CNLP 782 | The Problem of Mini-Celebrity Pastors: Les McKeown on Growth Barriers for Church Leaders

Summary

The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast – Episode 782

Topic: The Problem of Mini-Celebrity Pastors: Les McKeown on Growth Barriers for Church Leaders
Date: January 29, 2026
Guest: Les McKeown (Founder/CEO, Predictable Success)
Host: Carey Nieuwhof

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the challenge of "mini-celebrity" pastors in the church and how leader-centric models can cap or stall church growth. Through a dynamic conversation with Les McKeown—a renowned consultant and organizational growth expert—Carey explores stages of organizational lifecycle, leadership transition points, and practical strategies for building lasting, scalable church movements. The insights expand far beyond church contexts, speaking to anyone interested in sustainable leadership or leading through stages of growth and decline.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. The State of the Church & Sobering Trends

• Recent data (from Barna Group and others) show a softening of Christian identification and engagement in the US, even as some pockets and generations (Gen Z, millennials) demonstrate renewal.
  • "When you look at the percent of all US adults who identify as Christian from 2000 to 2025, that has gone from 83% to 71%. So we are minus 12 in Christian identity over 25 years." (David, 00:56)
  • Church engagement, evangelism, and personal significance of faith have all dropped noticeably.

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2. Mini-Celebrity Pastors—What’s the Problem?

• The “mini-celebrity pastor” phenomenon isn’t new, but it’s now easy to attain at a much smaller scale due to social media and digital platforms (08:27).
• Having a charismatic, visible pastor is powerful for early church growth and momentum but becomes problematic when the leader’s persona and the church’s identity become inseparable.
  • "The business, the organization, the church and that person are Velcro connected... Their identities are so enmeshed, you couldn't, if you tried, separate them." (Les, 10:50)

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3. The Predictable Success Model: Stages of Organizational Growth

The Seven Stages (14:31–24:33)

Growth:

1. Early Struggle – Survival mode, often cash-strapped.
2. Fun – Past survival, momentum and excitement; founder-led, everything is “fun.”
3. Whitewater – Hitting growth/complexity limits; old methods stop working.

Peak:
4. Predictable Success – Scalability, strong teams, distributed leadership, robust systems.

Decline:
5. Treadmill – Over-systematization, bureaucracy sets in. 6. The Big Rut – Slow, “comfortable” decline; hard to reverse. 7. Death Rattle – Final attempts at survival or reinvention.

• Leaders must choose: stay in 'Fun' and plateau, or risk the challenges of 'Whitewater' to reach scalable, sustainable success (Predictable Success).

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4. The Pivot: Separating Founder Identity from the Organization (13:08–14:07)

• Growth depends on transitioning from a leader-centric model (founder as identity/decision-maker) to a model where church and leader are clearly differentiated.
• Problem: In many churches, the leadership platform (how things are decided and led) is never separated from the personal brand/platform of the founding leader.

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5. The Challenge of Building Teams

• Founders often mistake loyal “water carriers” for a true leadership team.
• To enter Predictable Success, organizations require a healthy challenge function—genuine debate, empowered team leadership, and leaders who can challenge the founder’s views.
  • "Do we have a leadership team who actuate a healthy challenge function?... Or are we doing what the founding pastor wants us to do because his or her desires… have always been a proxy for what the church wants?" (Les, 30:00)
• The "mini-celebrity" phenomenon impedes this challenge function, fostering groupthink or fear of contradiction.

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6. Distributed Leadership & the Curse of Knowledge

• True growth demands that vision, decision-making, and responsibility are shared—founders must intentionally “give away” areas of control.
  • "Your job is no longer to decide and fix things. Your job is to build the team that decides and fixes things." (Les, 64:00)
• The “curse of knowledge” (believing only the founder knows how or can) is a major barrier.
  • Practical advice: “Ask whoever knows you best to list 10 things you could stop doing—which not only wouldn’t harm things, but would improve them.” (Les, 54:21)

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7. Warning Signs & Solutions

• Key warning sign: When substantive topics, ministries, or problems are “out of bounds” for discussion—not open to team challenge (76:32).
• Organizations must move from 'heads' (roles defined by personalities) to 'hats' (roles defined by function/need), and the org chart should reflect what the church needs, not just what “Jimmy” does as worship pastor.

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8. Succession & Longevity

• Lasting churches outlive their founders. Pastors who successfully transition to a team- and system-centric model often experience less urgency, more bandwidth, and less burnout—sometimes even “boredom” as the machine runs itself (92:30–94:28).
  • "Our church kept growing and I almost got bored because I was so not in the weeds." (Carey, 92:30)
• Succession plans should be metric-based, not endlessly delayed by shifting timelines (98:01).

