Latest / Church Staff Book Club / Are You Planning to Fail?
Transcript
- Jonathan Malm: Maybe I didn't hear from God. Maybe I didn't hear from him correctly. Hey, welcome back to the Church Staff Book Club. My name is Jonathan Malm. My name is Jason Young. We are now into our third book. Our first two books were the Comeback Effect book Jason and I wrote together. Second book was the Emotionally Healthy Leader. Fantastic book about emotional health as a leader. But we decided to go a little different direction. Our goal is to kind of get some breadth with these books to get leadership. practical, emotional health, all sorts of different topics that can help us. Because we believe that we learn better when we learn together, and we should be learning more than just specifically what applies to our jobs, specifically what applies to our current problem. But hopefully in exploring these books, we can figure out some really practical ideas, some really good contextual ideas that work for us for what we're currently dealing with. So our third book is How to Get a Return on Failure by John Maxwell, a few of you've probably heard of him. He's a good dude. This is his latest book and we decided let's just do a current one. We've done some older ones. Let's get real current with this one. It just came out two or three weeks ago whenever we are recording this podcast. So really fresh. This book is about failure. Jason and I are both fans of failure. In previous books we've talked about, we've talked about the importance of failure and embracing failure. So it's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts. But what do you feel like this first chapter really, what was the benefit of this first chapter, Jason? So I'm gonna take one step back and even bring out a question. It's the very first sentence in the entire book. And it comes from the introduction, which a lot of people do not read. It feels like it's a throwaway. This one at is like two pages. It's short, it's tiny. short. And the question, the very first sentence is a question. in an introduction, it says, what separates successful people from unsuccessful people? And so I think that tees up the whole book. And just kind of like in these bite size pieces or these bite size steps. And this first step is thinking that failure always costs you something. And I think the question that we have to ask is like, do you get anything back? So if it cost me something, do I get anything back? And the only way to get something back is if I learn from it. so really- Here's a counterpoint to that. I would say success costs you something. Yeah, true. You know, what is it? New levels, new devils, more money, more problems, whatever phrase you want. It is, you know, as you make more money, you have more problems. As you get that new, I was talking to my wife the other day and she's like, you know, she was thinking about her boss. She's like, would it be interesting? Would it be nice to be that person? I'm like, I don't think you would enjoy that because the amount of responsibility, everything falling on you, you know, right now she can call in and, you know, it's not her, it's not her responsibility to cover for it, but it's her boss's responsibility. So there is this truth to success breeds more problems. Success costs something, failure costs something. So what's going to benefit you more in the long run? I don't know, I feel like sometimes the return on failure is higher than the return on success in a weird way. Yeah, which is kind of how this first chapter starts out. It's like a reframing of failure because if you're listening, watching right now, you may say to yourself, but it doesn't feel good. I don't like the idea of failure. And what's interesting is when you start, looking at failure, one of the key components, and we're going to talk about reframing it, one of the key components is we're trying to protect our self-worth, we're trying to protect how people see us. And I think if you'll hang in there with us throughout this book, the conversations, we think there are some practical tools that can help begin kind of to turn maybe the Titanic a little bit, Titanic being us as leaders. the way we see failure because you could see it as only a loss or you could see it as an investment, which presents this question. Let me ask you this, John. How do most people... naturally view failure. think most people assume that failure is a ⁓ final instance. I mean, we've all heard the sermons about failure is not futile, is not final, is you know, like the three F's of failure, right? But there is this sort of finality to failure. If I fail, I am a failure. If I fail, this business that I run, this ministry that I run is done. I remember my brother, my brother asked me one time, my brother is kind of entrepreneurial in spirit. as well, he's a teaching pastor, he does these leadership expeditions, he runs like a resort, I mean, what's it called? Getaway, what's it called? Like a retreat center. Like a retreat. That's what it is, retreat, you run away. He does all these things. And he asked me, said, Jonathan, what would