Bob Seymore

Helping to build capacity in people, organizations and communities

The Global Leadership Summit-A resource

Bob Seymore

The Global Leadership Summit is not just an event to attend, it’s a resource to be leveraged. That’s a phrase that inspired me several years ago after over 10 years of participating in the GLS both locally and globally, but I will have to admit it has moved from an idea to a conviction in recent years.

There are events and conferences that come across my desk every week and while I love to participate, I often have to make a choice. Because the resources of time and money are finite, I pick and choose the events that I attend. Bottom line…there’s a surplus of events and a shortage of resources. Resources add value to the receiver. When it comes to this annual two day experience called the Global Leadership Summit in our city it’s not who do I can get to attend, but who do I want to add value to.

So what makes the Global Leadership Summit a resource?

  1. Fresh, actionable leadership content. I love to learn and frankly it’s my perspective that most people want to improve their leadership, increase their influence and are looking to learn fresh ideas. And not only do we all desire to learn those new ideas that will impact our circles of influence, we want something we can apply today. There are more resources available than ever, but sorting through the vast depth of speakers, writers and content is an insurmountable task. For over 20 years the WCA team has been scanning the horizon every year for speakers that can deliver fresh, actionable leadership content. It’s not unusual for them to look at over 200 speakers to bring a dozen presenters to speak at GLS. GLS bring some of the best and latest leadership ideas, but even more importantly they are ideas that you can apply in you’re world today.
  2. A world class faculty. The GLS is delivered by a faculty. And while you will be inspired and motivated to impact your areas of influence, the GLS is a learning environment. It is a faculty made up of thought leaders, pastors, business leaders and authors that will deliver very specific ideas that you will want to take down in notes and discuss with your team in the days that follow. And while you will recognize some of the names in the promotion of the GLS, our experience tells us that often some of the most profound ideas have been delivered by unrecognized names of communicators that have spent years in research and development of leadership content. The GLS brings to you a world class faculty that has been selected from the top of their fields of expertise.
  3. Applicable across all sectors-While there are lots of opportunities for business leaders, non profit leaders and church leaders to attend conference that apply specifically to their sector, GLS crossed all sectors. At the heart of GLS is the idea that business leaders can learn from church leaders and church leaders can learn from business leaders and nonprofit leaders can learn from government leaders and every sector and learn with and from every other sector. There is rarely an opportunity where business, church, nonprofit, government and educational leaders sit beside each other in the same room with one objective… to get better. It’s what city movements are made out of when leaders sit together and network in learning environments.
  4. 450,000+ influencers in 125 countries-The GLS is a movement. When we are gathering with all sectors of leaders in our community to learn from this world class faculty of the GLS, it is significant to remember that there are thousands joining us around the globe. What’s the value of improving leaders in your organization? What about several hundred leaders in your city? What is the value of improving the skills of 400,000 leaders in 125 countries? To be a part of the GLS is to be a part of a world wide movement that has has ripple effects across cites and countries.
  5. Available in 1300+ local venues-Recently I heard a city leader from our community say that it is not uncommon to spend thousands to travel and experience the caliber of speakers that are represented by the GLS faculty. He said “why wouldn’t we go to a local venue, pay a fraction of the price, sit beside friends and coworkers from our city and then go home and enjoy our own bed”. World class faculty in over 1300 local venues not only brings the content to you, but also affordably allows you to connect far more leaders from your business, church or nonprofit organization. The organizations that get the greatest impact from GLS, bring teams.

If you have a need for another resource, add the the GLS to your calendar. But wait, you need to add this resource to the calendar of your entire organization. What I can assure you from experience is that the Monday morning after the GLS there will be fresh conversations and ideas that will flow through your office and among your team.

Don’t miss it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Reality of Influence

Bob Seymore

One of the most interesting perspectives of growing older is looking back and recognizing those times in your life when you seized opportunities and those times when you let opportunities pass you by. And what I am realizing is that most of those opportunities come because of this whole idea called influence.

A dictionary definition of the word influence says: the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on/or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions of others. And if you read and study to topic of leadership with any depth, you will find that through it all there is a fundamental idea that was expressed best by John Maxwell several years ago when he wrote that the definition of leadership is influence…nothing more nothing less.