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9. The Unique Challenge in Church: Spiritual Authority

• Church founders can “play the God card”: “Well, the Holy Spirit told me…” This makes challenge and transition harder.
  • "You just gotta be really careful when you pull the card out." (Les, 84:43)
• Rule of thumb: Save divine authority claims for actual scripture/teaching moments, not for organizational opinions (Carey, 85:42).
• Overuse of spiritual authority closes down team development and discretionary effort.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Founder/Church Separation:
  “The organization and the founding person have got to become separate, clearly identified entities. It’s a tool, not who you are.” — Les McKeown (13:11)

• On Team Building:
  "You need a leadership team who are genuinely taking the sort of yoke of leadership on. They're not there to support you as the leader." — Les (29:59)

• On Leadership Burnout:
  "Trying to bring that type of leadership to bear on every aspect of a complex, growing organization, it will kill you." — Les (36:34)

• On Everyday Leadership:
  "98% of leadership is built on mundane acts. Heroism is great, but it's not the essence of leadership." — Les (38:08)

• On Empowering Others:
  “Every decision you have between: do I spend an hour doing this thing or do I spend an hour investing in somebody so they can do the thing? It’s a no brainer.” — Les (64:03)

• On Role Definition:
  “Move from a heads-based organization to a hats-based organization. What are the hats that need to be worn?” — Les (73:47)

• On Handling the ‘God Card’:
  “I only really pull the God card out if I'm actually preaching something.” — Carey (85:42)

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Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment / Topic | |-------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:37–02:06 | State of the Church Data: Declining Identification, Engagement, Evangelism | | 08:27 | The Mini-Celebrity Pastor: Definition and Early Growth Benefits | | 13:08 | Why Founder/Organization Separation Matters | | 14:31–24:33 | Les Explains the Seven Stages of Predictable Success | | 29:59 | Building True Leadership Teams; Challenge Function | | 36:34 | Leadership Burnout—The Heroic Myth | | 54:21 | Giving Away Responsibilities and the Curse of Knowledge | | 64:03 | Your Job: Build the Team that Decides and Fixes Things | | 76:32 | Warning Signs: Topics That ‘Can’t Be Talked About’ | | 84:43 | Playing the ‘Holy Spirit Card’ and Its Dangers | | 92:30–94:28 | Transitioning out of the Weeds—What Success Feels Like | | 98:01 | Succession Plans: Pitfalls and Metric-Based Planning |

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Practical Applications

• For Senior Leaders: Begin giving away real decision-making authority. Build and empower your team—your ability to “disappear” from details is a success indicator, not a threat.
• For Team Members: Know your fit. If you’re wired for healthy challenge and growth, you may need to move if your environment is frozen by a celebrity leader.
• For All Churches: Re-cast your org chart based on what the church needs, not based on personality or convenience.
• For Preachers: Be extremely careful with spiritual authority claims—overuse damages trust and stifles initiative.

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

Engaged, direct, practical, and sometimes playfully irreverent (“mini-celebrity” language, “spot the billionaire” games). The episode balances hard truths with encouraging frameworks and actionable steps for change. McKeown’s perspective is both surgical and empathetic, with Carey providing relatable anecdotes and energetic pivots.

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Further Resources

• Predictable Success: predictablesuccess.com/carrie
• Art of Leadership Academy: art of leadershipacademy.com
• Barna State of the Church data: stateofthechurch.com (Carey, 03:58)

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If you’re a church leader, business founder, or team member facing growth barriers because of centralized or personalized leadership, this episode will help you name the problem, see its hidden costs, and start building a healthier, more sustainable organization that truly outgrows its founder.

Transcript

[Gary]

Well, we'll get to today's regularly scheduled podcast episode in just a moment, but I am so glad to be here in person. For the first time ever, we're doing State of the Church. It's great to be here live and in person in Nashville.

[David]

It's great to be here, Gary.

[Gary]

Great to be with you.

[David]

Thanks for having me.

[Gary]

We're tracking your tracking. We is very generous. You are tracking.

[Les McKeown]

It's the royal we.

[Gary]

The royal we. You're tracking some data. Now, we're all talking about revival, right? There's some really hopeful signs, but there's also some other things going on at the same time. It's not a complete positive story. What's going on and what are you learning?

[David]

Just to make sure, we really emphasize that we're seeing so many interesting pieces of data about renewal, especially among young people, Gen Z and millennials, and at the same time. So that is very true, at least according to the data we've been collecting the last couple of years. And especially in 2025, we'll have more of that coming in at 2026. But we're also tapping the brakes on this revival is breaking out. So we want to just kind of COVID a couple key stats. When you look at the percent of all U.S. adults who identify as Christian from 2000 to 2025, that has gone from 83% of all Americans to 71%. So we are minus 12 in Christian identity over 25 years.

