Fairness Is Overrated: And 51 Other Leadership Principles to Revolutionize Your Workplace

By Tim Stevens

Discover the tools of leadership to revolutionize your workplace.

Tim Stevens traveled an alternative road—leaving high school and immediately joining a national non-profit organization. He rose quickly through the ranks of leadership, but nine years later left it all behind to help an upstart church get its footing. During the 20 years Stevens served as Executive Pastor at Granger Community Church near South Bend, Indiana, the ministry grew from a congregation of 300 to more than 5,000; from a staff of five to more than 130; with a preschool, restaurant, three campuses and more than 1,800 new churches planted in southern India.

Leaders learn by leading. Stevens knows that creating a healthy and successful organization requires throwing out the conventional instruction manual and writing one that balances practical lessons, spiritual truths, and twenty-first century realities—exactly what you will find in Fairness Is Overrated.

Stevens, now an executive with the Vanderbloemen Search Group, takes his lifetime of service and dispenses with conventional wisdom. Short, powerful chapters end with actionable discussion questions. Four pillars hold up every successful leader: Be a person of integrity. Identify the right people around you. Build a great culture. Lead through crisis.

This is a manual of doing, not talking. No fluff, no stale inspirational platitudes. It’s time to move past planning and kick-start Monday into action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781400206551

Book preview

PART ONE

BE A LEADER WORTH FOLLOWING

MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF A LEADER FALLING WAS WHEN I was in seventh grade. I remember looking out my bedroom window to see two of the pastors from our church walking up to our house. They didn’t look happy. I found out later they were visiting all the families who had students in Mr. Jackson’s sixth-grade class. He had molested some of my friends, and my favorite teacher was suddenly gone.

A few years later another teacher at my school was found to be in an inappropriate relationship with a high school student. During that same year, there were two national Christian leaders who fell quite publicly. I don’t know whether it started becoming an epidemic in the mideighties or if I was just coming of age and aware of it for the first time. But it seems as if it has snowballed since then.

In recent years, several of my good friends have been taken out of the game because of personal choices. Each time it breaks my heart. I hate losing friends. I hate having to be involved in a decision to end their employment because they didn’t live up to the standard of a leader. I hate having to console others through their pain while dealing with my own. I hate thinking back over my time with one of those friends and realizing some of it was built on deception. The pain of betrayal is real, and it happens way too often.

In my world, everyone enjoys a good talk about leadership. We love to go to conferences to hear about a church that is being innovative or listen to a leader who has built an organization from nothing, seemingly overnight. We pay money to learn how to grow our youth ministries, put on more effective services, or get more people in small groups. We eat up the stories of church leaders who think outside the lines to draw crowds. And we lean in when someone says, Forget the crowds. There is a better way to make disciples.

In your world, it might be workshops on improving sales, increasing profits, or doing a better job with guest relations. The bottom line is often the driving concern.

And yet just about every week we hear of another leader who has fallen. It might be having an affair, stealing money, lying to a client, participating in sexual deviance, or something else that takes him or her out of the game. But the person is sidelined, even if for a season, because of personal choices.

When witnessing the falls of some of these leaders, people around me sometimes have responded with haughty shock or judgmental anger. I typically become quiet because I realize I am not immune. I am just a few bad choices away from being in the same boat.

It’s exactly for that reason I write this section. Not because I am the poster child for perfection and morality, but because the opposite is true. I am just as susceptible to a hard fall as anyone who has gone before me.

That is why I want to build guardrails into my life; Mark Beeson, my good friend, calls them rumble strips.¹ Those are the bumpy grooves on the shoulder of a road that keep you from going into the ditch. Without rumble strips, you could be in the ditch before you know it.

No one is going to put rumble strips in your life for you. That is up to you. Your rumble strips may not be the same as mine, and mine may not be the same as yours. But everyone needs rumble strips. It all begins with self-leadership; before we talk about leading a church or a business, we must talk about being a leader worth following.

CHAPTER ONE

LIVE A LIFE WITH MARGINS

A MARGIN IS THE PORTION OF THE PAGE THAT YOU intentionally leave blank. You will notice on this page that the printers didn’t put text all the way from the left side of the page to the right side. Rather, they left space all the way around—those are margins.

Yet in life, everything in our culture is telling us to ignore margins. Spend more money than you make, and you will have no financial margin. Fill your schedule from early morning until late night, and you will have no time margin. Surround yourself with needy people and constantly be reactive to their expectations, and you will have no emotional margin.

