rock stars. Top of the field, everybody knows their name if you're in finance. And then you, small brokerage, small firm, poached the guy from Merrill Lynch, but you didn't poach his ecosystem. And he comes over to your firm and all of a sudden he's not as good and his picks are off and it doesn't work as well for the worship leader who was used to, all I do is focus on music. I never have to print my own stuff. I don't book my own tickets. I mean, that's part of what made her successful at the other church. And then even, I know a lot of leaders, for example, I've had a number of different assistants and over the years, it is very, very hard to find the chemistry that works with an assistant. And I've had my current assistant for about six years. And I mean, people ask me all the time, well, how can you like blog and podcast and, you know, lead a church full time and write books and all that stuff? And the answer is I have an incredibly supportive wife. I have a great ecosystem around me and I have a great assistant who makes all of that possible. And if she ever left, I might have to like cut my activity in half for a while while I find a new ecosystem. - That's right. And what's crazy is imagine you're telling your good friend, right? Imagine you're sitting there talking with Reggie Joyner and going, Reggie, my assistant is awesome. And Reggie, you know, in a moment of clarity and yet betrayal says, I'm gonna double her salary and I want her over here, right? And he over pays, right? And he brings her over and nothing happens. Like it doesn't work. Like all the things that are supposed to happen and Reggie's looking back at you going, I think you sold me a bit of goods. And you're like, no, no, no. No, my assistant was awesome in my organization for me with what we were working on. And that doesn't necessarily translate to being incredible and valuable in your organization for what you're working on. - You know, that's a really apt illustration. Reggie Joyner and I are good friends. We've known each other for a decade. We get to work together, speak together. We've written a book together. And we're complimentary, but our skill sets are very, very different. Like the way Reggie works, I write an isolation. He writes in collaboration in community. I tend to be very structured. I go to bed early, Reggie will work till midnight or beyond. Reggie's very spontaneous. I tend to be more structured. And so what makes Sarah, my assistant, great in my context, might not make her great for Reggie because she's trying to put a square peg into a round hole. Like, well, Carrie, I always did it this way. No, what makes Reggie successful is very different. I'm not saying I'm successful, but what is different from the way I operate. So I think that's a really apt analogy. And I do think you're right. We've all seen people. And there are some people you follow around. They're like, well, they were good in Chicago and now they're great in Phoenix or whatever. And that's true, but often it doesn't work out very well. So we're living under this delusion, right? Chris, that we're just going to hire away our problems and buy the talent that we need. - Yep. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work. At the end of the day, and I was pointed to the Green Bay Packers 'cause it's not something that I naturally looked at. And what I discovered was that 95% of the, over 95% of the team that puts on the jersey and gets on the field to play for the Green Bay Packers, 95% of them have never worn another jersey in their entire life. - Or they've been in Green Bay. - They were brought in at the very beginning. They were drafted in and they have been developed in that organization, in that approach for that way. And I think we tend to think that, oh, if I just go buy talent, if I just go find the right person, if I can write the perfect job description, have the perfect interviews and find the perfect person, everything will be great. And it's not true. That's maybe two, four percent of the entire problem. The core of the building greatness issue is not how you find the person. The core of the issue is what do you do once they get here? And if you go back and look at high performing organizations, what you discover is that unlike the rest of the organizations in the world, in the other organizations, what happens is you either find a great person, stick them in a role and walk away, right? 'Cause you're like, look, I'm not the worship person and you are, or I'm not the stock analyst, but you are. So here, I found you, I paid you, I hired you, now go do your thing and I walk away. - Yeah. - In other organizations, what happens is you hire someone really young and you know that they're young, you know that they don't have the background. And so you say, okay, I'm gonna put you here next to someone and good luck and they walk away, right? High performing organizations never walk away. High performing organizations bring someone in, whether they're great or whether they're young, they bring them in and they say, our commitment to you over the period of the next several years is going to be developed to develop you. And then once they've been developed, once they've invested week over week, quarter over quarter, year over year, and they create their superstar in their context, now they have a new problem. And that problem is how do we keep them? Because it turns out every other organization is looking in and saying, oh my God, they have the perfect analyst or they have the perfect youth pastor, they have the perfect executive, right? They have the perfect GM and whatever it is, they yank them over, right? And you see this played out in Newsweek, right? Where someone's paid an inordinate amount of money to leave Pepsi or to leave Kmart or to leave Walmart or to leave somewhere and move to Apple or move to Sony or move to Pepsi. And then a year or two later, you're like, no, it didn't work out, right? - John Scully, great example, right? Pepsi to Apple, and that worked out well. And it happens in sports too. I mean, you can look at team, actually, if you look at Toronto, the Blue Jays several seasons ago basically bought a whole new team. They rated a lot of the Florida Marlins. They took in all these all-stars and everybody said, that's it, this is our year to get the World Series back. And they had the worst season in years because they bought all this talent and it just didn't work when they brought it on the field together in Toronto and they're still rebuilding from that. - I'm sad to say that the Lakers have a similar story in the NBA. I've grown up in Southern California, so I've been a Laker