you do if your businesses failed tomorrow? And I was like, I'd probably just go work at Starbucks and then start something new. And he was like, that's. Whoa, like that start something new was kind of like revolutionary to him. Cause he's like, ⁓ you just like brush off the failure and move on to the next thing. That's my perspective on life is I just, I just go here, I go here, I go here. He was coming from the perspective, like if I fail, it is done. Now what? What's the next season? But I'm like, it's just the opportunity to start something new. And that's easy for me to say, or that has been easy for me to say in the past because largely my projects have been run by myself, you know? I run a blog, I run a website, I start a company and it's me, maybe a business partner, you and me, Jason, it's us two. There's not a lot of stakeholders in it, right? Sunday Social, the company that I run, has grown to a point where there are a lot more stakeholders now. If Sunday Social fails tomorrow, there are six or seven or eight people that now need to scramble to find a job, right? The stakes do get higher and that's, I think sometimes why failure becomes more scary. is, you know, it's easy to fail when you're in college and you're a startup and you're just like, you know, you know, just, I want to start this ministry. I want to start a teaching, you know, I want to be an evangelist. I want to just, you know, work with people. Now, suddenly you've had some success and now you have people that are relying on that success. And I think that's sometimes the fear. So there's the, the fear of it being final, but also because there is a final element for some of these people. Like if they're benefiting from your risk, the failure can be final for them if it's one of those complete failures, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point. And I think that that's what this conversation is about. That what if failure isn't final? It may feel that way. And I think that's a whole nother conversation is separating the emotion of it from the truth of it. Right. And where are you drawing your conclusion from feelings or from the facts. and the one thing that you said I think is so huge is separating the failure of something from your identity. Right? And they're not the same. You are not a failure. That thing that you did, the idea, the business, the like, it might have failed for one or 10 reasons, but that is not defining your identity that you are a failure. Again, it may feel like that, but I think this conversation is like, do the facts say? And, know, unpacking that. Okay, so let me ask you a little bit of like a step forward question. What could shift So if most people naturally view failure like you just described, what could shift if I were to start viewing failure differently? Yeah, one of his seven points in this first chapter ⁓ was, let me see, focus on the big game instead of the playing game. know, that's nice and clever, right? But for me, I think he's great at doing. He's got these little... Yeah, he's so good at it. I think of the big game as being important. I always kind of equate ⁓ business, everything that I do, almost to fencing. I don't fence, but I think I know the concept. It's, you the idea is Maybe that should be an episode. Me living to fence. Yeah, fencing would be a remarkable episode. I'm here for it. Yes. We'll schedule that. fencing, idea of fencing is you're kind of testing your opponent for weakness. You're testing- You yes, you were actively in the game, right? You were actively in the battle, if you will. But the point of fencing is that you're testing, you're trying, you're adjusting, you're... So every poke that I have, I don't necessarily overcommit myself initially until I've decided that like, ⁓ that is the thing. This is the strike. I have done the work to discover this is my strike, right? So there's a little bit of conservativeness, but you're still risking every time you're risking whenever you go in for a swipe, because they can swipe back, right? So I think of that with business. I do tons of tiny risks every day. I try something, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I think so often we assume risk is one big thing. It's when we go all in with our chips. It's when we, know, whatever analogy you want to use, we think of it as a one big risk and if we fail it is that. And I think maybe this book is hopefully helping us take the shift, the mental shift of is like, no risk all the time, fail all the time, learn all the time. And then when it comes to that time to go all in or to fully commit yourself to that strike, you have done the work, you have learned the stuff to know, okay, this risk is worth going all in. This risk is worth committing myself fully to. I think that's the big thing, right? And I think that's what, like, whenever I think of my team, you know, we're constantly taking tiny risks here and there. We'll launch a new thing and, it didn't work. We'll launch another thing, ⁓ that didn't work. you know, some of it's led by me, some of it's led by my team, and I don't really care if they fail. you