Hey everyone, welcome to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast where we help you build, run, and keep great teams. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in. Well, today, William, we are talking all about change. It's the new year. People have coming up with their new year resolutions, new goals, aspirations. Some would say dreams. How do we what do we need to recognize in our teams to make the changes required to achieve such goals?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm recognizing a change in that you're here. That's right. Probably a lifelong dream. No. But you're how'd you get ready to be on the podcast? People are going to watch the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Lots of research. I've went back and I have watched every single Vander Blumen leadership podcast that we have done for the past month or so. So in episode 512, when I said no. That's right. He said how much he was looking forward to recording today. I think that's what I heard. Well, I don't remember much else.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so everybody's watching now. I was told I have a face made for audio. But um, you know, uh I had a friend in high school. This is so funny. He wanted so bad to be a DJ that he walked around with a pencil. I'm like, DJ. I love him. He was the weirdest sounding voice ever. I would never listen. It was like Wcreep.com.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it was I wonder, could we get him on one of our podcasts? I wonder what he's up to right now. Well, maybe it'll be a special episode or something. I don't know. I don't know. But you know, it's the new year, and a lot of people have come to the realization that maybe they're in a tough season in their job and they're maybe wanting a career change or something along those lines. How can one go about recognizing, well, you know, this is just a tough season and you kind of just need to suck it up? Or there's something deeper, maybe a longing for change in a career or even in leading a team as well.
SPEAKER_01Such a good question. I I when I look at um people who are looking to make a change and they send us their story and their resume and they trust us at a very holy crossroads. Yep, I become more and more convinced that the time when people initiate and make changes, that crossroads is when you find out what's going on in them. In fact, if you're thinking about interviewing for a job, go back and rethink why you made the changes you did when you changed jobs. Because that's gonna tell more of a story than what you got done there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And and changing jobs it and bad. Hey, if you're leading an organization, probably in the next three, four weeks, you're gonna have somebody come in and say, Can I have a few minutes? It won't take long. And you know what that means. It's a short meeting and they're moving on, and then you've got to deal with change. So the question is, you know, when you are feeling that, oh, maybe my season's come to a close, maybe it's time to make a shift. What's the right thing? Especially if you're in the lead chair. Yeah. If you're the CEO or the exec director or the senior pastor, how do you know? Because I mean, most people listening to this podcast are not here about how to make more money and win friends and influence people, right? Hopefully you're here because you've decided to give your life to a higher calling, uh, whether that's leading a great business in a way like Chick-fil-A or a school or a nonprofit. So if you're like me and you've been a leader, I was a senior pastor for a long time. Anytime I thought about leading, it's like, oh, but what about the people? I can't let people down. So how do you know? Like, how do you know? And and for me, there are a couple things to know when it's not time. Okay. Okay. First of all, it's not time to quit your job on a Monday. Why is that? The Monday blues? It's the Monday blues, particularly. I know not everybody's a pastor, but you know, pastors, uh, you know, Billy Graham used to lose massive amounts of weights on a weight on a crusade without trying. Wow. Because the the energy that's required when you get up to put your whole self out there. If you're a CEO, you know when you publicly speak, it takes everything out of you. What if you're publicly speaking not just about the latest, greatest trend in business? What if your job's to stand up every single week and tell people, this is what God says for you and me today? I mean, that's big. That's pressure. That's pressure. So after that, there's actually studies that show that most great public speakers are somewhere on a manic spectrum. Like they get way high for the talk, and then afterward, it all crashes down. And then you add on to that, um, you get the email from some well-meaning parishioner about how you split in a and split an infinitive or dangled a participle, or you wore the wrong color shirt, or and it's just like, what? So Monday's a bummer. Yeah. Back when I was when it was just me. Yep. So I would, I guess I would sit here and then go sit in that chair and then, right? So back and forth? Yeah, just back and forth, me and the dog. Uh, I actually put on my voicemail for a while, hey, if you're calling me and it's Monday, hang up. Call me on Tuesday. Yeah. And I mean, my friends didn't know what that was about, but the number of people calling saying, I want to consider a new position on Mondays, used to be bigger than all six of the other days combined. It's crazy. Wow. People just have the scary Sundays and then the Monday blues. And so I would say, you know, don't quit on Mondays. And maybe a better way to say it is don't quit when you're super emotional. Wow. You know, you gotta, you gotta rise over that to discern whether it's a real thing or not. And if it's a real need to change, it'll still be there after the emotions calm down. But if you let drama run your life, well, that's that's that's a whole different podcast. So I would say, you know, watch out for the times you're in a big big high or a big low when you're in what's what I think is truly a holy crossroads about whether you should stay or go.