fan forever. And they twice, they've tried to do this thing where they buy a bunch of talent. And then what do you do? You stick them on the floor and you say, guys, you're all great people. Now go make it happen. And you're like, no, making it happen, especially when you have great people, right? Making it happen is hard work. And the lesson I learned there is you watch 'em how Lauren Michaels works at SNL, right? Lauren Michaels is a producer at SNL. And again, I try and take my lessons from things that we've all experienced in front of the curtain, right? We're like, well, we watch a show and you're like, oh, that's great. And then the real trick is, how do you go behind the curtain and figure out what are they doing, right? - And it's a great example. Talk about that because we all know Saturday Night Live. I mean, well or anecdotally. And it's very easy to say, well, that's just a star factory. I mean, my goodness, you look at like, what serious comedian hasn't spent some time on Saturday Night Live? Everything from Tina Fey to Will Ferrell to Eddie Murphy to Dan Aykroyd to, I mean, my goodness, you could just go on and on, Adam Sandler. I mean, Steve Martin, all cut their teeth on Saturday Night Live. And you think it just produces superstars, but that's not actually what happened. - No, what happens is Lauren Michaels will bring on young talent, right? Constantly hiring fresh young people, people that no one's ever heard of, right? And he brings them in and he puts them together with some of the more senior people that have been there a few years, which by now you may know their name. So he puts young people with older people. He puts an experience with experience. And then he forces the writers to put them together in some sketches, right? And they have a meeting on Monday afternoon where everybody comes in, the oldest to the youngest, all of them are in there plus the guest host for that week. They all come into the room and they all pitch ideas, right? And it's a scary thing, right? If you're not at the front of the line, right? So you go to the first guy and you're like, hey, what are you thinking about this week, right? And they go, oh, I'm thinking about doing this kind of sketch, but halfway through the line, right? You're moving around in a semicircle of all these people and you're pitching ideas. Well, halfway through, you're kind of like, I don't haven't, like they've said all the good ideas. Like, what do I do? - Or now my idea looks terrible compared to all the other ones. - And so what he teaches them, right? Is that it's okay to say, I'm gonna work with that person across the room that already gave you an idea. I'm just gonna see if I can help that out. And so what happens is he encourages them to work with each other. And then if they won't, right? Which happens, right? You get certain primandones that don't wanna work with other people or certain new people who are scared and intimidated of working with someone so senior that they've dreamed about forever. He will just go to the writer and say, write this guy into this show or write this gal into this skit, right? And so then they're forced to work at it. They, he says something really interesting where he's like, you know what? It's not that we create and perfect the perfect show for a Saturday. It's simply that Saturday comes every Saturday, right? Like, we put on a show because it's time, right? These are people who have to put on, much like a church has to put on it. - Yeah, Sunday comes around with surprising regularity. - Exactly, and you're like, we gotta do it again, right? And they do two episodes that they run the performance on "Sirenites" at two different times, right? So they have an earlier show and a later show. Most of what gets put out on production is the later show, but they're still testing things even on Saturday night, right? And so they may end up adjusting things, but they have rehearsals, they write through the middle of the week, tail end of the week, they actually practice perform, it's ruthless cutting, right? I mean, so you could think all week, this is gonna be a great sketch, and by Thursday or Friday, it's cut, it's on the floor, and now you're gonna get written into the audience part or some other little bit part of some other sketch, right? But it's this push to put old and young, experience and inexperience together and to force them to work. And what you'll discover, and I, because I was talking about "Sirenite Live" at a conference once, I literally read just about every book on them, and then I watched about 16 seasons of "Sirenite Live," which is-- - Oh, just for research. - Just a little bit of research. - Just a little bit of research, okay. - Just a little bit of research. You know, I really put myself into the work that I do. What you discover is that the first time we see a sketch on the show, most of us go, eh, I didn't laugh very much, right? - Right. - And it is the fine tuning. If you watch over the course of some sketch, from the first time you watch a sketch until the third time, they're making adjustments to either the storyline or the character or the habits of the character. They're making adjustments until you no longer remember the first couple versions of it. All you remember is how awesome it is later, and so-- - So the church lady or whatever becomes hilarious. But it didn't start out that way. - But it didn't start there, right? And so what happens is we always go, and this happens every couple of years is a new year, right? There's a new cast, and you look at it and you go, all the good people left, right? We say that, I don't know how many times I've said, well, I'm done watching now, because all the good, like all the good people are gone, right? And what happens? There's a new group, and it takes a while for them to find the right sketch, the right personas, the right, everything, and it takes some work to collaborate. But eventually, they're killing it too, and they become the new name, right? Will Ferrell was big at the end, but at the beginning, Will Ferrell was just another guy that you thought, "I'm done watching the show," because they have no more good people on it, right? - Well, and when all the good people leave, they're even willing to endure a ratings dip, because then all the critics come on, and they go, "Oh, Saturday Night Live isn't what it used to be. It's done, it's washed up." I mean, they just did 40 years. They just did their 40th celebration this year, and I mean, they've just kept going, and it would be interesting. I mean, if we can find this, we'll link it in the show notes, but like a list of all the famous people