know, let's try some, again, let's try those little thrusts and see where the market weakness is or whatever you want to call it, right? And I think that's the big thing is if you start to shift your mind to make... tiny failures to regularly fail or regularly try, I guess. It's not so scary when then you need to go all in. So if we need to make a massive change with Sunday Social, like, this could be the big risk. We're kind of in that stage right now. We're taking a big risk. Will that fail? I think we know enough to know that it won't, but it's always a risk, And if it does, ultimately Sunday Social won't fail. We'll start something new, right? We'll pivot, we'll adjust, but it's never final. And I wonder if how our perspective or what our perspective is, is directly related to the potential payoff, right? And I think sometimes we, in an effort to avoid feeling something or being seen as a failure or, you know, avoid impacting people that might fall into that kind of... in a ripple effect of the failure, we just avoid it. Forgetting that avoiding it also has a cost associated with it. And I love what you said that if we did these small risks, because you're right, risks sometimes like I'm all in, kind of the whole farm versus it could be as simple as, let's just make it so practical. You think telling a particular story in a sermon, like this is going to be it. And you tell it and you're like, well, that didn't go over well. That's a little bit of a risk or ⁓ outside of the norm. don't normally tell stories, but I'm going to, or this story, you know, maybe it's a little edgy, know, yeah, whatever you. Yeah. Maybe you lead volunteers and you have, you know, these volunteer huddles and you think, ⁓ I'm going to change up our approach. I'm going to do it this way. And the payoff wasn't as big as you thought. Instead of like tucking your tail and hiding, you learn from it, you make necessary adjustments, and then you show back up, right? I remember watching this talk, I don't know where the talk, where this lady did it, but she was talking about resiliency and failure. And she said for her, where she learned failure and resiliency and kind of perspective taking, because she was all about avoiding it. is she learned it on the dance floor and she would go to these open places to dance. And she said, you know, just imagine like, ⁓ if I walked up to Jonathan and asked Jonathan to dance and he was like, no. And then I go up to so-and-so, Sally, no. And it was this kind of rejection. You felt like a failure, but I want to dance. And you just ask the next person, right? You don't walk off the dance floor and never ask anybody and avoid it again. It's just, you just keep showing back up. And it really built this resiliency strength versus what for many people do is avoiding failure because avoiding failure, you know, has a cost. I've seen this in leadership. Heck, I've done this in leadership because I want to be seen as competent. Yeah. Right. And, but that might mean I stay stuck or we do the same things or I try to get it so perfect until we're ready to deploy it. Well, I might've missed the window. or it's still going to get tweaked even when I think it's perfect when we deploy it because putting it out in the wild versus working on it in the lab are two different things. The lab generates this out in the live wild is this. So all of that to say is any decision we make has a cost associated with it. We're just weighing what those things are. So let me ask you this. Do you think when we think of failure, Do you think the fear of failure limits a leader's growth? 100%. I do think there's this element of entropy that we need to consider that like, if we don't risk things naturally decline. I was talking to someone about this, you we were talking about the book industry actually, or just any industry. think he was, you know, he'd been approached for a lot of different TV shows, for hosting TV shows. And he was just discouraged because he's like, they just keep falling through. keep falling through. I was telling him, I'm like, here's the problem is that ⁓ why don't you just start your own industry? Right now, the industry is being disrupted by YouTube, by Spotify, by TikTok, by all of these things, right? Like the industry. And now they're starting to realize, ⁓ we have to take some risks. I mean, we've experienced this with book launches, right? Like where like our marketing team meets with us and they're like, hey, our idea for your marketing for this book is, we're gonna put an ad in Outreach magazine. And I'm like, that's the default, that's the lowest hanging fruit, right? But we always do what's done before, we don't take risks. And the entropy that's happening in industries right now is that if they don't take risks, they're declining. And the time to take the risk is before the decline. So for the leader, the time to take the risk is before things are on the downward trend, right? Yes, there's still, you can still, take that risk and salvage the ministry or salvage the whatever. you do, I don't think you realize the harm that not taking risks does to you until