[Gary]

Wow.

[David]

The percent of Christians who attend church monthly has gone from 66% to 59%. That's minus 7. So a slight softening. There is also a surprising softening, although not as dramatic, of the percent of Christians that agree strongly that they have a responsibility to share their faith, from 35% to 31%. So minus 4. Which is important to note because in a moment where people are open to Jesus, we need to reinstill confidence in the gospel and in telling our story, because people are especially open right now. They should be telling their story anytime. But especially now.

[Gary]

Especially now.

[David]

And the last one is a really surprising one. But the percent of Christians that agree strongly that their religious faith is very important in their life has gone from 74% to 54% in 25 years.

[Gary]

20 point drop.

[David]

So we're just wanting to talk about the fact that even as Barna and some of our colleagues are talking about a renewal, and in some pockets, there seems to be a kind of revival happening. College campuses, a lot of campus ministries are talking to us about what they're seeing among Gen Z and young people. When you look at the broad spectrum of Christianity in America, and especially the established, as all generations established practicing Christians and self identified Christians, there's been a real softening over 25 years. So we just wanted to make sure to talk accurately and with the right kind of nuance about what we're seeing in the data.

[Gary]

No, that's good to know because. And it's one of those things where you're holding two truths in tension.

[Les McKeown]

Correct.

[Gary]

There are genuine seeds of renewal and excitement and reversing data in the church. And at the same time, the overall trends cannot be encouraging as well.

[David]

Yeah, right.

[Gary]

There's a lot of work left to be done.

[David]

There is. One of the ways I've been thinking about it is it's almost as though with younger generations, they're going back to a place that might have been 15 or 25 or even 30 years ago in terms of their religious. They're almost like it's a reset moment.

[Les McKeown]

Sure.

[David]

But it's not this sort of like socially defining renewal at this point. Now what is unique about this is that with older adults there is a real sense in which usually it's older adults who get more religious. What we're seeing now that is unique is younger adults are more oriented to the Bible, more oriented to Jesus, more oriented to church than they were a generation ago. So we hope that those trends might continue. But again, the main story here is just tapping the brakes on widespread renewal, widespread revival. There's still some ways in which Christianity in America is definitely softening.

[Gary]

So preachers, still a lot of mission left. Still a lot of people left to reach.

[David]

You're not done yet?

[Gary]

Not done yet. This is super helpful and that's why I love the data. It's such a gift to the church, the ministry that you bring. And I've really enjoyed these segments as well. So thank you so much, David. So what you can do if you want to learn more is go to stateofthechurch.com Carrie, you can see all the data yourself. You can sift through the positive and the tap the breaks data. And now to our regularly scheduled episode, the Art of Leadership Network.

[Les McKeown]

I feel a lot, particularly in tech and fintech, where it becomes really amplified in the church is when you bring God into it, which is hard to do, hard not to do when you're in a church. Right.

[Gary]

I'm glad you went there. Right.

[Les McKeown]

You know, when you have the hard driving founder who also gets to say, well, the Holy Spirit told me.

[Gary]

Welcome to the Carrie Newhof Leadership podcast. It's Carrie here, and I hope our time together today helps you thrive in life and leadership. Well, we are sitting down with Les McKeown. Les is one of the most popular guests we've had on the podcast. We've had him on a number of different episodes, and I ran into him at the Global Leadership Summit in August, and we were chatting, and he said, you know, next time we talk, we should talk about the problem of many celebrity pastors. That's exactly what we are going to do. Les is the founder and the CEO of Predictable Success. He is a consultant and thought leader on organizational and business growth. And, you know, it's so cool talking to past podcast alumni like Les. When he first appeared on this podcast, he was doing almost all business work, and now he spends a lot of time with the church, and that's thanks to you. I love you as an audience. You guys. You take action, man. And this is the best part about doing this, is when we bring you guests, you act. So welcome to all of you who are brand new. Welcome to those of you who might have just started following us. You know, there's a whole new generation of church leaders who are, well, finding the podcast and jumping on. And I just want to say welcome to you. One of the kindest things you could do is maybe to share this episode with someone else to subscribe, follow. Leave a comment, and I'll tell you a little bit more after my conversation with Les McKeown. Well, Les, welcome back. I'm just so glad to have you. I was telling you, you're like a fan favorite. You're a personal favorite of mine. I don't know if this is number five or six for you, but welcome back to the show.

[Les McKeown]

I don't know either, but it is either five or six. And it's an absolute pleasure. It's something that I look forward to enormously. And there isn't. I mean, I'm gonna say something that sounds like hyperbole, and of course you would say that, but there isn't a word of hyperbole in this. There isn't a week that go that somebody doesn't say, oh, I got to know about you through Kerry's podcast. Not a week that makes me so happy.