who come out of that, but you're right. None of them was famous when they started, not one, not one. - And what happens is when you look at these folks, what you discover is that what they really take away from, more than almost any other show, right? You look at these guys when they leave, they all end up creating movies, they all end up being writers, right? They all, they have found a new way to collaborate with people. So if you watch, for a second there, you were talking about Billy Madison. - Oh yeah, Adam Sandler. - Adam Sandler, right? Watch six, this is purely for research. Watch six Adam Sandler movies in a row. What are you gonna see? It's the same cast, right? The core of the cast is there in every single movie. So what happens, right? You've learned to collaborate with a group of people, and now that group of people can tackle just about any challenge. - It's like, well, feral. - Always around the same people. There's a common core. - Now think about what that means if we were thinking about an organization that was trying to build out a leadership team. And think about that leadership team as, I'm building a team, not I'm building a superstar. I'm building a team for this context that could handle just about any situation, any topic, but I'm gonna build them together. It's gonna take time. It's gonna take different kinds of people. It's gonna take forcing them to work together. There's a lot of work to this thing, right? And that's why high performing teams don't happen naturally. You have to have a Lauren Michaels who says, I'm going to commit to this endeavor every week of every year for 40 years. And then someone's gonna say, oh yeah, he's just lucky because he just gets all the great people, right? So the other note, right? Is that when you work in high performing teams and when you build them and you spend time investing in them, right, just be clear that you're never going to get any of the credibility or respect from it because people will just assume you got lucky, right? Those soon you ended up with high performers. And so of course you always have high performers 'cause that's just, I don't know why you always get the great people, but you're so lucky. And then you discover, no, that's not really how that works. - I think Saturday Night Live is actually a brilliant example because, I mean, it's one thing to do that for five years or 10 years, but to actually produce superstars for 40 years, and again, not hiring talent, but everybody's an unknown when they start there. And clearly, he's got an eye for, I think that guy's got potential or I think she could go somewhere, but they're just as many people who didn't become superstars out of Saturday Night Live, probably more than people who did. And the other thing that makes it a great analogy for church world, I think is, okay, so you do your show, you're done at midnight early one a.m. Sunday morning, and you start again Monday, and there you go. Now they got a few reruns in the summer and all that stuff, but I mean, my goodness, what an incubator? And so what I would take away from that and tell me if I got this correctly, Chris, is he's created an ecosystem or an incubator, if you wanna switch metaphors, that really has the potential to produce excellent comedy and even superstars, predictably, again and again and again. - And you can't, that's exactly right. And you can't get away from that. You can't get away from that if you put young talent and experience talent together. And I can't tell you how many organizations that I interact with that don't want to bring in young talent, right? They want the leadership magic by just going and finding the right person and saying, okay, here you are. Now I'm done, you don't have to do anything. And that's not how it works. If you want to create an incubator of talent, if you wanna create an incubator of leadership, you're going to have to pair young people with old, and I don't mean young and old by age, but I mean experience, right? - Yeah, a decade with a newbie. - And yeah, and you're gonna have to tell the senior person, I know this is gonna slow you down, I know this is gonna limit some peak performance if you might imagine having without having to educate them, but for the long run, right? For excellence's sake, this is part of your job. Part of your job is to work with inexperienced talent and groom and train them. Part of your world is to pass on and to collaborate with these folks because if you don't do that, we will not build up, we will not create the incubator we want of talent to be able to lead through the situations that we're gonna have. Everybody likes to think, I have a senior leader, they'll be able to handle everything. The reality is context around us, not just context in the organization, but context around the organization is constantly shifting. And so if you're not taking from that context, if you're not bringing in young talent who are more in tune with some of those different dynamics and bringing them in the organization, your organization will end up being someone that doesn't relate to, someone doesn't connect to, and someone that can't handle some of the challenges from the outer context. And so you have to do this. If you care about leadership in any way and you care about high performance in any way, you have to marry senior leadership and younger leadership, experience with inexperience and force them to work together. - Okay, I don't wanna lose that thought, but let me just bridge a couple of contexts here. So if you're a small church, this is critical because there is a silver bullet theory at a small church leadership. If you're like 50 to 200 people, it's like, well, we just need new pastor and about every three to five years, another pastor gets parachuted in and they either quit resign or if you're in that system, the bishop appoints them or however that works, and then they raise it up or they kill it and then they go and somebody else comes in, that's not an incubator. But when you look at the mega church context, when I talk to large church pastors or multi-site pastors, the biggest challenge is we don't have enough campus pastors. We could launch a church. We could launch five more campuses if we had enough leaders. Sometimes money isn't even the issue because money follows vision, but they just don't have it. