Several years ago, when Shasta College was being constructed in Redding, California, the contractor didn’t install the sidewalks immediately after finishing the building. Instead, he planted the lawn around the entire campus and then waited a year to see where the people wore out the grass. When the year was over, the contractor poured sidewalks in the worn sections of the lawn so that the walkways followed the actual routes of the students and faculty.
We all need pathways—structures—that take into account our strengths, maximize our purposes, and cover our weaknesses. Yet many of us live with structures that were built for someone else or constructed for a different season in life, so they keep us from being fully actualized.
You might be asking how important it is to have a structure designed specifically for you. Well, let me give you a great example of how structures can make or break you.
When America’s forefathers drafted our Constitution, they were interested in creating a very different governmental structure than the British monarchy that once ruled them. They thought Britain’s king had way too much power. In response, they created a constitutional republic to limit our president’s authority and balance the decision-making power among three branches of government and the majority of our citizens.
But as our forefathers contemplated our young country’s future, they realized that a republic is great in a time of peace; but if our nation were ever under siege, a structure with so many checks and balances would process decisions too slowly to win a war at home.
With this in mind, they provided something in the Constitution called martial law. When Congress enacts martial law, our government is transformed into a military structure. This empowers our president to make decisions necessary to win battles without the time constraints of the congressional approval required in peacetime. Even if the United States had the greatest military general in the history of the world as our president, without martial law the governmental structure itself would restrict his or her ability to lead our forces into victory.
It is clearly important to have the right structure in place for the right season. Is it possible that your current life’s structure was built for a different season, that you have been struggling to reach your destiny simply because of an outdated way of doing things? Let’s look at an antiquated structure that resisted a new epoch in history.
It was 1908 in America, and the first Model Ts had just begun to roll off the assembly line. The cars cost $825.00, and Henry Ford was selling them like hotcakes at a loggers’ convention. Before the year was over, Ford had delivered ten thousand of these babies to people all over the country. Four short years later, Henry dropped the price to $575.00, and the sales soared yet again. But people were still arguing over which form of transportation was more efficient: cars or horses. The comparisons raged on, with Ford measuring the strength of their cars in “horsepower” . . . twenty horsepower to be exact.
But the real challenge facing Ford had nothing to do with the automobile itself. All the transportation structures in place had been developed around horses. Narrow, dirt roads had been built for horses instead of wide, paved highways constructed for cars. Stables were everywhere, but there were no gas stations. Farriers were in stables in every town, but there were no mechanics. Veterinarians took care of horses, but there were no repair shops. Even though automobiles were a much better form of transportation, it would be years before America realized the full potential of the car, simply because of the constraints of the infrastructure.
What does this mean for you? Maybe you’re a Ferrari driving on a dirt trail hewed out for horses, wondering why you can’t get any traction. If you’re feeling stuck, it might be a good idea to consider whether the structures around you are conducive to what you’re called to do.
For example, if you are working in a church as a songwriter and worship leader, then an 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. schedule is probably not the best structure for you, because inspiration refuses to be confined to a clock or calendar. You may be in the middle of writing a song, chasing the melody through a meadow in your mind, and then you realize that your shift is over. Yet, you know that you can’t leave, because the vision is fading into obscurity. Therefore, you chase the melody all night and finally leave your post in the wee hours of the morning. But the schedule says that you must be back in your office by 8:00 a.m.!
Creative people need flexibility, so they can chase inspiration without the constraints of a schedule designed for factory workers on an assembly line. This is what we discovered with Bethel Media.
Bethel Media is an $8 million nonprofit business owned and operated by Bethel Church. We started the business fifteen years ago when we began copying Bill Johnson’s sermons onto cassette tapes and selling them to people who wanted them. In the first year our tiny business lost $60,000. Eventually, we figured out that the business had to be moved out of the pastoral wing of the building because the atmosphere was designed around dialogue, not production.
We took over a modular building one hundred feet from the pastoral wing, and suddenly our profits soared. In fact, the second year we made $60,000 in profit! You might be asking, what created such a dramatic turnaround in such a short time? The answer is simple: we built a structure that emphasized and thus maximized productivity. In the pastoral wing, success was measured by lives changed through conversation and prayer. But Bethel Media changed lives through products that people could listen to and watch. The more cassette tapes we produced, the more people were helped by our ministry. Unlike Bethel Church, Bethel Media’s goal was not to build relationships with the world but to produce as many cassette tapes as possible each hour.
We found it impossible to keep people focused on production in a culture built for conversation. In other words, we had the right people, but they were in the wrong structure. The moral of the story is simple: if you want to maximize your full potential, you have to discover, develop, and deploy a structure that is proactively built for you.