So the question is not “am I a leader?. The real question is “do I have influence”. And in that context I began to look at the reality of influence. Here are some of my takeaways…

  1. Everybody has it. When you really reflect on what you’re day looks like, it is full of opportunities for influence… Mom’s and dad’s influence their kids, grandparents influence grandkids, workers influence coworkers, bosses influence employees, students influence other students and educators influence students. But even on a smaller scale we influence people that serve us at restaurants, people that we do business with and sometimes just random strangers that enter into our daily space for just a brief period of time that might be a simple as a seat beside us on an airplane. Bottom line, we all have influence…everyday…everywhere we go. Some short term, some long term. One of my favorite examples of influence is a group of friends who make a regular journey to the country of Myanmar to work with orphanages. From the moment they step off of the plane there is a mutual love and respect and opportunity to impact kids half way across the globe. Influence has no geographic barriers. The question is not “do I have influence”, the question is “how am I leveraging my influence?”
  2. It’s like muscle. While I consider myself the world’s least competent expert on the shaping of muscle, there is something I learned a long time ago about it….use it or lose it. There’s a word that applies to unused muscle that is “atrophy”. And it basically means muscle that doesn’t get used will eventually decline in effectiveness. Influence that doesn’t get used will lose it’s effectiveness. You may be given the opportunity to work with a group of kids or you may be given a position of authority in your job, but influence grows in direct proportion to how you exercise those opportunities.
  3. It’s about others. There’s a difference in influence and fame. You can be famous because of what you have done for yourself. You only become influential by what you do for others. I recently crossed paths with a local weatherman in an elevator. And while he has a face that would be recognized by most in our city, I reflected on those evenings when storms have passed through our area and we were glued to his maps and capable insight into how to keep our home safe. He was famous, but also influential because of how he had served me and my family and our safety. We aren’t given influence to absorb. We are given influence to serve others.
  4. It’s an offense for defense. You are either influencing or being influenced. And certainly while there are some positive influencers that you can learn and gain wisdom from, we live and work in places that have dark influences. There’s an old adage that says ‘the best defense is a good offense”. Influence seizes opportunities to help improve people and environments that need to move forward in a positive direction. In many relationships it is ongoing conversations that spark progress and movement. The drift is always backward. Influence provides a vehicle for us to create forward motion.
  5. It’s our legacy. It just strikes me that we won’t be held accountable in the end for people we never met, places we never went or opportunities we never had. But legacies are birthed out of how we touched a life, served in an organization or a community or how we seized opportunities that came our way. Positions show up in our resumes. Influence shows up in our biographies. In the end, we will be remembered by who and what we influenced. I hope your family ranks high in that circle, but I am also confident we haven’t been placed in strategic roles in our careers to just make a name for ourselves. We have been given influence to exercise it and make an impact on the good of people, the organizations and the communities that we are connected to.

Leadership is influence and we owe it to ourselves and the people that we work and live with to recognize it, learn more effective ways to leverage it and find ways to multiply it every day.

 

 

 

GLS-Own it’s!

Bob Seymore

GLS-Willow-CreekThe Global Leadership Summit is a two-day event that is broadcast LIVE from the Willow Creek Community Church campus near Chicago every August to more than 600+ locations in North America. Then throughout the fall, GLS events take place globally in an additional 1300+ global sites in 125 countries and is translated into 60 languages. Every year the team at Willow assembles a world class faculty including speakers from business, nonprofits, government, education, research, churches and beyond…but they all capture and deliver content designed to improve the leadership capacity of every person that attends.
When I started working as a local church leader with the Willow Creek Association team in Chicago about 9 years ago, I remember thinking that we would go back…promote this event like so many other concerts or speakers that came to our church…we would gather a crowd that would learn and grow and it would be a great opportunity for us as a church to offer such an event to our little corner of the world.

But after a couple of years I had a conversion….

I realized that the GLS wasn’t just an event to attend.

While there were some well known names that we heard at the GLS, some of the most profound content came from people that we were not familiar with. We discovered that from beginning to end, the GLS was crafted with a world class faculty that would teach, train, inspire and motivate those in attendance to be better leaders and raise their impact through the local church. We discovered that the GLS was unapologetically aimed at local church leaders, but it gave space for some of the best and the brightest in the marketplace to share strategic ideas that could be used to mobilize leaders at all levels. We discovered that the GLS created a ‘gathering of leaders” in a church and a community that would build networks of relationships that could fuel a leadership culture and collaboration like no other gathering. It was simply the best and only 2 day learning experience that we had ever been a part of that kept the local church at heart, but brought together church, business, government, educational and other leaders from an entire region to learn and grow.

The Global Leadership Summit is not just an event to attend, it’s a resource to be leveraged.