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges facing the church today is we are not very good at pairing seasoned leaders with starters and it doesn't matter how much money you have eventually, even if you can buy all the talent in the world, they're not gonna perform at the way somebody who was raised in your ecosystem might perform. Really, really fascinating. So tell me what that looks like week to week. Okay, if we're gonna live differently in church world, what does that mean leaders have to do? And this really stretches me too because I'm not naturally gifted at this or inclined that way. - So I think day to day and week to week, right? There has to be a place where people are working out that kind of partnership. So this is not a, okay, and this is the mistake some church leadership teams make, right? Or some leadership structures make is they say, okay, the senior pastor and the campus pastor are gonna meet once a week to go have coffee and just talk about stuff, right? And so you're imagining in your head that what's happening is some sort of leadership, osmosis and diffusion, like you put the two people at a coffee table and suddenly it passes, you know, between them, we don't see that, right? When you look at Elijah and Elisha, you don't see in their story, right? You don't see them sitting down for half hour and saying, okay, let me give you the digital download of everything you need. And then good luck with it, right? Instead, what you see is no, these are two guys that walk next to each other, right? Through the situations together. And more often than not, what the mistake we make is we think, okay, an hour a week talking is going to be the way we disseminate leadership and best practices and understanding and it's not. What happens is you gotta put the two, you know, you gotta put experience and inexperience together in a context where they work side by side because when they're in that context working is when you get to see leadership at play. It's when you get to see management at play. It's when you get to see conflict resolution at play. It's where you get to say, well, how come you did that when you could have done this, right? Imagine that you have a situation where the two of them are working on a fundraiser or the two of them are working on a project or the two of them are working on some initiative or a campaign. And there's a default action from someone who's young. Well, just fire that person or just toss that person or just quit or let's just not do it. All the defaults that that older leader has discovered don't pan out, they don't pay off. They're not, there is no quick win. They get to watch the other turn, the other decision, the other approach. And sometimes even, right, as a senior leader, part of our job has to be able to articulate why we did what we did. This is why we didn't fire or this is why we did. That's right. And that is so hard for some people because they're acting out of their gut and the reality is, right? If you look at firemen, I'm gonna take you to a different place for just a second. If you look at fire chiefs, right, these are the people that come onto the scene and they have to make decisions about a fire and they have to decide what to do and how to direct their staff, whatever. A guy named Gary Klein went in to look at how these fire chiefs make their decisions. And he thought that he could help them by figuring out that they were probably only looking at A and B situations, pros and cons of A and B. And so he assumed that what they were doing was anchoring. And so he thought, if I could teach them how to think about C and D, I could probably improve how they're making decisions in a life and death situation, right there, they have 90, the first 90 seconds are critical. So he started researching and analyzing these fire chiefs, right, hundreds of them. And he went back and took all the notes, he interviewed not just them, but all the people around them. And they decided that in a situation like a fire, when the fire chief gets there, they end up making 20 to 40 different decisions all in the span of a couple minutes, right? Think about how intense that is. - Yep. - And yet, these fire, Klein was surprised because they weren't even operating between A and B. They were only operating in A. They only had one default approach. And so you're like, wait, how are they doing it? What he discovered and later named it was pattern recognition and context decision-making. And so what happens is the fire chief shows up and immediately he looks over at the building and with the billboard in the building and the building next to it on fire and he says, get those people pull them all the way back to 40 feet back. And in the moment, you ask, why did you do that? I don't know, I just, it just, I felt like they need to be back. Three minutes later, the billboard comes flying off the top of the building and lands on the ground where those people would have been. And you're like, did you know that was gonna happen? And as you're sitting there weeks later and you're talking, did you know that was gonna happen? And he's like, no, I didn't, I couldn't have predict, like I didn't know it would happen. But now that I think about it, yeah, I've been in situations where that's happened before. I've seen that pattern enough that I knew how to act, right? - Right. - Now here's the thing. We have leaders in business and we have leaders in the church who have that pattern recognition, context awareness. And they make decisions in a split second, but it's because they've been doing this for 20 years. - Absolutely. - Right? I've been leading software engineers to build software products for 21 years. And for 21 years, I've been building software on the web. And for 21 years, I've been managing really, really, really, really smart people. And for 21 years, I've developed a set of patterns and ability to recognize context and make quick decisions. But none of that has ever taught me how to explain it, right? - Yes. - And so what happens when I step into a new organization? What happens when I bring in a new team member? And I realize, yeah, my decision may have been right. And my decision may have been fruitful. But if I can't articulate the whys, if I can't articulate the context and the pattern and why I did what I did, well, then what happens is the next person will never pick that up. Diffusion of leadership doesn't happen at a coffee table over coffee. It happens by being in context and it happens by being able to articulate day-to-day, why are we doing what we're doing? Why is this working? And that's not always the value of stuff that you put on posters. It's just the low-level pattern. Like, look, normally I'd tell you to fire that person, except here's two things I know. And when I see this, sometimes I think it's insecurity-driven and then I have a conversation with them and I address the insecurity. And then I tell them up front, look, if