Month: April 2017

Three Takeaways from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s New Book on Grief—2017 GLS Faculty Spotlight

Posted on April 27, 2017 by - News & Updates

We are thrilled to welcome Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most powerful women in business, to the 2017 Global Leadership Summit faculty. Her new book on the topic of resilience, Option B, was co-authored with Adam Grant (GLS2015) and releases this week. She is the lead cover story this week for TIME Magazine and appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America.   

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg was on vacation in Mexico in 2015 with her husband and friends when her husband, tech executive Dave Goldberg, passed away unexpectedly of a cardiac arrhythmia.

Sandberg, 47, was left as a single mother of her two children with Goldberg. She writes about recovering from the tragedy and working through the grief in her new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.

The book, which Sandberg co-wrote with her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, takes its name from a moment when Sandberg was grappling with not having Goldberg on hand to attend a father-child event with one of their children.

A friend, Sandberg writes in the book, told her, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the s— out of option B.”

“We all live some form of option B,” Sandberg told Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts on April 24, 2017. “You’ve lived through cancer. People go to prison, people lose jobs, people get divorced, people suffer unbearable loss and the question is, then what? How do we make the most of it?”

Here are three takeaways from Option B on grief and recovering from tragedy.

  1. What you should (and shouldn’t) say to someone who is grieving

Sandberg writes that after Goldberg’s death she discovered she was sometimes the friend who avoided painful conversations because she worried about upsetting the person who was hurt.

“Losing Dave taught me how ludicrous that was,” Sandberg wrote, adding that she often felt invisible after Goldberg’s death and was shocked by friends who did not ask how she was doing.

“The elephant is always there. By ignoring it, those who are grieving, isolate themselves and those who could offer comfort create distance instead,” Sandberg wrote. “Both sides need to reach out. Speaking with empathy and honesty is a good place to start. You can’t make the elephant go away. But you can say, ‘I see it. I see you’re suffering. And I care about you.'”

Sandberg also said she eventually found the courage to explain that it was more helpful if people asked her the more specific question of how she was feeling today, in the moment.

“I did what proved so difficult to do with friends and colleagues face to face: I described how a casual greeting like “How are you?” hurt because it didn’t acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary had happened,” she wrote. “I pointed out that if people instead asked, “How are you today?” it showed that they were aware that I was struggling to get through each day.”

  1. Empathy is nice but encouragement is better

Sandberg draws upon her own experience of returning to work at Facebook to explain how she actually lost self-confidence when colleagues stepped in to pick up the slack for her.

“As people saw me stumble at work, some of them tried to help by reducing pressure. When I messed up or was unable to contribute, they waved it off, saying, ‘How could you keep anything straight with all you’re going through?,'” she wrote. “In the past, I had said similar things to colleagues who were struggling, but when people said it to me, I discovered that this expression of sympathy actually diminished my self-confidence even more. What helped was hearing, ‘Really, I thought you made a good point in that meeting and helped us make a better decision.’ Bless you.”

Empathy was nice, but encouragement was better.

  1. Encourage resilience by avoiding the three P’s

Sandberg highlights the work of psychologist Martin Seligman who identified three P’s that can stunt someone’s recovery.

Personalization: The belief that we are at fault.

Pervasiveness: The belief that an event will affect all areas of our life.

Permanence: The belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.

“The hardest of the 3 P’s for me to process was permanence,” Sandberg wrote about her own grief. “For months, no matter what I did, I felt like the crushing anguish would always be there. … When we’re suffering, we tend to project it out indefinitely. … People also overestimate the negative impact of other stressful events.”

Speaking of the resilience that can emerge from moving past the three P’s, Sandberg said it is what allows you to breathe again.

“Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. It comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning into the suck,” she wrote. “It comes from analyzing how we process grief and from simply accepting that grief. … And in those moments when we’re able to summon our resilience, we realize that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface and breathe again.”