[Gary]

And you are among many alumni on the podcast who will tell me that. And that's a shout out to all of you leaders who are listening. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for taking this seriously. I mean, we've been doing it for 11 years, but I still remember reading Predictable Success. Casey Graham, our mutual friend, put me onto it over 10 years ago. I think I read it on a plane and I'm like my whole life. And I think I reached out to you on Twitter back in the day.

[Les McKeown]

That's right back when it was fun.

[Gary]

And you answered and I'm like, can we talk? And well, here we are over a decade later, so it's been great. So, Les, you've got a very unique position, having bought and sold so many businesses, consulting with so many organizations, and by the way, leaders. If you have not read Predictable Success and you have, you know, money for one book left in there, it is one book left in your book budget. Go buy Predictable Success. It's fantastic. It's just your life will flash before your eyes. Go back into the archive. You can find all the principles there. So we're gonna go sort of in a different direction this time. But yeah, it was earth shattering for me. But we ran into each other at the Global Leadership Summit in Chicago this summer, and we just happened to accidentally be sitting next to each other. I think we bumped into each other literally. It's like lesbian. And you were telling me you did a lot of work with churches lately. So that shifted over the last few years where you're doing a lot of work with churches. And you said, make sure we talk about the rise of many celebrity pastors. So talk about that a little bit, because celebrity pastors have been around for a while now. I mean, the broadcast age, the Internet age. But you're talking about many celebrity pastors. What do you mean?

[Les McKeown]

Well, first of all, I don't mean anything negative in and of itself. There can be enormous negative consequences which we'll talk about. And I'm not talking about scandal or anything. I'm just simply talking about scalability, the ability to grow your church. It's always been around, as you say, it's never not been a thing. And it's will also make this very clear. It's something that happens for profits, particularly in the financial sector. Fintech. Every founder is a little mini celebrity these days, particularly if you're doing AI, you're on every podcast. So there's nothing, there's nothing new about it. And the change that I've seen is that with the rise of social media, and that phrase is even beginning to sound a little dated, but the normalization of celebrity almost as a thing that you can go and get your thousand followers to get yourself started, you get your YouTube channel. I mean, here am I talking to the king of YouTube. These days. It's not a hard thing to get to the point where you're not even thinking. It's not that you're doing something for a purpose at the end, it's beginning to become a part of your identity and that's when it can become a little problematic for your church's growth. And the bit that's most confusing I think about it, is that all of the positives that it brings make it an absolutely brilliant model, if you want to call it that, for early church growth. Absolutely.

[Gary]

So if you're planting a church to have a profile isn't a terrible idea.

[Les McKeown]

Absolutely fantastic. I mean, and if you've got it, and if you're photogenic, telogenic, Twitter, Genic X Genic, whatever it is, that's fantastic and people get to experience a bit more of you than they would do otherwise. It begins to bring a bit of at least perceived intimacy into what is a wholesale set of relationships. All of that's great. So in my terms, in early struggle, tough then because you've got so much going on, you can't really be building too much of a sort of branding platform, but absolutely in fun. It's a massively powerful tool and foreshadowing. Let me just show the last slide first. You can continue with it forever and it can be perfectly, perfectly good tool to use if that's what it is. Where I see the problem is if you think about someone who starts anything, any for profit, not for profit, cause based, faith based manufacturing, auto parts, it doesn't matter in the early stages of their business that they founded. And for those of you that are listening, I've got my two hands clamped together. The business, the organization, the church and that person are Velcro connected. They're absolutely tied up. Their identities are so enmeshed, you couldn't, if you tried, you couldn't separate. Again, perfectly fine for there, there comes a point, it's the stage I call Whitewater in my model and it's starting in and around the sort of 250, 300, 400 size church where you have a decision to make. Again, any organization, not just churches, which is okay, do we stay a boutique version of what we do, stay in the world that I call fun and don't go for absolute growth. In that case, all is well. Just rinse and repeat, keep doing it. Rinse and repeat, keep doing it. If you want to grow your church, one of the non negotiables, although it never steps up and says, hey, you got to do this, is the two entities have got to begin to separate the two entities.

[Gary]

The organization and the organization and the.

[Les McKeown]

Founding person have got to become separate, clearly identified entities. Now, it doesn't need to be seen necessarily from a distance. And that's where you can continue to build a platform and make it very, very useful, so long as you're not running on that as your leadership platform as well. So your branding platform begins to become problematic as a leadership platform in some very, very specific ways. So that's where it's problematic. There's not a thing wrong with it in and of itself. There's nothing wrong with it if you're gonna stay a certain size and not push too hard to get beyond it. And there's nothing wrong with it if you get the distance to be able to say, this is a tool I'm using. It's not who I am. Does that make sense?