you can handle this security and still end up being a performer, I think we can go at this and make it work. If you can't, then I don't think it's gonna work. And half the time, you know, that's not up to me, that's up to them, but half the time, they can pull it off. And so that, my young friend, is why I didn't fire him, is I had that conversation because I saw these two dynamics. These two dynamics related to me, the pattern of insecurity and insecurity as a core issue is not an end-all, which is very different than betrayal, right? If I see someone doing something and it's driven by betrayal, done with, right? I'm not gonna have a follow-up conversation and you're out of the organization, right? But it's being able to articulate the pattern in the context, being able to articulate why I'm doing what I'm doing and that, literally, for that young person who gets that kind of experience, they skyrocket, right? They become so much better, so much faster if you put them with the right people who know what they're doing. - And I'm so glad you're articulating that because, I mean, I've led like you for 20 years now and for years, we had this conversation. It was like, well, how did you know that? 'Cause my gut's wrong sometimes, but often it's been right and it's been like, I don't know, I just knew it, you know? And people ask me all the time, I write a blog, right? As you know, Chris, you've helped me with it, but like, why do you blog? But I think you've actually given me a better reason for blogging than I usually say. It is my way of figuring out how I know what I know after 20 years or how I know what I don't know. And as Andy Stanley has said, if you've been successful but you don't know why you're successful, you can't repeat it. - Exactly, right. - If you're-- - Yeah, go ahead. - Here's what's crazy, two different periods of time in the '80s and '90s. Scientists did this, they did this research, right? Where they literally, you read an article, right? They had students read an article and then read another article much like it and ask if they could solve the problem. So they say something like this. Red Adair was known, a famous firefighter, was known for going to oil fires, right? And so they tell the student, they write it up about a oil fire with a plume that's shooting up hundreds of feet in the air. And it's so hot that it can't bring the hoses with a foam, they can't bring it to the core of where the fire is because it'll burn up the hose. And so they call in this experienced top notch guy, he's the guy who said, you think expertise is expensive, wait till you pay for inexperience, right? You're like, oh man, so Red Adair flies out, right? The Middle East, and instead of bringing one hose with the foam needed to put out the oil fire, he brings 30 guys to stand around the fire, each with a fire hose that is not gonna give you enough foam to kill it. But just enough to add to the 29 other guys. And he turns them all at the same time and they all shoot from the outside by surrounding it. They all shoot in and low amount of foam from 30 sources rather than a high amount from a single source that could get burnt up in the way and he puts out the fire. And students read this article and they go, okay, got it. Then they ask them to read another article and it's about a person that has a particular form of a cancerous tumor or whatever or a lesion that has to get removed, but the laser that is required is so strong and because of the position of the tumor that it's gonna have to penetrate other organs and it's going to destroy the organs because of the strength of the laser. And they say, what do you do? 78% of the people had no clue. No clue. So then they give them a tip, right? And the tip says, the answer may be related to something you've read. Now this is in the last 30 minutes, right? And so you think at this point, right? Everybody gets right. 50% of the people still have no clue, right? And you're like, well, what? How do you not know, right? And the answer is, of course, you take small lightweight, you know, rays of beams of lasers that aren't effective enough to completely kill it from one single ray, but now they can pass through all the other tissues, you do it, you surround it, you all shoot the same place. And so they give them another one, right? You have a drug dealer at the top of the mountain and there's only one road to the mountain and it's covered with mines. So the big tanks can't come up the road. What do you do, right? - Send 30 guys around the mountain through the boat. - 70%, 70% are like, I don't have a clue. - Okay, here's the reality. Most of us are really, really bad at abstract thinking. Most people are really bad at abstract thinking. So they can't take a solution that worked in one context and apply it to another. And so it was only, these researchers discover that it's only after they say, at the end of reading one, draw a picture and create the abstract rule that you learned from this one exercise. Then when they go to the next, they say, okay, hint, right? It may be the pictures and rules of your dream. And then people are like, oh, now that you've told me, I can totally apply the lesson. - Hence, pattern recognition. - Exactly. So what I tell people is, when it comes to blogging, right? Which I'm a huge fan of, you are. And I tell all leaders, they should write, right? Don't write just because you're writing to create an audience and create a tribe and sell books on it. Write because it allows you to articulate the abstraction from the lesson so that the people that are coming behind you have a way to be fed. This is the situation. This is the abstraction and rule. This is how it applies to other situations so they can learn and accelerate their growth. Write because you are articulating your understanding of things. And people will embrace and leverage it. - Yeah, that's right. I always say, run it through a helpful filter. And at the end of the day, if you can help other people with what you write and in your own organization, your church, if you can help people with how you lead. And again, just saying, well, you'll just figure it out if you do this for 20 years is not very helpful and you can't actually create talent. But if you can get around a 25 year old and do life with them enough and spend enough time with them that you help them in that pattern recognition thing, they'll develop their own shortcuts. And they'll actually add to the pattern recognition and say, well, here's what you missed, Kerry. It's like, oh, I did, you're right. So man, this has been fantastic. So I'm leading a church. I'm just trying to figure