Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

leadership

What Mazda Can Teach You About Core Values

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With so many options out there, how do you choose?

I remember the first time I went grocery shopping without my parents and feeling paralyzed by all the different options for salad dressing. I only had one job—to buy salad dressing—yet I couldn’t make the decision.

Do I go for classic ranch or caesar? What about garlic caesar? And why are some cheaper than others? Raspberry vinaigrette sounds good too, but balsamic vinaigrette is the safer option.

And now with Amazon and online shopping, it’s even worse. There are over 8,000 results for “salad dressing” on Amazon!

Well, fast forward several years later, I felt the same way when shopping for a new car…

…but this time, I saw the leadership lesson underneath the surface.

Did you know that clay is still used to design cars? No, I’m not referring to a small lump of clay or Play Doh that you model into a miniature car. I’m referring to full life sized models of cars made out of clay!

Okay, to be honest, I didn’t know that clay was ever used to design cars, but it makes sense as a medium…of the past. From 1927 to the end of the 1950s, Harley Earl of General Motors used clay to design cars. But that was then! These days, car companies have 3D printers, design software, and virtual reality at their disposal, so why would they still use such an archaic method for design?

I didn’t understand why, until I came across this one particular Mazda commercial.

Now, is Mazda the only car company using clay to design their vehicles? By no means! Yet, that commercial helped me see Mazda cars as sculptures of art, rather than hunks of metal or utilitarian modes of transportation.

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Authenticity vs. Excellence

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If you had to choose one, which would you choose?

If you were only known for one of these values, which would you prefer?

If your team could be marked by either authenticity or excellence, which would you rather?

Unless you wrestle through black and white polarizing questions like these ones, you’ll never uncover your true bias.

After all, most leaders would publicly choose both, but when push comes to shove, often lean in one direction or the other. So which direction is that for you?

And that’s the thing. It really is a direction. Authenticity and excellence are not opposites. I’ve been a part of worship services that have been both authentic and excellent—in mega, medium, and micro churches. The same is true for concerts, small groups, staff meetings, service projects, and block parties. All of those gatherings can be simultaneously authentic and excellent, but they often lack one or the other—or both.

Authenticity and excellence are not opposites.

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So if you had to choose one, which would you choose? Or better yet, if authenticity and excellence were on the opposite ends of a spectrum—even though they’re technically not in opposition to one another—where would you mark yourself?

If you had to choose one, which would you choose?

Let’s explore the implications of both choices for the teams that you’re on and the teams that you lead.

1. Choosing excellence over authenticity

Teams that are led with a bias toward excellence over authenticity are often high pressure. Workaholics thrive on teams like this. Enneagram 3s and 8s would be attracted to these environments. Projects are prioritized over people. Hard growth metrics are more important than emotional health. You are judged solely on your public persona—as long as you keep your private life private.

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Top Quotes on Didn’t See It Coming by Carey Nieuwhof

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I’m not sure if there’s a more helpful and accessible voice for church leaders than Carey Nieuwhof.

His podcast is on point and his newest book, Didn’t See It Coming: Overcoming the Seven Greatest Challenges That No One Expects and Everyone Experiences distills some of his greatest insights into an easy to read book for all church leaders.

You’ve probably seen his book around, but if you haven’t had time to dig into it yet—or if you need a refresher—here are my favorite quotes.

  • “Cynicism begins not because you don’t care but because you do care.”
  • “What starts as self-preservation soon morphs into something more insidious. You become a bit jaded.”
  • “The problem with generalizing—applying on particular situation to all situations—is that the death of trust, hope, and belief is like a virus, infecting everything,”
  • “As you grow older, you become more of who you already are.”
  • “I realized that left unchecked, cynicism would win.”
  • “Cynicism is actually a choice.”
  • “Hope is one of cynicism’s first casualties.”
  • “An incredibly effective antidote to cynicism is curiosity. Yes, simple curiosity.”
  • “Feed your curiosity, and it grows. Starve it, and it withers.”
  • “You can’t wonder and discover when you’re in a hurry.”
  • “As young leader, I was convinced that competency was the key to success in life. My formula went like this: Competency determines capacity. The more competency you are, the greater your potential. The greater your potential, the greater your capacity…But a few years into my adult life, I began to notice highly competent people who became disqualified from leadership.”
  • “If competency doesn’t determine capacity, what does? Character does.”
  • “All the competency in the world can’t compensate for your lack of character. Ultimately, your character is your lid.”
“All the competency in the world can’t compensate for your lack of character. Ultimately, your character is your lid.” – @cnieuwhof