[Gary]

It does, it does. You know what I wanna do? I wanna come back to that and drill a little bit deeper. If you want the deep dive on the question I'm gonna ask you, go back to the first interview with Les, and I think it was episode 103. Get his book. But if you could give us the elevator crash course and the predictable success model, I think it is seven stages or whatever it is, that'd be great. Starting with fun right through deathrattle.

[Les McKeown]

Sure. So it's the parabola, it's the life cycle, and it's a couple of quick caveats. First of all, it's not something I invented. I just saw it, put words to it. And second thing is, it's rather akin to the human life cycle. We start, we reach a peak, and then we age. The one difference is, and it's a pretty big one, is that you can circle cycle the stages. Organizationally, we can't. Yet at least I have. Nobody sent me the memo. If it's possible for human beings to reverse aging, it's not something I've experienced personally. So three growth stages, a peak stage, which I call predictable success, three decline stages. There's a sort of a mirroring goes on the three growth stages. First of all, early struggle, sometimes called the startup phase. I don't like that phrase for a whole bunch of reasons. So I call it early struggle, because that's what it is. There's nothing glorious about it. It's not to be wished for. The only strategy for a business or a church in early struggle is to get out of there.

[Gary]

This episode is brought to you by my Art of Leadership Academy. One of the key insights I took away from my conversation with Les McKeown is this. If the church can only move at the speed of one leader's insight, the church will always be limited by that leader's insight, capacity. Or put another way, church growth accelerates when leadership is distributed. So the Art of Leadership Academy is designed to help you and your team think, decide and lead at a way higher level together. When your whole team is learning the same language, values and leadership frameworks, guess what? You stop relying on one voice and you start building a leadership culture that lasts. So here are a few simple ways to get started. You could read an article inside the Academy and talk about it together in a staff meeting or a Slack channel. You could download download my preaching cheat sheet and bounce sermon ideas off each other. Start a real collaborative process. Or even sitting down and working through a course together like the Art of Preaching or fund the future. Well, that's a way to really move the needle in your ministry. So you can get started completely [e-mail] or simply click the link in the description of this episode. And remember, don't just grow as a leader, grow as a team. Click the link in the description and you can get started for free. Can I ask you a question? So obviously if you're starting something from scratch, you're an early struggle. So church planters. But like 30 years ago, I started at three small declining churches that were in death rattle. Literally the final cycle. Like it was going to be last one out, turn out the lights in a couple of years. And then we basically became a church plant. Like we were totally rejuvenating. So I'm thinking about everybody who's trying to revive something that has almost died. Would they also be an early struggle.

[Les McKeown]

Or would that be a different thing? And that's one of the key distinctions is that you can get into deathrattle. In fact, the only two options you have are actually put this thing into the ground, it's over. Or you should across here, throw away all the detritus and start again. And you're starting in early struggle. It may not feel that way because you've got a bunch of stuff, but it's still early struggle because you're in.

[Gary]

Other words, you're reinventing the church, you're reinventing the company from for people listening. Okay, great. So that's early struggle. So if you're like trying to reinvent everything or inventing everything.

[Les McKeown]

You'Re trying to get solvent is the blunt truth about it. And it's one of the things.

[Gary]

You have enough money to do this again tomorrow?

[Les McKeown]

It's hard to. And given that we have chosen to live in a capitalist environment, it's really, really difficult to change the world if you can't pay the bills. That doesn't sound very romantic, but, you know, you've got to.

[Gary]

Yeah, I said we were going to do the elevator pitch, but this is really good. I did, I talked to or I was listening to some business podcasts recently and basically one of the common themes was usually entrepreneurs don't run out of vision, they run out of money. And that's why businesses fail. You start a restaurant, you start a new AI startup. And it's not that you don't have ideas, it's not that you don't have passion. Same with churches. Right. You just ran out of money and the funding was over and you couldn't keep the doors open. So it really is a struggle for cash to support the ministry.

[Les McKeown]

Yeah. And eventually your energy suffers.

[Gary]

When we planted Canexus in 2007 and to 2007, by February of 2009, we were down to the last $5,000 in the bank. And it was like one of those, whoo, we're starting over again. And we did and now took off from there. But like, yeah, you get there.