SPEAKER_00So that's that's one piece. That that's great. I think as team leaders, especially when you do notice that change is needed in your team, what what are some maybe best practices that you would say for weighing the risks and the rewards, maybe the feelings of a team member who could be asked to leave or maybe change roles? Or how do you go about weighing the the positives and the negatives of going and actually changing things in your team?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, it's a great question. And it sort of flipped it from should I change jobs to do I need to change the team? Exactly. Right? And I'd say the same rule applies don't do it when you're angry, don't do it when you're emotional, don't give raises just because somebody did one great thing and you're on a sugar high from that one thing. And here's here's what I've I think I'm learning. Uh, every every team ought to have a list of what I call red cards. Okay. Like in in soccer, or my son, who would kill me for calling it soccer, football on the pitch. Yep. Like there are things that if you do that on the field, red card, you're done. And and every organization has them. They're different for every. If you don't know what those are as an employee, you need to figure that out. If you haven't named them as an employer, you need to name them. So everybody knows if I do this, there isn't not a conversation. Yeah. Because a departure from a staff really should never be a surprise. Okay, I did the thing I wasn't supposed to do and it's in the list, and I, you know, as the as the Catholics would say, a lot of them say, you have chosen to excuse yourself from our fellowship, which is the new way of saying you're excommunicated. Yeah. So I'll, you know, it there are boundaries that need to be drawn, but past that, past the singular incidents that are red cards, here's what I'd say: don't look at the moment. Instead, look at the pattern. Remember this there's power in the pattern. If someone is slipping just a little bit, maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe their kid got kicked out of school for a day for fighting. Maybe they got bullied. Maybe something's going on and they've gotten hurt and then they come to the office and they say awful things. You know what? Hurt people hurt people. Yeah. But singular incidents should not determine who's on or off your team unless it's a red card. Because, you know, whether you're leading a church or a business or school or a nonprofit, if you're on Team Jesus, grace wins.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And when that moment comes, show grace. If it's a red card, you can be gracious about well, you threw the red card, we're done. But if it's a moment, show grace and then carefully start watching for patterns. There's power in the pattern. If a person really uh has messed up or should be fired, or or more commonly, is just a different person than when you hired them, and the organization you're leading is a different organization, and it's no longer a fit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You're not married to your employees. And even in a marriage, uh, what's the old line where the woman says, I've been married uh 25 years to him, and it and it's been married to 10 different guys? Yeah. You know, we evolve and change, and sometimes it needs Paul and Barnabas left each other. We don't know why. So look for the pattern. And here's just a real tangible take-home. If you've got an employee that's really just not cutting it, and in church, it's not usually they did the red card. Here's what it usually is. Do you have anyone on your staff that's working just hard enough to not get fired? That's pretty normal. Most everybody can say, so you need to draw a line in the sand and say, this needs to change, or we're going to have to make a change. And you can call it a personal improvement plan, you can call it a corrective measure, whatever you want to call it. But here's the thing make it last longer than two weeks. You know, we're filming this in the uh first, the second full week of January. Yep. I still can't get a treadmill at the gym. It's full. Everyone's gonna lose 10 pounds. New year, new you. I'm gonna balance my checkbook. I'm gonna get a dream job. Uh guess what? Next week, I can have any treadmill I want. Yep. I was just upstairs. I got interrupted by somebody while I was upstairs. And uh I was talking to the instructor that was teaching a fitness class at the gym here at our office. I said, Blake, are you busy right now? And he said, Oh my gosh, yes. I said, New year, new you. He said, Yes. I said, when does that end? He said, next week. So he short lived. So what does that mean when you're trying to make a change as a leader? Well, it means if you want to see whether someone is really willing to modify their behavior, you've got to wait a little while. Yeah, you have to look for a new pattern. There's power in the pattern. And if they can make something stick longer than two weeks, it's gonna show you you might have something to work with. Yep. Flip side's true too. If you're in trouble at work right now or your boss has said, hey, I've got to uh you we've got to have a change here, make a mental note to yourself. Let's make it through three weeks at least of doing whatever they ask. Three weeks, suck it up and do it, even if it's a dumb change, just to show that you have a willingness and an ability to make a change that's longer than the quick fix of two weeks in January.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Let's talk about you mentioned reg cards about how some organizations just have like, hey, you do this and you're out the door. How many? You said warnings, we'll go sports yellow cards for the soccer football fans. How many yellow cards are you willing to give someone? Is it um just again based on the pattern? Is it a three strikes and you're out? Is it, you know, some yellow cards are like, oh, okay, you can mess up a few times with this. You mess up with this yellow card, you get two of those and you're done. Yeah. How do you discern uh the the amount of second chances, I guess, that you give an employee or whomever?