out, okay, let's get practical. I'm leading a church of 200 people in attendance, small budget, haven't got a lot of money, can't even, oh, I know what else I wanted to say before we get there, if that's okay. Our leadership team recently reread Emith Revisited, which is amazing, great book. And it also deflates the superstar phenomena with different vocabulary. I think it's Michael Gerber who wrote it, who basically says, you look at the most successful companies in the world, they're almost always built on $11 an hour, $8 an hour in our employees, right? The 15 year old McEmployee. And if you're relying on high capacity leaders to run a McDonald's, you're not gonna run many McDonald's. So what you have to do is you have to systematize, you have to train, you have to prepare people for success. Is that somewhat related to this? - It's exactly, exactly related. Look, if you've ever been to Disneyland or Disney World, there are people who are working the carts that are selling you in Disney on its ice cream, right? And this little cart is in the middle of the grounds and you'll notice three things. Number one, there's no supervisor around. Number two, they have a wad of cash in a till, right? And number three, they're young. Now, in any other organization, you put a young person with cash and no supervisor around, what are you gonna find? You're gonna find turnover and you're gonna find theft, right? - High percentage, high probability. - And you can look at McDonald's, you can look at movie theaters, you can look at all these places and see that they fail at this, right? Yet Disneyland puts them out there and doesn't have a problem. Why? For the very reason you said, they've built system and process. One of the tools I use every single day in a practical way is I use a daily huddle, right? - Okay. - A daily huddle is a way to get all the people together that are doing the similar stuff. You pull them together and you talk through values, you talk through the stories that are inspiring from the rest of the organization or what's happening so that they get another aha moment of how this gets lived out. How does this value become performant, right? How do I turn this into something practical? You're like, "Well, here's what so-and-so did." And they're like, "Oh, I never thought of doing it that way." - Yeah. - And you give them the challenge, right? So if you go behind the scenes in the back lot in the back room where Disney has all those little push cards with ice cream and have been there, you'll see they have a little room for a huddle and they come in and they have the key challenges for the day on the board, they have a little video, they have a video that teach, all the people have to exercise, right? For 10 minutes, right there in the huddle, they're all doing the same exercise because you gotta keep you healthy, right? We care about you, they even have a counter for health and safety issues, right? How many days they've gone without a health and safety issue and when they hit a certain number, 100, 203, they have parties, right? So they even have the name of the part, like the next one's gonna be a taco bar. If we go three more days without an accident anywhere, right? This is how you drive the value of safety is you put a monitor on it, you put a metric next to it and you measure it every day, right? But it's also in the huddle and so what happens? They read it and they go three more days and we're having a free taco bar, right? This is gonna be awesome. They watch the video of a couple announcements, they see all these things, they talk with each other and then off they go, they grab their cart, they go out in the middle and they manage their shift. The Ritz Carlton does the same thing. The Ritz Carlton across every property, across the globe, collects the stories of amazing people, not what happened 20 years ago, what happened today? Every manager on every shift collects the story, sends them to the corporate office. Corporate office every single day reads through all of them and picks five, five compelling stories of the way the values got lived out in practical way that day and then sends them out to the managers of the shifts the next day and so across the organization, across every Ritz Carlton, across every shift, five stories are told. One value among 16 of their golden values, one value is articulated that day. Guys, I just wanna remind you, we have a value for clear communication. You know, just remember, blah, blah, blah. By the way, I wanna tell you five stories of things that happened yesterday that are just amazing. And what have you done? You've started sharing the practical dynamics in the huddle of what's critical to think about, what's new ways to think about this value, what's important and then you send people out and then the next shift comes on in the next day and then it starts all over again, right? We tend to think there's a magic bullet, we tend to think there's a magic something. It doesn't matter if you're a 200% church or a 7,000 person organization, right? The core of it, the real question is, are you pulling people together? Are you talking about the same stuff? Are you highlighting what's important? Are you giving people the freedom and the ability to move so that they can actually live it out themselves, not just point someone to their boss? Are you creating places where they get decision moments? And are you putting senior and junior people together to collaborate on stuff? When you do that all together, even if you're a 200% organization, right? A 200% organization, typically still, if you're a 200% church, your leadership teams, three, four, maybe five people, you still have a meeting once a week, right? Monday morning, you have a meeting. And I tell you, well, that's not enough. That's not enough, right? Tiger Woods looks at you and says, you play golf on Saturday, maybe you do it two times in a week, you're never gonna get good that way, right? And everyone gets depressed 'cause you're like, I thought once a week was really good. - I know. - Compared to the other churches. - Yeah. - That's way more. - No, you, you know, so I, when I come on board in a company, one of the things I do is say, okay, we're having a daily huddle, it's 15 minutes, and people freak out 'cause they're like, we're gonna meet every day. I'm like, yeah, we're gonna meet more so that ultimately we meet less, right? We meet, we meet, we have less meetings, we have less issues, we have less last minute heroics because every day we're engaged with our values, our engaged normative behavior, what's appropriate, every day we're digesting what we learned from the last