 

Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer at Facebook, overseeing the company’s business operations. Prior to Facebook, she was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google and chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department. Sandberg is the best-selling author of Lean In. Her 2017 release, Option B, is an inspiring and practical book about finding resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks. This post originally appeared on the ABC News website, here.

 

 Guest faculty members are invited to participate in The Global Leadership Summit based on proven leadership abilities in their field of expertise. Their beliefs may not necessarily reflect those of Willow Creek Association and Willow Creek Community Church, and their presence at the Summit does not imply blanket endorsement of their views or affiliations.

Building a Sustainable Business to Solve Issues of Poverty

Posted on April 26, 2017 by - Because of the GLS, Business, Nonprofit, North America, Stories

Lou Haveman with his wife Jan, are founders of Business Connect, an organization that aims to provide affordable, easy access to clean resources, such as water and light, to citizens living in developing countries through the creation of a sustainable, local business model. Lou is best described as the visionary and writer, while maintaining and nurturing his business and donor relationships around the world. He credits the Summit to the success of his business, and the model to use business to combat issues of poverty. 

Someone recently told me, “I don’t know anyone who can ask more questions, and talk to anyone more than you.” My friends describe me as a learner. I love the word “learner.” But I didn’t embrace that description until I was in my early forties and I started attending sales training and motivational seminars.

I learned sales is more than closing the deal. I learned about people, motivation and what it meant to be successful. I also discovered how much I already knew. I was amazed that the single most important part was more about reinterpreting what I knew into contemporary business language. I also learned how important it is to relearn the fundamentals of sales, relationships, purpose and motivation.

Continuing education is important   

Continuing education is the reason our family has attended the two-day “drinking-from-a-fire-hose” Global Leadership Summit event every year for more than 11 years.

Each year, I learn from some of the most knowledgeable, thoughtful and experienced men and women in business and ministry. I’ve been filled, inspired and challenged to think outside of the box. I believe that consistent exposure to strong models of leadership, hearing the stories of struggle and success and taking time to reflect and intentionally look at what we are doing through the lens of the ideas of the Summit have given us a commitment never to give up, trust God and seek improvement on a regular basis. I love doing this together in community with other leaders who want to champion change in our world.

The success of our business improves each year because of the Summit

Lou with the team of volunteers at Maratane refugee camp in 2016 getting clean water from the community well for refugee homes.

The African word “Ubuntu” means “We are someone because of the relationships we have in our lives.”

Our organization, Business Connect, has risen out of the experiences of living in several African countries, raising family there and having friends across many cultures and languages. We seek what other organizations and individuals in ministry do through collaborative relationships.

I am a great believer in empowering lay people, whether in America or around the world, to see their business as a gift and ministry.

Our goal is to be self-sustaining and create a sustainable model throughout the world. Making a profit is not our driving motivation. It is one of several bottom lines.

We want to use business as one solution to solving the issues of poverty. Our products are used as one of many tools to bring people to Christ.

Seven years ago, I was introduced to a simple, but effective water filter. Over the next three years, I helped identify local Christian leaders who imported, distributed, trained, and brought this water filter to some of the neediest and most remote regions of the world. One of our primary customers was Compassion International through whom we distributed more than 300,000 water filters in 12 different countries over a three-year period. We now have sales representatives in 45 countries.

The impact keeps us going

Without a doubt, we are motivated by the letters, emails and pictures we’ve received from our international representatives and purchasers of our products. We hear stories of how families have experienced chronic diarrhea and now are healthier than they ever have been. We’ve seen tears in the eyes of mothers who can now give their children clean, crystal-clear water instead of the silt-filled, cloudy water they drank in the past.

What really inspires me is when our representatives write and tell us helping their own people, communities and their own nation is one of the most rewarding things they have done with their lives.

The Summit makes Business Connect stronger

Attending the Summit can inspire and encourage you wherever you are.

Your influence really matters.

I encourage you to ask the questions, what do you do to grow your own capacity to lead? Who are you influencing? And how can you do it better?