SPEAKER_01Well, it starts with praying for discernment. How do you discern? You pray for discernment. Yeah. You know who the richest guy in the world is? Uh Elon? By a long shot. Do you know who the richest guy in history is? King Solomon.
unknownBingo!
SPEAKER_01Yes, winner winner. You can come back next week, Jared. It's awesome. Let's go. So, what's the key to Solomon's wealth? Did he, you know, he inherited it, got a great head start because he did a good job of being born, David's kid. Yeah. Uh, you know, maybe. But if you remember when Solomon first started leading, he said, Give me wisdom. Yeah. And God said, Oh boy, you asked for the right thing. Wisdom. Now I'm going to give you riches. Now I'm going to give you favor. Now I'm going to give you all these other things. And if you think about Jesus for a minute, think about when he's born, think about what we know about his childhood and his upbringing. Yep. Okay? There's not a lot. No. But we read in the second chapter of Luke, 52nd verse. This is my prayer every morning. I'll I'll tell you in just a second the prayer. But uh we're told that the boy Jesus grew in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and among men or humans, right? Didn't we just came out of Christmas? Didn't we talk about how he was born perfect, right? We did. Yeah. And isn't wisdom kind of I mean, that's what we hear the Holy Spirit's called wisdom. So he was born perfect and he grew in wisdom. That makes me say, you know, if he needed to grow in wisdom, guess what I need to do? So every morning, every morning, part of the morning prayer for me is Lord, just let me grow a little bit in wisdom, stature, favor with God, with you and among other people. Wisdom, stature, favor. Because when it gets back to how many yellow cards do you give, how many, you know, it's not the same as when Jesus says, How many times do you forgive your brother? 70 times 70 or 7 times 70, depending on what translation you read. It's not that. That's human relations. We're talking about work relations, and you really get into the gray. And folks, most of leadership is in the gray. Yeah. And so I would say you pray for wisdom. Yep. Uh how frequently is the pattern broken? Okay. I had a team member some years ago, we don't work together anymore, and I won't out them, but um, they almost got fired like five times in the seven years we worked together. Jeez. And it was, and it wasn't there, you know, they just kept falling back into an old pattern. We just, hey, listen, we need to change that. And then they changed, and then they and it ended up working out fine. We never did fire the person, but sure, if it's far enough apart and they're just sort of slipping back into a bad habit, yeah. Well, you can call people on that, and that's okay. If they're slipping into, you know, in and out of rehab, that's a different thing. So it really is on uh leaders to say, give me wisdom, Lord. That's how you discern. Yeah, and I wish I had a better answer for that, but uh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, let me ask you, you know, we have a lot of pastors and even people in the nonprofit sector. Does that answer change at all for volunteers? Are you giving more of uh Yeah?