day, every day we're checking progress and we're finding the roadblocks and we're mitigating them. And if you do that daily huddle, it's my belief, right? That you're gonna see what Lauren Michael sees, right? You're gonna see that people need to collaborate with each other and that they won't do that by default, but you can force them to do it and that helps. - And Chris, can that be like, I mean, I remember leading very, very small churches, that's how I started, right? And so can it be fairly informal in the early days in other words, you know, I can have a big system with like videos and calisthenics and head office communications. But I remember it's funny because you helped me answer a question. Like I was out a lot in those first few years. I was out multiple nights a week meeting with people, connecting with people, casting vision, getting people together, working on the same team and it felt like an awful lot of work for the size of the churches at the time. But I think in retrospect, to some extent, I mean, I haven't done this perfectly at all over my life, but that's what I was doing. I was trying to get people to work together, you know, newbies with seasoned people and cast a common vision and a common vocabulary and a common strategy and get people moving in the same direction. And so can that be informal as well as normal in the early days? - Yep, yep. In fact, every time I step in a new organization, and I recently did about six months ago, I stepped in this organization and I changed everything. And I was like, okay, we're meeting. Like, what are we gonna talk about? I'm like, well, initially, we'll just, you know, I'll try and make you laugh and we'll talk about what seems important at that moment and we'll go from there. But what's the point of this meeting? Oh, this point of this meeting is that we're all in the same place, talking for a few minutes. That's initially it. And there's some people who are like, oh, this is stupid. I don't wanna be on a call where I have-- - Waste of my time. - Yeah, waste of my time. And I'm like, well, it's not optional. So you have two choices, right? You can come to my meeting or you can move on, right? So you can do that virtual for distance workers, like a 15 minute Skype call or a phone call or whatever. - Google hang out, there's lots of tools these days. Yep. But you realize, if I say to you, Carrie, I have a value for education and you say, I have a value for education. And then we go find some person on the street who comes in the door and says, I have a value for education, right? And one of us means, I think you should get an advanced degree, right? I got my master's degree in leadership. And so maybe you think, oh, well, you need to get an advanced degree. And you go, nah, I don't think it's about, you know, it's about how many books you read, right? Are you a constant learner, right? So I, by the way, I believe you need to be a constant learner and not get a degree. But the point is, let's say I define, when I said I have a value for education, let's say I define it as advanced degrees. And you say I have a value for education and you mean it's constant learning, right? And this other person comes off the street and says, well, I have a value for education. I spent six years grueling through my AA degree. And I did, it took me six years to do two years' worth of work, but I pushed through it because I have a value for education. And what you discover is, it's really easy to say, we have a value for education and mean legitimately, three different things. - Totally different things. Because you think you're on the same page, but you're not. And the only way you discover that is by being in the same place in the same time. You know, to quote Reggie Joyner, you can't be on the same page if you're not in the same room. And I think that's very, very true. So Chris, you know, we're winding down here, this has been super, super helpful, just like a laser, you know, attacking this issue. And I've learned some things already, but you live in the corporate world and in the church world. Do you think churches have a harder time with this than corporations or do you think this is just a general thing that most leaders struggle with? - I think that there are challenges in both contexts. I think the challenges are different. - Okay. - So I don't think that one has it easier than the other, but in the business world, if someone's not performing, you give them a, you give them feedback, you put them on a plan and I may let go someone, you know, in three months and be done and say this is what didn't work. There's a financial guiding underlying driver to everything. And so I have to make decisions quickly. I can't afford to burn six months or nine months or 12 months on someone who's poor performing, right? In the church world, we don't see people cut like that, right? - That's very true. - In the church world, because we value grace, sometimes further than we ought to, we give people a second and a third chance, right? And sometimes that's right. Sometimes that's exactly the right decision. But sometimes, right, in a church world, you find that there's a poor performer that keeps getting passed from one department to another simply because nobody wants to do the hard work of looking at them and saying, this isn't a good fit for you, right? This is not good, right? And so it's a different set of challenges, right? Both organizations face, both context-based challenges. What I've discovered is you don't, when you go get an MDiv, you don't spend a lot of time in leadership school, right? When you go get a computer science degree or when you go get a finance degree, there's very little that teaches you about leadership and management. And so what happens? You still fundamentally have one problem across all context, which is that people are inexperienced at leading and managing others. Their defaults are incorrect. They don't spend any amount of effort or energy learning and growing that skill set. And that skill set may be more important than the core competency of the role, right? - Which is why you can be a lawyer or a doctor and run a terrible business or even go bankrupt. - Exactly right, exactly right. And so I don't think that's a dynamic that happens only in business. I don't think it only happens in the church, but obviously podcasts like this and the books that we write are an attempt to say, it is just as important. If your right hand does your domain specialty well, right? It is equally important if you're gonna play basketball to be able to dribble with your left hand. And that left hand is leadership. And that left hand