Why These 2 Values are a Must When You Want to Innovate

I was leading my group coaching call when I heard the comment “This is going so slow, how do I get people to follow me? Will things ever change?”

Can you relate?

Let me start by saying you are not alone!

Whenever change efforts feel slow, it can start to feel like a lost cause.

And once we start to question if our efforts will have the results we want for our people, we consider quitting. Before you quit (or start) there are two values that are non-negotiable for people to follow you, especially if you don't want to rely on your title or position.

Every time we ask someone to try something new, we’re asking them to take a risk. It might be a calculated risk. But it’s a risk, nonetheless. And every risk asks us to put aside the familiar and to risk “failing.”

If you see a better future and know that you need to try new things to get there (because continuing to do the same things will simply lead to the same results), you need people to follow you. This means that you need to be a leader who people are willing to trust.

If we want people to be willing to try new things by taking risks, we have to be trustworthy leaders who take risks ourselves.

The truth is, we can’t build church or organizational cultures on values that we don’t personally value. We can’t sustain that over time. So, we need to ask ourselves “what culture are we creating, building, and personally leading?”

Create a trusting culture

Trust is vital for our relationships with the people we lead and serve. If we invite people to try something new (for pastors, especially with regards to their faith) we need them to trust us.

Since there is an inherent about of risk involved whenever we’re trying something new, people are only going to try something new with those they trust. Who wants to potentially fall flat on their face in front of people they don't trust? (I did it once walking across an empty stage before the band came on and let's just say I was mortified.)

Some people will inherently trust you because of the office you hold as a pastor or manager or executive. Others will make you prove yourself trustworthy before they trust you.

The reality is, establishing trust always starts with us as leaders.

Once, when I started a new position I made the mistake of believing people would inherently trust me because of my new title. I had never not been trusted before in my life. And so, I found myself in a new position in a new organization and the majority of people who I needed to trust me in order to be effective in that role, didn’t.

And I’m so thankful they didn’t. They shouldn’t have. They didn’t know me. But at the time I was dumbfounded that they weren’t willing to step out on a limb with me.

Without their trust, I couldn’t move forward with what I was responsible for. Thankfully, I had built trust with a legacy partner who committed to helping me and who became my ally.

Because I was new to a community that had been together for decades, I needed an ally to partner with me until I had authentically gained people’s trust on my own merit. And I doubt I could have done it without the partnership of that legacy member.

So how do we become trustworthy people to follow? We can’t expect others to trust us if we don’t first show them that we trust them. Some ways that we show that we trust others are through:

• our transparency with them,
• our ability to share power with them (not merely loan it), and
• the degree to which we give them the authority, resources, and ownership they need to implement their own ideas.

A high degree of mutuality has to exist in order for genuine trust to exist. And a high degree of trust is vital to people being willing to try something new. And so is a culture of risk-taking.

Create a risk-taking culture

There is no way to avoid all risks when doing a new thing. We cannot with 100% certainty know what the outcome will be when we try something new. Even if it’s a calculated risk that you took after listening and asking a lot of questions.

Did you know that for the greatest inventors throughout history, the risk of not finding the solution to their problem was greater than any failure they could experience? And not achieving their desired outcomes weren’t failures anyway, they were simply opportunities to learn.

In Acts 16, it says that the Holy Spirit prevented Paul and his companions from preaching the Word in the province of Asia. I can only imagine that they figured this out because they tried to preach the word in Asia, because they likely wondered if that was what God was inviting them to do. And the doors simply weren’t opening.

When our church and organizational cultures lack creativity and the capacity for change and innovation, it is very likely that risk-taking has traditionally been corrected, punished, and/or ignored and often on the altars of tradition (and theology).

As with trust, creating a risk-taking culture starts with us as leaders personally modeling it.

As we embrace risk-taking for ourselves, there are several ways that we can create cultures in which risk-taking is safe by:

• Modeling the way ourselves by the stories we share, the way we lead meetings, and the questions we ask, and
• By ensuring that trying new things is viewed as an experiment or a trial.

When trying new things are viewed as experiments, trials, prototypes, beta tests, etc. it’s easy for people to accept them as learning opportunities. When new ways of doing things are framed in this way, the fear of failure is removed because there is always something to learn from any type of outcome, whether it is the intended outcome or not.

Jesus told his disciples about a man who was going on a journey, and before leaving, entrusted his property to three of his servants. To one of the servants, he gave $5,000, to another $2,000 and to the third he gave $1,000. The servant with $5,000 immediately doubled his master’s investment as did the servant given $2,000.

However, the third servant, afraid of disappointing his master, carefully hid his $1,000 in a hole in the ground. When their master came back from his journey, he celebrated the investments made by his first two servants and upon hearing of the third servant’s ‘play-it-safe’ approach, responded “That’s a terrible way to live! It’s criminal to live cautiously like that!”

As the leaders of congregations and organizations, we get to create cultures where “playing-it-safe” is no longer the status quo, rather trusting God, trusting each other, risk-taking, and trying new things becomes the norm as we discern what it means to serve and lead in the 21st century.