 

BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Posted on April 25, 2017 by - Articles, Execution, Leading Organizations, Vision

Chris McChesney calls them Wildly Important Goals (WIGs). This is where great execution starts. His description of those important, overarching goals reminded us of Jim Collins’ thoughts about the BHAG out of the business classic Built to Last.

Highly visionary companies often use bold missions, or what we prefer to call BHAGs (pronounced bee-hag, short for “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”), as a particularly powerful mechanism to stimulate progress.

All companies have goals. But there is a difference between merely having a goal and becoming committed to a huge, daunting challenge—like a big mountain to climb.

Think of Nasa’s Apollo moon mission in the 1960s. President Kennedy and his advisors could have gone into a conference room and drafted something like “Let’s beef up our space program,” or some other such vacuous statement. The most optimistic scientific assessment of the moon mission’s chances for success in 1961 was fifty-fifty and most experts were, in fact, more pessimistic. Nonetheless, Congress agreed (to the tune of an immediate $549 million and billions more in the following five years) with Kennedy’s proclamation on May 25, 1961, “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

Given the odds, such a bold commitment was, at the time, outrageous. But that’s part of what made it such a powerful mechanism for getting the United States, still groggy from the 1950s and the Eisenhower era, moving vigorously forward.

A CLEAR—AND COMPELLING–GOAL

Like the moon mission, a true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort—often creating immense team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.

A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People “get it” right away; it takes little or no explanation.

The moon mission didn’t need a committee to spend endless hours wordsmithing the goal into a verbose, meaningless, impossible-to-remember “mission statement.” No, the goal itself—the mountain to climb—was so easy to grasp, so compelling in its own right, that it could be said one hundred different ways, yet easily understood by everyone.

Think about your own organization. Do you have verbose statements floating around, yet no stimulating bold goals with the compelling clarity of the moon mission? … Most corporate statements we’ve seen do little to provoke forward movement (although some do help to preserve the core). To stimulate progress, however, we encourage you to think beyond the traditional corporate statement and consider the powerful mechanism of a BHAG.

Reflecting on the challenges facing a company like General Electric, CEO Jack Welch stated that the first step—before all other steps—is for the company to “define its destiny in broad but clear terms. You need an overarching message, something big, but simple and understandable.”

Like what? GE came up with the following: “To become #1 or #2 in every market we serve and revolutionize this company to have the speed and agility of a small enterprise.” Employees throughout GE fully understood—and remembered—the BHAG. Now compare the compelling clarity of GE’s BHAG with the difficult-to-understand, hard-to-remember “vision statement” articulated by Westinghouse in 1989:

General Electric: Westinghouse:
Become #1 or #2 in every market we serve and revolutionize this company to have the speed and agility of a small enterprise. Total Quality
Market Leadership
Technology Driven
Global
Focused Growth
Diversified

 

The point here is not that GE had the “right” goal and Westinghouse had the “wrong” goal. The point is that GE’s goal was clear, compelling and more likely to stimulate progress, like the moon mission.

Whether a company has the right BHAG or whether the BHAG gets people going in the right direction are not irrelevant questions, but they miss the essential point. Indeed, the essential point of a BHAG is better captured in such questions as:

  • Does it stimulate forward progress?
  • Does it create momentum?
  • Does it get people going?
  • Does it get people’s juices flowing?
  • Do they find it stimulating, exciting, adventurous?
  • Are they willing to throw their creative talents and human energies into it?

Grace & Relationship – The Paradigm Shift for the Catholic Church

Posted on April 24, 2017 by - Because of the GLS, Church, Church & Faith-Based, North America, Stories

Dan Tarrant, founder of ReEngaged Ministries and a Summit host site leader in Philadelphia, is on a mission to invite Catholics into a personal relationship with God within the heart of the Catholic Church.

Some think this mission is counter intuitive and impossible.

But the paradigm is shifting.

When the Catholic Church signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999, agreeing explicitly that salvation is “by grace alone” and “not because of any merit on our part,” Dan became burdened with a call back to the Catholic Church.