things start going badly. And then you realize, ⁓ I'm behind the curve. I did not take the risks early when I should have. I'm trying to teach my son that right now, right? Like in school is the safest place to fail. I think we've grown up with like the F is the bad thing. The A is the good thing. If you get an A, you get ice cream. If you get an F, you know. You just started shoved your face is shoved into books, right? But like school is the safest place to fail. Like that's how it should be. But we've made it such a scary thing. If you fail this, you know, if my son fails kindergarten, nobody cares. Honestly, like it really doesn't matter. But like for me, you know, as a parent, my son failed kindergarten. That's horrible. Right. I think it's a matter of reframing all of failure that as a good thing. But here's, here's a question I have for you. Cause I think this, as I was reading this again, for me, failure is like, okay, seven stakeholders, eight stakeholders. My customers, if Sunday social goes down tomorrow, it doesn't really matter, right? Customers will find another thing, right? But I think some of the failure, fear for people who work in churches, and that's not what's addressed in this book, but is that if we fail and 10 % of people get mad, or if we lose these key volunteers, it's not just me that's suffering, it's not just the team that's suffering, it's all of the church. So, you maybe you have four staff members, you're the pastor, have four staff members, or you know, whatever. But then you also have 500 stakeholders that are in the church. They're not just customers, they're not customers. Like it hurts when you fail and they feel the blowback of that. And I think that that's the fear, right? If you're working in churches, it is not a small thing to fail. It is a big thing. What would you say to that? Because I feel like that's the tension that I imagine people would be having when reading this book. Two lines of thought, let me see if I could be concise, yeah, you just chuckled, I knew it. It's like, yeah, right. Let's see. Okay, that's funny. This is your chance to fail. Yeah, I'm going to. So let me just preface, put it out there. So two lines of thought. One, I think there is this aspect in the church when we associate spiritual things, if we're not careful, we become so performative as we think about our relationship with Jesus. if this doesn't go perfectly or if I fail, then he is going to look at me like, seriously, dude, you're such a failure. Right? So we, we create this performative story. That's right. That's right. So we have this performative story track and we put that on him. And I think that is erroneous. So that's, that's a line of thought that we need to address and work on. The other line of thought is maybe like how we do it. Let me see if I can illustrate it this way. remember ⁓ maybe I've told these stories, know, or this story at another episode, but I remember I was leading eight, 900 volunteers. There was a decision that needed to be made that I wanted to make. And it was, this sounds like a simple decision. Instead of... and I inherited this, they were on an every three week rotation. I did some research, I did some survey, figured all that. If I could get down to two weeks. We put this in our book. I think this was likeable leader, we put this in. Yes, we did illustrate this somewhere. So I thought, well, let's reduce that to every two weeks. Well, this was a major risk because they had never done this before. You increased the amount of times you're requiring them to volunteer, which is like the opposite of what people tend to do. That's right. And it's not because you were lacking in volunteers either. wasn't that, right? Nope. know it was, I knew if we can increase repetition, we could increase what we know and our practice means we are doing it better. It builds better community and relationship. I see you, cause imagine if we're in a three weeks and I don't see you cause you're sick or traveling for one. Now it's six weeks, right? So it's like, all right, let's shrink that a little bit, which means asking you to show up seven more times annually, right? That's not a lot. If you put in those terms, that's not a ton. It's not, but when I rolled it out on the first day, 210-ish volunteers quit. So the risk... was what's like a 25 % or something that's 25, 30%. That's a huge, that's a huge strike. And people were emailing the pastor and you need to get rid of Jason. And what are you thinking? One guy was like, do you know how much I give to this church? And, know, on and on probably much of what some of you listening or watching have experienced. It's scary. And you know what? In that moment, I felt scared too, but I knew the risk had to be made. You say, well, What was the, is that the end of the story? No, it was for a little bit. And it felt like, man, I'm in trouble. Fast forward 90 ish days or so. And we ended up working really hard and we added back to the team about 350 volunteers. You say, well, that's a scale I'm not familiar with. The numbers are a bit irrelevant. It's the idea that I didn't see the