Assessing Your Destiny
In my life journey, I have discovered five main questions to keep in mind when proactively creating structures built for success. Misunderstanding the answers to any of these will form structures that limit, resist, or even derail your destiny. The truth is, whatever you misdiagnose you will mistreat.
So let’s take a closer look at these five foundational questions. The following lists are meant to help you process and proactively evaluate the structures with which you are currently living, so you can determine whether they are empowering or constraining you. But these are not complete lists. They are catalysts to inspire you to catalog the qualities in you that need protection and that need empowerment in order for you to achieve your goals in life.
WHATEVER YOU MISDIAGNOSE YOU WILL MISTREAT.
1. Who is leading? The apostle Paul said, “I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment” (Romans 12:3). So the first step to determining what structure will maximize God’s purposes through you is to look inward, and to do so with sound judgment. Here are some examples of questions that might reveal the characteristics you need to be aware of as you consider what structure best complements you and the calling God has on your life.
• What are your greatest strengths?
• What are your greatest weaknesses or constraints?
• Are you an internal or external processor?
• What is your greatest fear?
• What is your greatest passion?
• Are you a visionary or an administrator?
• Are you introverted or extroverted?
• Are you highly relational? Does interacting with people make you feel alive or overwhelmed, intimidated, and exhausted?
• Are you transparent by nature or intensely private?
• Are you good at facing people, or do you avoid confrontation?
• How do you interact with people around you? Are you a teacher, parent, exhorter, inspirer, comforter, or protector?
• Are you a leader or a manager? Are you a risk-taker who lives in the future and is passionate about reproducing the vision you have inside? Or are you someone who values security and naturally creates safe environments where expectations are consistently met and trust is built?
2. Who are the people you are leading? My close friend, Paul Manwaring, is a great leader on our staff. He leads our Global Legacy churches and network. But before Paul came to Bethel Church, he was a prison governor for a juvenile facility in England. I am sure the contrast between the people he was leading and is now leading is obvious, but allow me to explain it further.
When Paul was in England, he led those whom society had to control from the outside because they refused to exercise self-control. Therefore, much of the leadership structure in the prison was based around control, rehabilitation, and cognizant retraining. Conversely, Global Legacy is a network of church leaders, who, for the most part, have excellent characters. They have gathered of their own free wills to be inspired, trained, and equipped to grow their churches and transform their cities.
Imagine what would have happened if Paul had established the same structure for his Global Legacy leaders as he used with his juvenile prisoners, or vice versa. Frankly, leaders make this mistake all the time. They take the structures that worked for them previously and superimpose them over their new leadership assignments. Then they wonder why they used to be so successful but aren’t anymore.
To help you avoid this pitfall, here are some examples of questions you should consider about the people you are called to lead:
• What are the greatest strengths of your people?
• What are your people’s greatest weaknesses?
• Are your people mature or new believers?
• What is the social or economic dynamic of your people?
• What level of favor and respect do you have with your people? Do they trust you? If so, at what level and in what areas do they trust you?
• How do your people perceive themselves? Are their perceptions accurate?
• Metaphorically speaking, are your people civilians or soldiers?
• Are your people lovers or warriors?
• How do your people relate to money? Are they generous, frugal, cynical, and so on?
• Are your people leaders, thinkers, highly educated, politically minded, or followers?
• How do your people relate to you? Are they your family, friends, workers, slaves, etc.?
• How would your people see you? As their parent, leader, boss, friend, spiritual guru, or something else?
• Are your followers infants, children, teenagers, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, or grandfathers and grandmothers?
• When people come into your organization, do they think it’s a hospital, counseling center, army barracks, school, country club, family reunion, worship center, bomb shelter, or party?
• What are the spiritual, mental, and physical conditions of your followers? Are they tired, zealous, sick, healthy, wounded, fragile, strong, hopeless, hungry, overfed, or full of faith?
3. In what season are you leading? The Israelites living in exile in Babylon taught us that life happens in seasons. Read Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 introspectively, and consider what might be your current season:
There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven—
A time to give birth and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill and a time to heal;
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to weep and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing.
A time to search and a time to give up as lost;
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear apart and a time to sew together;
A time to be silent and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.
You must build structures that are relevant to the season in which you find yourself, so let me ask the same question about seasons in a different way. What time is it?
Can you imagine trying to plant corn in the dead of winter, build a house in the midst of a war, or insist that your two-year-old son or daughter learn calculus? These examples seem ridiculous, but leaders do this type of mismatching all the time.
It’s imperative that you understand the season you and your people are in, so you can build structures that are congruent with the times. Otherwise you might find yourself trying to snow ski in the middle of the summer.
