Last year I read a great book by Patrick Lencioni called The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family. It is a secular book written as a leadership fable about "how to restore sanity to the most important organization in your life."
The hook of the book is: "if you ran your business like you ran your family, you'd be out of business in 3 months."
I used a few concepts from his book in my talk at the Men's Breakfast last Saturday - "Red Line or Red Zone."
Here are the three Big Questions:
1. What makes your family unique?
If you don't know what differentiates your family from others, you won't have a basis for making decisions, and you'll try to be all things to all people.
2. What is your family's top priority - rallying cry - right now?
You need to know what the single most important objective is for your family over the next two to six months. Without a top priority, everything becomes important and you end up reacting to whatever issues seem urgent that day.
3. How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions?
If you answer the first two questions but don't use those answers in daily, weekly, and monthly decision making, it will yield no benefits.
The takeaway for our men on Saturday was to develop with their spouse a single goal - Rallying Cry - for their family which would be the family's primary leadership focus for the next three months. Secondly, they were charged with identifying 3-5 specific action steps in accomplishing that goal. Third, they were to post the Rallying Cry in a prominent place.
The Vroegops have found this to be extremely helpful in providing focus to a very frantic life.
2 comments:
Thank you for this! We often find ourselves wanting to be involved in everything, whether it fits with the "mission" of our family or not, which often leads to frustration and over commitment.
Great book. I now use this book in the management classes I teach at Bethel College and in teaching our staff here at Life Action. Highly recommend this book!
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