So how can you best leverage the Global Leadership Summit as a church? There are a lot of ways that you can make the GLS a win, but at One Life Church we have reached a point where we “own it” at several levels of our core strategy and structure.

photo_why1. Own it in your calendar

As a church, there are events that are non-negotiables in our annual calendar. All of us make sure that we calendar Christmas and Easter and the rest of the year seems to be on-ramps to those special days. The next date that we calendar is the GLS and we look for opportunities to build on-ramps IN AND OUT of the GLS experience. For us it comes at the end of the summer season and it provides great timing to inspire leaders as we launch into our fall plans. We surround it with prayer and even a special meal and gathering the night before as we re-gather from the summer break and prepare for our fall season kick off.

2. Own it with your staff

Not only does our entire staff attend the GLS, but we schedule an entire day very soon after to debrief. It’s an event where you will want to take copious notes and sharing those thoughts and ideas will change your staff discussions for the next year if you quickly connect and look for common ideas and learnings. In fact, last year in addition to our debrief day we took content from one of the speakers, Joseph Grenny and did a staff retreat using the ideas from “Influencers” to discuss our path for new people.

3. Own it with your leadership core

The WCA people introduced us to the idea that in most churches, approximate 15% of your attendance would be considered leaders that have some level of influence in your church. It is very important to note that the 15% goes significantly beyond just elders and deacons.It is anybody who leads people from pastors to group leaders. We have formalized that structure and call it our “Leadership Core” and we have monthly gatherings. They become our number one target to attend the GLS and we work at debriefing GLS ideas in large and small groups settings with our “Core” leadership. GLS changes the conversations and provides a platform for fresh strategic discussions. Last year we even took some of the Brene Brown material with this group and discussed “Belonging” in our church culture.

GLSpanel-26534. Own it in your community

This has become a very important part of the GLS for us as we serve our city. We partner with our local chamber, local government and of course other local churches to invite and connect for the purpose of helping to build a great city. Every year we do some type of discussion during one of the lunches at GLS that provides insight into our local community and the work that is happening though local nonprofits and other churches with the idea of mobilizing for greater impact.

5. Own it in your Global missions

It’s interesting because many of us listen to the world wide impact of the GLS and applaud the efforts, but rarely connect the dots to our own mission strategy. But we did….and it changed everything.

Several years back, I was part of a team that had been involved in the country of Myanmar for several years. We had been in a village near the largest city of Yangon and at the time had about a dozen orphanages that were doing a highly effective work with kids. As we heard about the work of the global GLS, we had a discussion about taking it into Myanmar. And to shorten the story of an incredible journey, partnerships between WCA and churches in the states and churches in Myanmar began to form and this past year was our 6th year with GLS in three major cities in Myanmar with over 1800 leaders attending. And most important, because of relationships and collaborations that were shaped at the GLS, a new Human Trafficking Restoration Center was built and is serving one of the biggest issues facing this country. Because of the GLS and partnerships we have developed, we have gone from reaching a village to reaching an entire country.

The Global Leadership Summit is not just an event to attend, it’s a resource to be leveraged.

If you leverage the Global Leadership Summit as a point of leadership training and mobilization and embed it into your leadership culture, it is an annual resource that can change your church, your city and your global impact.

GLS: At the heart of a City Movement

Bob Seymore

There is a lot of talk and several examples of City Movements where we see public and private sectors join forces to make a sustainable impact in local communities, but I have rarely seen a connection point quite like the Global Leadership Summit(GLS) which has been produced annually for the last 20 years by the Willow Creek Association.

The Global Leadership Summit is a two-day event that is broadcast LIVE from the Willow Creek Community Church campus near Chicago every August to more than 600 locations in North America. Then throughout the fall, GLS events take place globally in an additional 1300+ sites, 125 countries and is translated into 60 languages. Every year the team at Willow assembles a world class faculty including speakers from business, nonprofits, government, education, research, churches and beyond…but they all capture and deliver content designed to improve the leadership capacity of every person that attends.

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The Global Leadership Summit has served our city for the last several years with fresh, actionable leadership content that is applicable in everyday life, work and ministry. We make it an annual priority.

But as part of hosting the GLS in Western Kentucky and Southern Indiana for the last several years, we have discovered another level of impact that goes beyond the growth of our own internal leadership. The GLS is having a growing value as a resource to start, build and sustain the heart of a city movement that can impact the city at large.

Here are some characteristics of GLS that can fuel a city movement:

1. GLS reaches across multiple sectors-While there are events and gatherings that cross various sectors in communities, there have been every few that reach the depth and breadth of the Global Leadership Summit. From the very beginning every year, founder Bill Hybels opens the GLS with a challenge to business and church leaders to “expand their bandwidth” and be open to learning the best of leadership from each other. The results for a local community is a gathering of church, business, nonprofit, education and government leaders in one room…growing together.