Asking yourself the right questions about timing is key to building great roads to your destination, so it would be wise to consider these kinds of questions for every sphere you lead. In other words, if your family is in one season and your business is in another, then two completely different structures are required.
Here some questions to get you started, but you would be wise to develop your own questions that are relevant to you and the organization you are leading.
• Is it a time of war or a time of peace?
• Is it winter or harvest time?
• If your group were a house, would it be time to lay a foundation, install the roof, or decorate the house?
• Is it time to tear down or a time to build?
• Where is this organization in its life cycle: a start-up, growing, mature, in decline, or starting over?
• Metaphorically speaking, is it time to rest by the still waters, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, or celebrate your victories?
• If this organization were a person, where would he or she be in life: having children, raising teenagers, marrying off sons and daughters, writing a will, or transitioning to the succession plan?
4. What are you called to accomplish in this season? As you are determining what your calling is during this time and what structures would support it, remember all we’ve considered thus far including who you are as a leader, who it is specifically that you are leading (and their levels of experience and capability), and in what season you are leading them. You must also consider your organization or community as a whole.
Here are some examples of questions regarding what you are called to accomplish. Again, I encourage you to come up with your own questions that fit you and the organizations you are leading.
• What is the mission (the why) of your organization?
• What is the vision (the what) of your organization?
• What are the plans (the how) for your organization to fulfill its mission and see its vision accomplished?
• What are the goals (the when) of your organization? List specific accomplishments with timelines.
• What has already been accomplished to fulfill the mission and vision of your organization?
• What has yet to be accomplished to fulfill your mission and vision?
• What are prophetic words concerning your organization’s purpose, identity, and destiny?
• What must be done but cannot be accomplished in this season and why?
• What miracles must take place to see the goals of this season fulfilled?
5. What core values are guiding you in life and leadership? When Kathy and I started our auto parts stores, we made choices that determined who we were as a company and how we operated. We had to decide which two of these three core values would define the life of our business:
Price—would we always try to have the cheapest price?
Quality—would we always offer the best parts?
Service—would we provide the best service in the world?
Maybe you are asking, why couldn’t you just have the cheapest price, sell the best quality parts, and give excellent service all at the same time? Well, it’s really simple economics. It costs money to provide great service, because excellent service is directly related to the quality of our people and the number of employees required to service the customers. Quality parts also cost more than the bargain brands. Therefore, if we were going to try to have the lowest price and deliver the highest quality parts while also giving the best service, we wouldn’t be able to compete. Our competitors could simply choose to set the best prices, provide great quality parts, and give very little service. Then we would soon go broke trying to fund our great service through the same profit margins as our competitors who were paying thousands of dollars less in payroll.
In the end, we decided that excellent service and quality parts would be the two core values of our company. We would stay within 5 percent of our competitors’ prices and then use the extra money to fund our world-class service.
We were located in a small town of 3,500 people, and we were located an hour from the nearest city, so 90 percent of our business came from the auto-repair shops in town. Our challenge was getting the right parts to our customers as quickly as possible, which meant finding the right warehouses and then delivering products to our customers efficiently.
We did some research and found three huge warehouses that would service us. The closest one was an hour away, and the others were about three hours from us. With an efficient system of communication and an intricate, collaborative delivery scheme, we provided a parts delivery service that made FedEx look like the Pony Express. Our customers could order parts by 10:00 a.m. and receive them by noon. If they ordered parts by noon, they would receive them by 2:00 p.m., and so on. In the evenings, our customers could place orders until 6:00 p.m. and would receive them at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. We made more than $50 million worth of inventory available to our customers, delivered to their doors within two business hours. We maintained our values of quality parts and excellent service, and we eventually found success.
As you can see, nailing down your core values greatly affects the chemistry of your organization and determines who you will be to the world around you. Here are some examples of questions that might help you understand your core values and how they affect your structure:
• Name ten of your personal distinctions, that is, your core values that give you your unique DNA.
• What virtues determine the boundaries of your behavior?
• Which core values dictate what you allow yourself to dream about or desire?
• Which core values do you use to interpret how different events in life relate to God? How do you determine which circumstances in life are attributed to God and which are attributed to the devil?
• Write a motto that will communicate to the people experiencing your organization what to expect from you. For example, our auto parts store motto was, Excellent Service Is the Crossroad Difference.
• What repeated behaviors do you want your core values to inspire in your team?
• What do you want your organization’s reputation to be? What do you want to be famous for? What repeated behavior will give you this reputation?
Read this chapter with your team and, as a group, write your answers on a whiteboard. Not only will clarity come from this interaction with your team, but an image or vision of who you are called to be and what you are called to do may emerge.
Now go forward, and structure your holy mission.