[Les McKeown]

And for the one in five, I mean, statistics float around all over the place. But I'm pretty convinced it's that pretty accurate number is about 80% of all new ventures fail within three years. The one in five that make it through, they hit the first real stage of growth. We found our market. People are buying this church terms, people are coming to this that, you know, I've found my market. I'm not scrabbling around trying to get non family members to turn up and give me a quorum on a Sunday. You know, it's there. I don't panic when I hear somebody's, you know, got a cold head. Cold might not be there. You know, we've got momentum. I give that stage a very technical name. I call it fun. Cause it is fun. I mean, we have our moments, there's trouble, there's problems, all that sort of stuff. But essentially it's real fun. And it's what most people think they started their church for. For this phase. This is what we. And it feels like this is it. This is what we're here to do. And it can be because fun is one of the. There are only two of the seven stages you want to be in. And fun is the first of. And I think It's a brave decision and sometimes the right one. This is easier, more easily heard in the for profit world than in the church world because of the grand commission. But there's a lot to be said for folks who decide, no, we're staying here, we're doing this, we're working in this niche area, maybe working with a specific demographic. And I don't want 12 locations. We're going to do this really, really well and I have a heart for this to be done elsewhere. So why don't you go and do that and I'll help you.

[Gary]

So you've kept it relatively small. You're growing, you have money in the bank, but it's a happy time and, you know, good time.

[Les McKeown]

You feel fulfilled and you get to be king. You get to have this, you know, you can. You and it are, you know, you're the face of the whole thing. And you can lead that way and we'll lead that way and we'll come back in a second or two to the ramifications of that. You then hit the third growth stage, which doesn't feel like a growth stage at all. I call it Whitewater. And it's essentially the point at which just the complexity of this. We've opened one more location or maybe our first new location, or we've added some services or we've just got a.

[Gary]

Bunch of services now. We doubled our staff.

[Les McKeown]

And just the complexity of this means that the way we were doing things really well for so long, which was just to turn up and throw massive effort at the next indicated thing. I mean, running a church, running a business, running anything in fun. What I'm about to say is a slight exaggeration, but not much. It's like watching 6 year olds play play soccer. It's flock ball, right? There's just the ball is the thing that needs to be chased. We chase it and all 22 players are around it and wherever the ball goes, they go. And that's what we do in fun. That's one of the reasons it's fun. People don't get head up about job titles. We're not filling in spreadsheets till we're crying through our ears. We're just doing the thing. It's relatively simple now. It's getting complex and we're having to put systems and processes in place. That's when the decision has to be made. Do we go back to where we were or do we put systems and processes in place to manage this complexity and then get up to the next stage? The peak stage, which I call predictable success. And the key difference, that's the second and last of the stages that you want to be in, either fun or predictable success. You don't want to be in early struggle or in Whitewater for any longer than you have to. You can avoid them, but you don't want to be in there for any longer than you have to. Why would you choose predictable success over fun? In fun, you can grow, but there's always a cap. There's always a cap, and Whitewater is that cap. In predictable success, your growth. And for the folks that are listening, I'm now doing a sweeping J curve with my hand. Growth is. I get these wrong sometimes. A convex curve as opposed to a concave curve. No, concave.

[Gary]

Figured that one out. So welcome to the club.

[Les McKeown]

It's a J curve. It's the ability. You can grow much, much more than you can in fun. And that's the whole of the growth stage, really, really quickly. We don't need to spend too much time on it. But in theory, if you keep doing the right things, you can stay up there in predictable success for a long time. And you will know many churches who have done that and are doing the right things, and they're staying there. Now, it is a process. You can't just sort of stop and everything will be fine. And one of the main processes is preventing yourself from declining. And the way to do that is the first decline stage. I call treadmill. It's sort of the mirror image of Whitewater. Whitewater. For the first time, we were completely under systematized. Enterprise wide, if you want to call it that, church wide. In Treadmill, we're for the first time over systematized. Why did we do that? Because, hey, look what Systems and processes just did for us. It gives us the ability to scale. So let's have more of that. We have more of it. We start to get bureaucratic, we lose our edge. We're not creative, we're not innovative. It's rinse and repeat. This Easter is just a rehash of last Easter's whole thing. Not a lot new being brought into play. Treadmill is reversible. And you do that just by reducing the systems back. You don't throw them out because you'll just fall back into whitewater. You reduce them back to what they need to be. But if you don't do that, you'll fall into the big rut, which is a long, slow decline into irrelevance. Why long and slow? Because you got a very healthy balance sheet from all of that time and predictable success. You've got a lot of followers, you've got a big congregation, but they don't want any change. Nothing's moving here, right? We all think we can the get.

[Gary]

End before we get to the next stage, can I just say to leaders listening, what's cool? This podcast's been around for 11 years, but I was talking to a few leaders when I was outside speaking this fall and they said a bunch of us who are millennials now are just getting into leadership and there's a whole new generation of new senior pastors who were like youth pastors or college students when this podcast came out. But now they're the senior pastor and they're inheriting a lot of churches that are in that big rut or whatever where, oh, the Glory days were eight years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but it's a slow decline and they were told that it was growing and then they discover it's not. So if that's you, and there are thousands of pastors and church leaders and leaders honestly listening who've inherited something that's not growing, listen up, because Les is reading your mail right now.