SPEAKER_01Well, let's take that from both sides. Maybe you've been volunteering at the same nonprofit forever and you're about to lose your mind because you've gone to the board meeting 8,000 times in a row and they're still talking about the same decision. And you can't, you know what? It might be time for you to change. Might be time for you to quit volunteering. Or leaders, it might be time to make a change in volunteering. It's okay to change. You're not married to your volunteers. Yeah, you're not married to your nonprofit. So for the for the person that's volunteering or serving on a board in a nonprofit, let me just uh challenge you to say, you know, why did you first put time and energy toward this? And do you still feel that calling? Right? And then if you're a leader of a nonprofit and you've got volunteers, well, how do you fire a volunteer? Well, I think we actually have a white paper on that somewhere, but you the way you fire volunteers is the way it starts with how you recruit volunteers. I was such an idiot when I was a pastor, and when it came to volunteer recruiting, I would, you know, August would roll around, uh, the children's ministry is kicking up because school's going getting in session. I hadn't done a great job of recruiting volunteers. So how do you solve that? Well, you know, for a couple Sundays, I'd stand up and stage in the pulpit and say, you know, you should volunteer. And if you think you're too old, there is no retirement in the Bible. There actually is retirement in the Bible, but that's that's a conversation about succession. But I I I didn't take the time to recruit and to interview volunteers. I just did a cattle call, which usually led to a group of volunteers that I never would have chosen to work with. Yes. So so how do you fire a volunteer? Well, it starts with the question of how are you hiring them? Are you interviewing them? Are you putting them through the same steps that you would put a staff person through? Because uh it's harder to let go of someone that's volunteering than someone who's getting paid. So you better make it harder to land the job as a volunteer than as getting paid. Yeah. So so it's it's gonna be all the same dynamics as paid employees, just with more finesse. And I think it takes a little more rigor on the front end so that when you get to the back end, it's it's not as hard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's an easier moment. Lastly, we'll close with this just really quickly for any of the leaders out there that have realized, hey, we need to make a change. A change is necessary in 2025. What's just a quick just something for them to just an encouragement as they go into what could be a very impactful decision for the team that they are leading?
SPEAKER_01Can I can I share my mistake? Sure. Yeah. I went too fast, so I lost trust. Now let me unpack that. If you're the leader of your organization, you probably have a farther field of vision for your organization than anybody there. You're probably feeling a burden to get to the destination you can see that no one else can see. You probably are realizing the clock's ticking. If you're in ministry and it's January, you've already had a bunch of people die in your church. Because Jared, sorry, everyone dies in January. It's like a thing. So the holidays end. You're more aware of how precious time is, and you're probably more inclined to go fast. Yeah. Most people probably aren't as wired to jump into change as the senior leader of a team. So what I didn't do was I just talked about change once, and we're gonna go, and we're gonna go. I had these fabulous people on my team that were more critical thinkers. They were probably more like engineers, you know, like okay, let's make sure it's all right and all the lines match up. And and here they are trying to line up what I just said, and I'm already on to the next step.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know what that leads to? That leads to people saying, Why is he talking so fast? Yeah. The kiss and cousin of why is he talking so fast is can I trust him? If you go too fast with change, you will lose trust. Even if the change is right. Yeah. And you know, you'll say, Well, that sounds like awful. I'm gonna have to wait, I'm gonna have to be patient. You know what patient is the same word as suffering in Latin. Think of the passion of the Christ. If you're patient, you're suffering. So if you're a leader and you say, I don't have time, I don't have time. Well, you may need to make time. You may need to be the suffering servant who's willing to say it more times than necessary, who's willing to paint it. Even when it comes to the employee, that you can tell you just did a year-end review, they're not making it. It's time to make a change. Deciding the change needs to happen, it's okay to have the decision before the implementation. Yeah. But the implementation of losing a team member really should never surprise them. And at the end of the day, people will remember how they're treated at the end of their time at a company long after they forget all the other days. Yeah. So whatever you can do to don't avoid the decision, but whatever you can do to make make it really clear, you know, put people through a process that says, hey, we're not doing well. If you, you know, we need to make some changes. If they don't make changes, we met, we talked about this, there haven't been changes. Like, you most of the time people will just opt themselves out. Yeah. Isn't this a fun podcast?
SPEAKER_00How do you fire people? Happy New Year. Yeah, I know. Well, listen, we know that 2025 is going to be a great year for you. The changes that you need to make are going to make a difference in your team. Thanks again for joining us on the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're looking for more leadership resources, you can find us at Vanderblumen.com and on socials at Vanderblumen. We'll see you again next week where we continue discussing how to build, run, and keep great teams.