is management and you have to, and those are two different things, but you have to learn that skill if you truly want to be a high performer. And more often than not, we get so busy with dribbling with the right hand. We get so busy with either being a specific kind of youth pastor, being a specific kind of lead pastor, being a specific kind of GM or CEO that we forget that there's another part of what we need to do that if we don't do, we'll be ultimately the downfall of ourselves and our organizations. - Brilliant theology doesn't create a great church automatically, it just doesn't. Well, that's super helpful. So in the last minute or two, as people are going, wow, that was a lot, a lot, a lot. There's a lot of work to do, I can see it. One or two things to get people started. If it's like, if I could do one thing this week to create a better performing team, any recommendation as to what that would be? - Do I get one or do I get two? - I can get two. - All right. Number one, start meeting daily with your teams. - Okay. - Even if you don't have an agenda, start getting together, even if you're virtual, right? Get together regularly, spend 10 to 15 minutes in that context. You will start developing a common vocabulary, you'll start developing common vision, you'll start developing just a way to monitor and look for patterns. And as people see a pattern, like, hey, tell me what's going on, I'm struggling with this. I've seen that before. I would think about doing this that and keep everybody as equals in the room, right? When you come into that room, right? This isn't the time to say, I'm in charge and here's the things I want to tell you. Don't talk at people and walk out the room 15 minutes later. It's a collaborative dynamic to discuss. So huddle, right? Huddle daily. And then the second thing is find a book. I don't care what book it is, right? You've written a great one on leading through change. I wrote one on high performers and high performance cultures and there's 200 or 2,000 others at Amazon that you can find. But find one book, read the one book and spend the next six months trying to pick out from that one book, one or two things you can do apply over the course of six months to see your organization get better. At the end of the six months, buy a second book, read it, apply it. It means you're going to go through two books a year, right? That's not a lot of books. And yet, more often than not, we read and don't apply or we never read, right? And the problems are the same. You have to get better at what you're doing and you won't get better just naturally. It's not just because you spent an extra year on Earth that you suddenly became better and that your organization became better. - You just got older. - That's all you did. - That's all that happened. - That's all you did. - And so invest in yourself and invest in your team by reading something and trying to apply it. And then you'll get new questions, right? And then you can find someone to talk to and talk it through and work it through and then go and apply again. - Chris, here's a fun little idea and we'll link to your books in the show notes. But I get asked all the time, what are the top leadership books you've read? I'm sure you get that question a lot. Why don't we put a top 10 list together? Why don't you suggest a few titles? I'll suggest a few titles and people are like, "I don't know what book to read." Chris and I'll have a top 10 list in the show notes, so. - Awesome. - We will do that, that's cool. Hey Chris, I know people are gonna wanna track with you. Where's obviously your blog, chrislemma.com, anywhere else where they can connect with you. - Yeah, I'm big on Twitter. I hang out there a lot. And so if you go to @chrislemma on Twitter, you can find me there and follow and interact with me directly. And it's an easy way to do that. Those are probably the two best, it's my blog and Twitter. - And it's L-E-M-A level. - L-E-M-A, yep. So chrislemma.com and on Twitter with the @sign. Those are the best ways to find me online. - For sure, cool. Chris can't thank you enough for the time today. That was a masterclass in team development, amazing. - Thank you. - Well, that was like drinking from a leadership fire hose, wasn't it, but so good and so rich, Chris, thank you. Man, this guy, I'll tell you, he is a heart for church leaders too. He's just helped me out so many times. And like I said, rebuilt my website. I'm so thankful for that. And if you're a blog reader, you know what a lot of work that site was. And like, all I do is write content. That's what I do or voice this stuff. So so grateful for guys like Chris. And clearly, this is a guy who's built some high-performing teams. And hopefully he's helped you build a high-performing team from scratch. And you can learn far more about him at chrislemma.com. That's Chris, just Chris, C-H-R-I-S, lema, L-E-M-A.com. Again, one of the most read blogs on the planet. Hey, if you make the top 20,000, 15,000, I think he's even cracked the top 10,000 sometimes. I mean, that's unbelievable for a guy who blogs out of his house in San Diego. That's just so, so cool. And super generous, just multi-talented guy. So now you got a new friend in Chris. And if you want more information, go to the show notes. It's just carrynewhoff.com/episode. Are you ready for this? We're all the way up to episode 39. How about that? Which means episode 40 is around the corner. And next week I've got Jeff Sarrat. Jeff has been a friend for a long time, just a great guy. And we are gonna talk about churches that reach millennials. So Jeff has been doing some research. Maybe you've read some of his books. He is a prolific writer. He's also a blogger and Jeff's also a friend. And he is gonna be on the podcast next week. And if you're wondering, we talk a lot about this on this podcast. I write a lot about it on my blog, just 'cause I think it's critical that the church hand over leadership to the next generation. And so Jeff's gonna share some research. He's got on a book he's gonna release next year about churches that are actually reaching millennials. Some fascinating stuff with Jeff Sarrat. Episode 40, hey, best way to not miss it is to subscribe. So just go to iTunes and you can subscribe there or on Stitcher or Tune in Radio, or you can just go over to my blog, carrynewhoff.com and get all the episodes there for you too. So thanks so much for listening. We're back with episode 40 next Tuesday. Really do hope this has helped you lead like never before. - You've been listening to the Carry New Hoff Leadership podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) (gentle music)