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  • “Character, not competency, determines capacity.”
  • “No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape you.“
  • “Compromise is in you, and life brings it out of you.”
  • “We judge ourselves by our intentions and other people by their actions.“

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Adaptive Decision Making, Change, and Leadership – Part 2

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Let’s pick up from where we left on in Part 1 of this series of articles on adaptive decision making, change, and leadership. Be sure to start by reading Part 1 if you haven’t yet done so.

Over the last century, here’s the reason most churches and organizations have been able to scale and support the growth that they’ve experienced.

It’s because of the modern day “scientific management model,” which rests primarily upon two elements:

  1. “Absolutely rigid and inflexible standards throughout your establishment.”
  2. “That each employee of your establishment should receive every day clear-cut, definite instructions as to just what he is to do and how he is to do it, and these instructions should be exactly carried out, whether they are right or wrong.”[1]

I’m not saying that these two elements run the shop in every church and organization today. I’m just saying that they are the foundation that modern day management theory—both inside and outside the church—has been built upon, and it doesn’t work anymore because…

  • You can’t just set it and forget it
  • You can’t just keep your head down, do your work, and expect to succeed and hit your goals
  • Your success isn’t wholly dependent on you
  • If the only time you talk about development is the annual performance review, you won’t grow
  • If the only time you connect with your volunteers and leaders are on Sunday or in formal training environments, they won’t feel connected
  • If the only things you do are the things on your job description, your team won’t win
  • In fact, if you’re not revisiting your job description multiple times a year, it will become outdated quick
  • And if the only time you talk with your team members is during official team meetings, your team will move too slow
  • And if you’re not changing your website every 2-3 years, watch out…irrelevancy is just around the corner
You can’t just set it and forget it anymore.

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Adaptive Decision Making, Change, and Leadership – Part 1

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Watch this clip of a traffic intersection.

As you were watching it, what did you think was going to happen?

When I first saw this clip, it reminded me of the T-bone accident I was in as a child. I don’t really remember much around the way it happened, or what I was doing when it happened, but as a child, I flew right into the windshield of our car.

It happened when we were on our way home from the airport after picking up my mom. She had just returned after visiting family in Korea. Someone ran a stop sign and boom. Just like that, my hopes of ever becoming a doctor or rocket scientist flew right out the window…or should I stay straight into the window?

Alright, so back to the traffic intersection.

This is a video from a computer simulation that the Autonomous Intersection Management project at the University of Texas at Austin was conducting. When Peter Stone, the professor heading up this project, discovered that “25 percent of accidents and 33 percent of the thirty-three thousand auto deaths each year in America occur at intersections, and 95 percent are attributable to ‘human error,’” he and his team wanted to do something about it.

But how is this chaos better? Doesn’t this seem like a T-Bone accident just waiting to happen, rather than a way to prevent it from happening?

The interesting thing about this simulation is that every car you see here is being driven autonomously. In other words, they’re all self-driving cars.

This being the case, you can actually plot the trajectories of each car long before they arrive at the intersection, which means there’s no need for the typical breaking, stopping, and accelerating that normally characterizes four way intersections. This also means that you can get rid of traffic lights and stop signs, since every self-driving car would be communicating, sensing, and noticing the other.

To self-driving cars full of sensors and cameras, this simulation makes complete sense. To us, it doesn’t—it seems like utter chaos.

And here’s the reason.

It’s because of a thing called, “mental models.”

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