end of the story when I... was at the beginning that I knew something, a decision had to be made and it was risky. And so stepping into that, realizing this is what the team needs, not knowing the end of the story. And could I have done some things better? Yes, a hundred percent. That was on me. Communication, rollout, things of that nature, right? So the risk was worth it. And what I learned is I could have done a better job with the timing of it, the rolling out of it. kind of prepping certain groups of people with it, that kind of thing, a little bit better. But the risk was worth it. Our numbers increased, our performance, you say, well, performance, sounds very secular. The way we showed up for guests, the way volunteers showed up for each other, all of these things got better by simply increasing the repetition, right? Shrinking, you know, the gaps in between volunteering. So nonetheless, it was a risk for me. but it was worth the risk. And so I think about this, you can't grow without friction. And I think for me, the friction was I needed to take the risk to feel the friction so that I could experience the stretching and take the risk. And there was some moments, some things I failed in along the way, but the risk overall was worth it. Well, I think true humility, not false humility, but true humility. goes a long way in creating grace for these moments. You know, I mean, there's so many times that I take, that we take a risk with Sunday social and I'm like, hey, let's do this. I really think it's going to work. I could be wrong though. Let's go through this together, right? Like, so like, what I do is I share the burden a little bit, but I share the like, you know, hey, this could fail, like it's okay. And I think that goes a long way. think a lot of times we make, you know, in our desire to be visionaries, in our desire to be, you know, like, hey, we're going to do this, we're going to launch this new service, and it is going to work, because we're going to reach new people, you know, like, I especially think of churches launching a Saturday night service, right? Saturday night services are a tough thing to launch because, you know, people tend to think of church attendance on Sunday morning, right? So you're basically building from scratch a Saturday night service. There's not a lot of people that want to go to a Saturday night service initially. And it's only whenever you've had it for like six months, it's like, ⁓ my gosh, Saturday's amazing, right? But like that launching that you're visionary, we're gonna reach new people, but like you don't. And then you say, okay, what do you do? What do you do at that point? You say like, God was wrong, God showed me this vision. Like, what do you do? And just say, I might've heard wrong, but that humility goes a long way. But I think also the other key, and you kind of alluded to this in what you were saying is that failure is not full. So first of all, you didn't fail. That was a success, You regained a bunch of people back, but there were little moments of failure. And I think that's so often, you we have tiny failures here, tiny failures there. Sometimes the failure feels pretty central, but maybe some other things actually did work out. Some other things were successes in that failure. And I think just seeing that way, again, it's not so often we think a failure is like putting all the chips in and then the other person had a royal flush. I don't do poker, I don't know what this is, right? I'm just, I've heard this. But you know, the other person wins and we've lost everything and now we're bankrupt. Like we think of it as this full failure, but that's not how life works most of the time. It's not an all or nothing situation. And I think that could hopefully take some of the burden off for people. And so another thing that, portion of this book that I liked or this first chapter was this idea of planning for failure that he said. And I had some pushback because planning for failure sometimes can feel like anti-faith, right? Like Peter, when he stepped out of the boat, did not plan for failure. ⁓ He didn't have floaties on just in case it didn't work out walking with Jesus on the water, right? So what's the balance of planning for failure and having faith, especially in ministry, where sometimes we feel called by God to do something. And we hear the stories of like, know, God told me to do this and if it didn't work out, I had nothing to fall back on, right? Like, what's the balance there? What do you think the balance is there? Yeah, it is interesting because if you, if you just hearing the phrase plan on failure, you're like, so does that mean I leave room for it? I expect it. kind of, he kind of pees it up as having almost like a backup plan or like a get out of jail card or, know, something, something to like, what's going to happen if things don't work out? Like it's almost like a backup plan, a plan B. Yeah. I think. Part of this goes back to what you said earlier. I think when we put something out, we expect that thing that we're putting out to be final, a final version, you know, a final, ⁓ like if you're writing a paper, know, nobody really loved creating a rough draft. Just let me write the final paper and turn it in, right? And so when we think about a plan B, it's not like, well, I'm gonna create something plan A and then I'm gonna create this whole other thing plan B. Part of it is, I think is the posture we have to what we are creating that we realize what we're putting out there isn't final. It is in essence a draft. And if when we think about it that way, it allows us to begin to think about this plan B or this other version that is going to come, an informed version that is gonna come from maybe the first version. That's a really good way to at it. Yeah, so it's like, I'm putting this out there. We're going to give ourselves permission to say, you know what? That's not the final version. It's a really great working draft, which for many people listening, and if you struggle with perfectionism like myself, it almost makes you feel a little bit icky because it's like, no, we need a ⁓ final thing. But if we lock ourselves into that too much, we in essence could be rejecting the next version that could be the better version than the first version, right? So your second draft should be better than your first draft, because there are some things that you learn, some insights that you gains, perspectives that people shared with you. But I am still convinced that one of the main things related to failure is how we're viewed or our self-worth or our competency or our image. or maybe somewhere along the way in childhood or young adulthood, or somehow it came up that it's just a performative life that you live. And if you don't perform and get five stars on everything, then you're a failure. You're subpar. And, you know, I would like to say it this way, that in the emotional aspect of failure, feel it, but don't live in it. Yeah. Right. So, man, golly, that is disappointing, right? You're not ignoring. but at the same time you're not accepting and staying in it forever. Yeah, you know, it's a thing. And so again, put that draft out there. It's pretty good. It could be a final version, but I realized that it's not gonna be. I'm gonna learn some things and then that next version is gonna be even better. But I have to have a posture of curiosity and openness. And the only way to get better at doing this is to give yourself just repetition after repetition. And I think it's what you said earlier. What are the small risks that you're not betting the whole farm? Small little risks, telling a story, doing this, doing that, that you can get your reps and maybe you could say it this way. This is really where your leadership shows up. Illustration. If you take a risk and it fails, my first reaction to that failure, that shows the human part of me. ⁓ man, I'm disappointed. man, that makes me mad. I could have done blah, blah, blah, better, whatever. That's the human part of you. But what you do next is the leadership part of you. And so when you look at failure, feel it, and you're like, ⁓ that kind of that first reaction, human. But what you do next, that's where your leadership is on display. And people are going to begin to understand how you handle risk and failure. And it really shows the type of leader that you are. And I would even say it is the faith part of you because, know, there are times you're following God and you feel like he's leading you somewhere specifically and you still fall flat on the mat. You know, you get punched and you thought that that was not going to happen. And so it is really just planning on that. Hey, maybe planning for failure for the believer is about planning that maybe I didn't hear from God. Maybe I didn't hear from him correctly. There's a humility there. Or maybe what God was actually calling to me was a step, not the whole picture. I think so often people think that God, you know, some people maybe hear this way from God, right? That like, God gave me this whole vision of exactly what it was going to look like, right? ⁓ But that's not the case. I don't think that God gave Moses the picture of the promised land and all the battles they were going to be facing from Egypt to the promised land, right? He gave him the promised land. but you didn't tell him how he was gonna get there. And there was a lot of missteps, a lot of redirections. ⁓ So I think that's it. There's maybe the faith element is understanding that God sometimes doesn't give you the full picture for your own benefit so that you can at least take the step. And maybe the step you thought you were going this direction, but the step was to get you to go the other direction instead. So that's maybe where that faith element comes in. But hey, we're at the end of our time here. ⁓ We hope this was a helpful. podcast episode for you. If you want to grab the book, it's been a good book so far. We still have a few chapters to go. It's a short read. We'll go through the next chapters. If you don't read the book though, that's fine. Just follow along with us and we'll all learn together. But make sure and subscribe if you haven't already and we'll see you next week.