[Les McKeown]

So the big rut. One of the unfortunate things about it is it's pretty much irreversible. And why? Because people like it like that. They actually don't diagnose it as problematic. When I draw my model, when I'm starting a session, I draw the four obviously painful stages of squiggly parts of the life cycle. So early struggle. You know you're having a really tough time in Whitewater. You know you're having a tough time in treadmill. You know you're having a tough time and death rattle. It's obvious this thing's not Whitewater. I draw the same as fun and predictable success as straight lines, because inside everything's harmonious. The customers are a bit of a pain in the neck if you're in a for profit business. But you know nothing's going to change here. And we're all comfortable and we're happy with that, but it's a long, long decline.

[Gary]

Few less people every month, few less people every year, few. But there's a bit of money in the bank to keep going.

[Les McKeown]

Correct. And then finally there's the stage you talked about as your sort of incubation for what you've built, which is the death rattle stage. Whenever it looks, oh, something's happening here. But all that's happening is this thing is either rebirthing or it's just being put to bed. So that's the life cycle in a hurry. And what we're talking about here is something that's universal, which is as Marshall Goldsmith wrote, the best title to a book ever. He wrote a number of brilliant books. But his book with the title what Got yout Here Won't get yout There says everything that I'm sharing at the moment. Because the leadership style we build set the mini celebrity side aspect label aside for a moment or so. We can layer it back on in a second. The leadership style that's needed in fun. Needed in fun, which is a hard charging visionary setting the direction and a group of water carriers enabling the achievement of that vision. That's not a good thing to have in fun. It's your lifeline, it's how you're going to survive fun. And once you hit Whitewater, almost like that, it becomes problematic. It's not like it ages out as soon as you begin to get stretched. Because what's this complexity doing? First of all, it's causing everybody to screw up, which is not great. But it's pushing your ability to juggle all of those things as the person who's giving all of the direction. And it needs, the only resolution for it is a strong, competent leadership team. And I'm going to say the second thing that's tough in the for profit, faith and cause based world of which churches are clearly a part, almost always the group that's called the leadership team and Fund because there usually is one, it sort of emerges after years. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, roundabout there it isn't. It's a group of highly competent, very, very committed and convicted water carriers, enablers in the positive sense of the word.

[Gary]

Just doing what you told them to do.

[Les McKeown]

And that's right because that's how we are going to get out of early struggle and make the most of our time. And fun is one vision. Here's how it goes. Doesn't have to be my way or the highway, but it's look, I'll set the milestones and we say things like let's achieve them together. But it's basically the part of the leadership group role to go make those things happen. To get through Whitewater and build a church that can get into and stay in predictable success, you need a leadership team who are genuinely taking the sort of yoke of leadership on. They're not there to support you as the leader. That now becomes a subsidiary part of their job. We're here to be the leadership. Now. Does that mean that if we're going to.

[Gary]

We're here for the mission, not just the leader. They're carrying the mission forward.

[Les McKeown]

And what does that mean in practical terms? I mean to cut it down to the real nitty gritty. And this is where the mini celebrity aspect becomes highly problematic. It means the development of a healthy challenge function. That's where the rubber hits the road. Do we have a leadership team who actuate a healthy challenge function? Is there debate? Is there discussion? Are we looking to come up with the best solution for the church, the separate entity that is the church, or are we doing what the founding pastor wants us to do because his or her desires, wishes, proclamations have always been a proxy for what the church wants in Whitewater. That starts to, or has to start to separate out now the many celebrity aspect of stuff. I shouldn't say it sounds very demeaning. I don't mean it that way. The reason I use that phrase is I think not. I think I do see a lot of leaders, not just in the church, but everywhere, who only think this applies to the really big household names.

[Gary]

Right?

[Les McKeown]

