All I Really Need to Know About Leadership, I Learned in Church

By Brian Koehn

Pete took Kevin and me to the Inc. 500 conference this last weekend. Pete is the company founder, Kevin Jones is our Sales Manager and I've been General Manager for three years. PCI made the Inc. 500 list in 2000 and 2001 when it grew from a one-man operation to a company with actual employees. Pete likes the conference because it gives him a chance to hang out with other entrepreneurs, and gives his employees a chance to expand the minds of his employees.

I went to this conference once before, two years ago. At that time, I was pulling my hair out, trying to figure out how to keep up with all the churches that were calling us for systems. I was spending half my days in the shop, sweating like crazy, unable to transfer the sense of urgency to guys that were half my age.

At the conference two years ago, I got some fantastic ideas from a paving stone company that had creatively applied The Great Game of Business (by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham) to their installation crews. Applying those concepts got me out of the shop and doubled the production capacity of our shop crew. As a result, we've been able to hold our case price in spite of significant market increases in almost every component used to make the PCI Cases - wood, carpet, glue, and hardware.

As I traveled to the conference this year I was feeling pretty depressed, but hoping for some encouragement and fresh ideas. As a company, we had had some great momentum through most of last year, but had blundered exceptionally with our biggest church ever. We had spent all of our reserves righting the blunders. Even though we were extended an unexpected amount of grace by the church, had licked our wounds, learned what we could, made some integral changes… it still felt as though our sails were at half-mast.

Upon arrival to the Inc 500 conference, Pete, Kevin, and I spent Friday night in the hotel room discussing what we were hoping to learn from this conference and the challenges that we needed to overcome as a company. As the discussion progressed, it became pretty obvious that the answers we were looking for weren't going to come from this conference. After turning our evening worry session into a prayer session, we slept a whole lot better.

We got to spend the weekend with some of the best and brightest leaders that American business has to offer. Ken Hendricks talked about learning the roofing trade from his father and growing ABC Supply to 3.4 Billion in revenue. Yvon Chouinard talked about living an examined life and running an ecologically responsible business. Tom Peters was even there to talk about excellence. And yes, I got some great ideas.

Through it all, however, I was struck with how much less the business world had to offer in the area of leadership than does the church! I still remember my first leadership conference when my pastor invited me to go with him to learn from Bob Biehl. That was over 15 years ago, but I still remember Biehl telling me “(You) don't ever have to set another goal. (You) just need to carefully and creatively identify problems and figure out how solve them.”

That philosophy, of course, is essentially the same thing as setting goals, but it is so much more energizing to my kind of brain. This way of thinking transforms the "goal" of 500 weekend attenders by year-end to a "problem" We're not reaching all the people this facility will support.

Willow's Leadership Summit, Catalyst in Atlanta, and Leadership Network, National New Church Conference, Launching a Church Conference and many, many others provide incredible insight on what it means to lead. It’s possible that we are always more impressed with those who share our values. As Chouinard says in his book Let My People Go Surfing, "The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welches of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values."

Church Leadership does not have the same leverage of power that business leaders have. Mobilizing and leading volunteers is very different than managing people whose paycheck is at stake. Either way, I think that church leaders have a lot more to offer business than vice versa.

In his monograph, Good to Great in the Social Sectors, Jim Collins writes about why business thinking is not the answer, "We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business’.” Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness.”

In thinking about how this applies to my job here, working for the kingdom at PCI, I realize I've got to keep working at being more like a pastor and less like a manager. John Maxwell taught me that “people don't care that you know until they know that you care.” I've applied that better to my life, than I have to my company. I'm really lousy at setting goals, but I love to work at solving problems.

I'd like to hear from you what problems I (we) should be working on. I’m listening….


You can comment here, or email brian@portablechurch.com or kendra@portablechurch.com