2. GLS builds year to year-We like to say that “GLS is not just an event to attend, it’s a resource to be leveraged”. With 20 years of growth globally, the GLS can be an annual gathering that not only improves leadership, but gathers more and more leaders every year to build momentum in raising the leadership quality of a local community.

3. GLS is a networking hub-Organizations in every community do a variety of things to connect. And while there are a lots of agendas in most community networking events, there is only one agenda at the heart of the GLS….to grow leaders. There is a value add to every leader that attends, but every attender is sitting beside other leaders with the same agenda. The networking that happens with leaders from a community committed to personal and organizational growth is a rare opportunity.

4. GLS is a mobilizer-When leaders gather to grow together, a natural by-product is action. When leadership capacity is enlarged in a community everybody wins. Churches get better, businesses get better, schools get better, government gets better, nonprofits get better…the opportunity to “build a great city” can become a practical reality.

5. GLS is about the church…and beyond-At the heart of the GLS is the church. The Willow Creek Association is unapologetic about their commitment to the local church and Bill Hybels is known globally for the quote “the local church is the hope of the world”. But the Bible is full of references to “the city” and at the heart of a city movement is a church that doesn’t just use the city to build a great church, but uses the church to build a great city. The GLS gives local churches the opportunity to be at the heart of “building a great city” and to serve local leaders by connecting and investing in their personal and organizational growth.

To church leaders: if I were planting a church or leading an existing congregation, I would connect to the Global Leadership Summit in my local community. If it didn’t exist in my community, I would be the first to bring it in. It is not only essential to my personal growth as a leader, but it’s vital to the growth of leaders in my church and community and with the GLS, we get to do it…together.

Never confuse limited resources with limited capacity

Bob Seymore

Never confuse limited resources with limited capacity…that iDay_8-45dea continued to resonate with our team as we participated in Global Leadership Summit sites in the country of Myanmar just a few weeks ago.

It all began in Myanmar in 2009 when a team from WCA, Singapore and Evansville Indiana worked in collaboration to launch the first GLS in a Yangon church for a passionate group of 350 Burmese pastors and leaders. This year the GLS is wrapping up in 6 cities in Myanmar with over 3000 leaders in attendance. And these passionate pioneers talk of reaching 9 cities with thousands more leaders over the next few years.

I had the opportunity to personally participate in 2 of the 4 sites this past year and while I enjoyed returning to be with the GLS veterans in Yangon, I especially enjoyed our experience with site in Kalaymyo Myanmar
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Kalaymyo is located in the northwest section of Myanmar and was recently recognized in the national news because a monsoon which triggered a state of emergency due to flash flooding that displaced thousands of people and caused devastation for families in the area. Makeshift rescue camps were spread across the valley and people were surviving in tents with random water and supplies from various churches and agencies. We were able to tour the flooded area and even provide some assistance, but in this city of 400,000 this was a disaster of major proportion.

5With that backdrop, we arrived in this city to join the launch of their first GLS. While we anticipated that the floods added to the ongoing resource challenges of this city might be a detriment to local engagement in a leadership conference, we found just the opposite. The local GLS team was hard at work when we arrived the day before GLS.

Producers were going over the script for the day line by line. Tech people were setting up audio and video systems and testing to make sure the message would be optimum. Ladies were cleaning and hanging curtains to darken the room. The highly skilled band was rehearsing the worship set to make sure it was ready. The event teams were hanging banners and making sure program books and name tags were ready and waiting. There was an army of people preparing food and all this was being done under the power of generators to provide electricity. It was amazing to watch the level of organized effort and their passion to serve leaders in their city.

6And they came.

The parking lot was full of motorcycles as they exceeded their goal and filled the church with over 260 leaders from 69 different organizations including pastors from multiple denominations, politicians, businessmen, educators, leaders from social welfare, media and beyond. Never had such a diverse group gathered in this city. The GLS provided a resource that could be leveraged to bring leaders together from every sector to learn, grow and improve their leadership.

4It is always a privilege to provide help to the under resourced. Food, clothes, shelter, financial support…may God enlarge our hearts for those with physical needs. But what became evident in our brief experience in Kalaymyo Myanmar was that physical resources served some of the immediate needs, but leadership development provided long term skills to address solutions. The GLS provided skills for growth to some very capable leaders in a community where leaders don’t lack capacity, but lack opportunity. Leadership resources that can help them navigate and lead in the reality of a severely under resourced environment.