This time, as a Christian who was also Catholic, he desired to invite Catholics into a relationship with God built on the foundation of grace.

His vision was sparked.

But it wasn’t until he (reluctantly) attended The Global Leadership Summit that Dan’s vision was set ablaze.

He realized the local church, including the Catholic Church, could be the hope of the world.

And Dan has been attending the Summit almost every year ever since.

Be inspired by Dan’s incredible journey.

 

“Figure it out”

God thumped my heart a couple of years ago when one of the speakers challenged us to “Figure it Out” in his message at the Summit. And it wasn’t simply a nice pep talk.  It was the Holy Spirit using that moment to pull me aside and so I could listen to Him.

This is likely the most important takeaway from a Summit for me in my life.

I realized that sometimes God calls us from A to B and then says “figure it out.”  I kept telling God to figure it out and I would follow. But it became clear God was asking me to “put out into the deep” without knowing what to expect and then “figure it out” myself.

So I set out on a journey to figure it out!

My own personal relationship with God, my own experience of Church and my reading of the Bible has led me to two solid conclusions:

The Catholic culture is being called to:

  • learn how to have a more personal relationship with God.
  • rediscover grace in a more authentic and personal manner

I honestly believe the absence of these two things can hold back many Catholics from a transformed life in Jesus Christ.

Pope John Paul II said, “It is painfully clear that many Catholics…have never made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ and the Gospel.”

Pope Benedict XVI said, “Let us ask ourselves: how it my personal relationship with God?” He also said “We are only Christians if we encounter Christ…. Only in the personal relationship with Christ, only in this encounter with the Risen One do we truly become Christians.”

Finally, Pope Francis said, “We believe in Jesus when we personally welcome him into our lives.”

It seemed that Pope John Paul II was saying that many Catholics have never personally committed their lives to Jesus Christ. It seemed that Pope Benedict was calling Catholics to a personal relationship with God and openly declaring that being baptized and then only going through the motions at Mass was not enough to be an authentic Catholic Christian. And it seemed that Pope Francis was saying Catholics need to consciously make a personal decision to welcome Jesus.

But few in the Church were actively responding.

The popes, along with the voice of God in my life, were saying what my own heart and experience were saying.

I was going to have to figure it out.

That was when ReEngaged Ministries was born.

Through ReEngaged Ministries, an organization birthed out of the inspiration and encouragement God prompted at the Summit, thousands of Catholics have met Jesus Christ in a personal way.

In a year and a half we have invited more than 4,000 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and beyond to make a personal decision to welcome Jesus Christ into their hearts in a personal relationship with God, which is grounded in grace alone.

My dream is that the relationship with God I discovered after I left the church can be found by other Catholics within the Catholic community without leaving it.

God calls all of us to be Christian. Christ is not a vague abstract moral principle; He’s a person with a personal plan for our lives.

Whenever I ask God what He wants me to do in this situation or that one, the answer is always the same: “Be a Christian.” It’s so simple. And it’s what I’m doing. I’m being a Christian in the Catholic Church, and God is honoring that work in the church tradition in which I was born.

The Summit is a catalyst

The Summit’s approach of being unapologetically Christian and unapologetically open to learning from everyone has created a genuine space for growth and rest in my walk with Jesus Christ as a Catholic Christian. The Summit experience creates unity with other Christians, changing the Summit from being a series of talks you can just watch at home to something you must attend within a diverse community of faith.

To this day, the Summit continues to give me the vision for leading up and leading courageously without using my circumstances as an excuse. It helps me keep my eyes on grace and growth. And the Summit is the one place where I am almost certain to hear a whisper from God about the future direction of my service to him in a foundational way.

Ultimately, the Summit has helped me be more fully myself fully for Jesus Christ. And in that alone is my peace. Everything else in my leadership life is a fruit of that lifestyle. The Summit has been, and continues to be, one of the most important touchstones in my walk with Jesus Christ within the Catholic Church.