Mark Batterson wrote, "You need margin to think. You need margin to play. You need margin to laugh. You need margin to dream. You need margin to have impromptu conversations. You need margin to seize unanticipated opportunities."¹

I want to live a life with margins.

When I live on less than I make, I have the financial margin so an unexpected expense won’t capsize me, and so I can respond in the moment to someone else’s real need.

When every moment of my life is scheduled, I don’t have the margin to stop and listen to someone who needs an ear; I don’t have the time to jump in and help a neighbor fix his sprinkler; I don’t have the flexibility to go to one of my kids’ sporting events that was scheduled at the last minute.

Margin makes you pleasant; no margin makes you grumpy.

Margin allows you to be generous; no margin makes you Scrooge-like.

Margin helps you listen. Without margin, you come across as someone who doesn’t care.

Margin gives you the space to learn, grow, and dream. Without margin you become stale and empty.

Most important, margin increases the chance you will hear the still, small voice of God when he speaks. Without margin, you might continue through life without the blessing of God.

And yet I think it is safe to say that most leaders in America live without margin. We don’t want to live that way, but we find ourselves constantly trying to catch our breaths.

Here are some practical ideas on how to create margin:

• Carve time into your week for margin. I liked to stack all my meetings on two days each week, which gave me margin to be responsive on the other days.

• Live on 80 percent of your income. Set aside another 10 percent for regular designated giving (church, charity, and more). Put the final 10 percent in a separate account to respond to whatever God might prompt your heart toward.

• Know yourself. What drains you emotionally? What fills your emotional tank? Be sure to schedule time to refill your tank with activities that add life to you. (More on this in chapter 4.)

• Minimize the number of life-sucking people around you. It’s okay to have some relationships where you give 200 percent and they give nothing, but if all your relationships are like that, you’ll die a slow, lonely death.

• Every now and then turn off the noise. You can’t hear from God if you are constantly listening to the beep of the newest e-mail, the vibration of the latest text, the alert from your Twitter feed, or the chirp of a new Facebook notification. Schedule an electronic detox on occasion, and take time to listen to God, others, and yourself. This is so crucial I’m devoting chapter 3 to it.

THINK ABOUT IT

1. Where are you feeling the lack of margin in your life?

2. If you made just one change to increase margin in your life, what would that be?

CHAPTER TWO

WHEREVER YOU ARE, BE FULLY THERE

TEENS GET A LOT OF GRIEF ABOUT HOW MUCH TIME THEY spend on their phones. I hear adults say, They never put their phones down! or He is texting nonstop! or I bet she couldn’t live a day without her phone. But in truth, teens do what teens see. And I see adults every day who belittle others because of the bad phone habits that they, too, model.

One day a couple of years ago I got up before daylight and spent hours traveling by plane to go across the country for the sole purpose of a one-hour meeting with some leaders for whom I have huge respect. I had looked forward to this meeting for weeks, waiting to hear their stories and grateful for the opportunity to share what God was doing through our partnership.

During the meeting, there were several points at which each of those leaders picked up his phone to read or type. At the same time, they glanced up at me on occasion as I was talking, said, Uh-huh, then continued to thumble with their phones. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say it was a rare moment in that one-hour meeting when one of them wasn’t looking at or typing on his phone. I’m not a touchy-feely type of guy, but on that day I felt devalued. I felt as if there was something they would rather be doing, but they just didn’t have the guts to tell me that this meeting was not a priority. I walked away from that meeting determined never to do that to anyone.

Here are a few fully there habits I appreciate in others and try to put in to practice myself:

• When you start a meeting, turn off your ringer and move the phone away from you. If the screen comes to life when you get a text, then turn the phone upside down so you won’t see it. If it is likely to vibrate, then put it somewhere it can’t be felt or heard.

• If your phone does vibrate during the meeting and your guest says, Go ahead and answer it, reach down and silence it without even looking. This communicates to your guest that he or she is very valuable to you.

• Don’t buy in to the What if there is an emergency? line. Rarely does that happen. It is not a good excuse for looking at your phone multiple times during every meeting.

• If you know you will need to be reached during the meeting, let your guest know, My wife is at the doctor’s office and may need to reach me, so I apologize in advance that I’ll be taking her call when it comes. That tells your guest this is an exception—you wouldn’t normally do this.

• If you are in a meeting with multiple people, follow the same rules. Don’t convince yourself that your participation isn’t needed so you can disengage and respond to texts or play Candy Crush Saga. We fool ourselves into thinking we can multitask, or that our disengagement won’t be noticed for a few minutes. Not