The GLS is a resource to be leveraged and in Kalaymyo they came, they listened and they learned. And experience tells us that everybody wins when a leader gets better. Churches win…. Cities win…. Countries win… everybody wins.

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Engage-Build a Great City

Bob Seymore

We often say “Engage” is a verb, not a noun. That’s because Engage is the strategy of  a group of local leaders, community organizations and concerned residents in Henderson, Kentucky and Evansville Indiana.  Our mission is to provide a process that creates partnerships with residents and community resources to improve the quality of life in targeted neighborhoods.

Engage Values include:

LISTEN-Seek to understand the dreams, gifts and strengths of people

LEVERAGE-Build on the strengths and assets of the community

PARTNER-Do WITH not FOR the community

COLLABORATE-Focus the gifts of many on a common vision

COMMUNITY-Serve through community and with the community

ACTION-Demonstrate the love of Christ through action

 

The Engage process includes 4 simple steps…Listen, Align, Act, Repeat.

 

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LISTEN-Seek to understand the dreams, gifts and strengths of people by providing a safe place for open discussion of ideas.

Align-Build on the strengths and assets of the community by doing things WITH not FOR the community. Work to focus the gifts of many on a common vision and be catalysts-promoting interdisciplinary collaboration

Act-Demonstrate the love of Christ through action

Repeat-Stay at it with a complete dependence on God for community transformation- We can serve the city, love the city and bless the city-but only God has the power to transform a city.

Church Planting-NYC

Bob Seymore

At One Life Church, We are church planters.

IMG_3573_1In 2013, we took a team of 50 people to Movement Day in New York City as part of our ongoing relationship with Mac Pier and the New York Leadership Center. Our team had the opportunity to do a teaching track at Movement Day in Times Square and then we spent a day visiting neighborhoods in Manhattan where we got to hear the stories of 3 amazing church planters and walk the streets where they served. For all who made the journey, it was snapshot of what it looks like to plant a church in one of the most influential cities in the world.

Coming out of building One Life East, we want to give a lot of attention to the health of our regional sites and strengthen people and financial resources as we process future opportunities in the tri-state area, but we also want to keep our church planting passion fueled and growing by pursuing some “church planting partnerships”.

Partnerships provide some great opportunities including:

-the opportunity to be a part of a church plant in high impact areas like New York City

-the opportunity to learn from other church planters that have our DNA.

-the opportunity to share some of our experience with church planters

-the opportunity to be a fractional part of the leadership and financial resources required to plant a church

And after a couple of years of building relationships and connections in New York City, we have landed on a couple of very strategic partnerships.

The first is called Redeemer City to City. Tim Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City and in 2001 he started Redeemer City to City which has helped start over 300 churches in 45 cities. The City to City partnership over the next two years includes sessions of church plant training along side other North American partners and ongoing coaching with the City to City staff( including Tim Keller) as we work locally and in NYC to deepen our planting skills and experience.

logo-hopeThe other partner in New York is a young church called Hope Church-NYC. Our connection with Hope Church has been with one of the founding pastors-Drew Hyun. Drew was one of the pastors at New Life Fellowship in Queens, a large church pastored by Pete Scazzerro. After 10 years in the area, Drew and his wife felt the call to form a team and plant new churches in New York City. They connected with Redeemer City to City and began the adventure in 2012 with 25 people at their first site in the Astoria area of New York. That first church has grown to a community of 200 people with 35 nations represented. They planted a 2nd site in April of 2013 on Roosevelt Island and they are just getting started.

During an afternoon at a coffee shop in Long Island City, we had the opportunity to hear Drew’s heart as a church planter and we genuinely connected to his aggressive passion to launch sites and soon discovered that he was the New York version of our One Life Church DNA. He is preparing to launch their third site in Midtown Manhattan on Sunday October 26th and that is where we connect.

Drew and a small team of pastors and worship leaders came to visit One Life Church in Southern Indiana and Western Kentucky for 4 days in August.They wanted to understand how we work with teams and facilities and plan our services and connect people to Life Groups and how we pray, pray pray…….They just wanted to come learn and get to know us.

And we will be taking a team to New York for Movement day on October 23rd and staying to do whatever we can to help with the launch of the next New Hope site in Midtown Manhattan on Sunday October 26th. Maybe it is passing out flyers, prayer walking, helping prep the facility or whatever…but our team wants to serve and learn with our friends in New York.

We are church planters.

We look forward to learning with and serving beside other church planters as we help people far from God experience Jesus.