But it doesn't. It applies to anybody who's built a platform that they can get confused about, whether that's their leadership platform or a branding tool. And branding tools aren't bad things. They're just perfectly fine. But they're not good leadership platforms. And what does that mean in absolute practice? It means this, that challenge function struggles very hard to be developed. Because that era of mini celebrity has convinced me that it's not just what I have done. It's not just the success that I've had that's important. It's how I did it. It's how I personify it, it's how I exhibit it. And therefore, I have to have the final say in everything or we won't succeed. And the reality is the bullseye of what cannot change about how you did things is remarkably small. The amount of things that do need to change. For a church that's going to get into and stay unpredictable, success about how they did things is huge. It's huge. Let me add one more lens to this. I realize I'm doing a fire dump here, but let me put an important aspect of this on the table to consider. Many of our listeners, and I know you'd be very familiar with Jim Collins work. Good to grade, built to last. Fantastic stuff. Jim talks about having the right people in the right seats in the bus. And here's what occurs during fun that happens any good leader, visionary leader, lead pastor, Founding pastor worth their salt. The churches find it a bit more difficult and they take a bit longer to do it, but they'll get people rightly positioned to do the right things. That's built on this centric model of leadership where there's one person who's having pretty much a series of monologic directions with folks. You're going to build a church in predictable success. 800 people, 1200 people, 2000 people. You need a leadership team who can carry the load of that of which you're the first amongst equals and you're still the senior person, but you're moving from what in the for profit world would be thought of as a founder to a CEO. That's really the core of the change. Here's the thing. When you take your beautiful bus with everybody in the right seat and it goes into Whitewater, it's like going into a tunnel or under a bridge. What comes out on the other end? It is not the same bus. It's not even a bus anymore. It's like a drone or something, right? That means that even the right people, your best people in that seat in Fun, are statistically unlikely to be the right people here. But we're built so much on managing these relationships and me showing up as the one who's right, that instead of allowing that sort of that metamorphosis to occur, we still try to run the church the same way as we did in Fun. And if I'm convinced not just that the things that we did were right and successful and how we're going to do them should be repeated, but the way in which they're personified has to continue, then I'm almost certainly doomed to failure.

[Gary]

This episode is brought to you by Church Law and Tax. Well, it's almost tax season. It has a way of sneaking up on church leaders, right? So the question is, what do you do about that? Right? It's so stressful. Are we doing this right? Are we getting all the boxes checked? Right? Because you got tax filing, payroll, housing, allowance reimbursement. It's a lot. And that's why I want to point you to the online Church and Clergy Tax guide from our friends at Church Law and tax. For nearly 40 years, it has been the go to resource US Pastors Trust to handle taxes with confidence. It's fully online, fully searchable, so you can find answers in seconds. And it's updated with the latest changes, including how to navigate the one big beautiful Bill Act. And now you can even ask Richie, their new AI assistant, how it applies to your church without the legal or tax jargon. So if you want to head into tax season prepared instead of panic, this is a great next step. So here's what you do. Go to churchlawandtax.com carrie to become a member and access the guide today. That's church, church, law and tax. A N-T-A-Com C-A-R-A y and you will get in today. And I'm guessing if you ever get out of Whitewater, well, you won't get into predictable success unless you decouple the visionary role with the leadership team. Right? Like the vision's got to spread to other leaders. But I'm guessing a lot of this probably contributes to burnout and exhaustion as well, doesn't it?

[Les McKeown]

Well, 100%.

[Gary]

How so?

[Les McKeown]

Trying to bring that type of leadership to bear on every aspect of a complex, growing organization, it will kill you. And one of the. There's no greater thing than a scapegoat. It's great to find scapegoats. It helps us process and work with a lot of stuff. The scapegoat I would put on the slab for this is media. Because now these days, I'm looking at my computer screen back in the days of Wired magazine and print and all that sort of stuff. Whenever you got to fill column inches, you've got to fill infinite websites with stories. And they've got to be interesting and they've got to be, you know, heroic. And so the myth of the heroic business leader, the myth of the heroic leader, it's one of the things that's driving this. Often that many celebrity thing comes from. I'm gonna be honest, it comes from a desire to be seen even in your own mind, as a heroic leader. 98% of leadership is built on mundane act. Her errorism is great, but it's.

[Gary]

Explain that. What do you mean? 98% of leadership is based on mundane acts? What does that mean, Les?

[Les McKeown]

Well, I mean, take on just any random example. The one I'll take is. You'll forgive me, Carrie, but I'm gonna assume that you're old enough like me to remember this. Remember Captain Sully landing the plane on the.

[Gary]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great movie, by the way, with Tom Hanks.

[Les McKeown]

I never got around to seeing it.

[Gary]

But I've been told that it is really well done.

[Les McKeown]

Well, that's a fantastic, heroic story. Thank goodness that's not happening a thousand times a day, right?

[Gary]

Yeah. You end up in the Hudson and.

[Les McKeown]

Nobody'S getting on the plane, right? It's great that that happens once in a blue moon. But does that mean that he hasn't been a great leader all of his years? Does it mean that no other airline pilot is a great. And it's one of the professions I most admire. They're wonderful folks, most of them. And what they're doing is mundane stuff every single day in predictable success terms. One of the things that people find valuable is the degree of shared vocabulary that it helps people with. And one of the things that's least stacked hands on is just a definition of what leadership is. And the way I put it is leadership is any act that gets two or more people closer to their common goals. If you do something discretionary, you don't have to to get your paycheck that gets two or more people closer to their common goals. That's an act of leadership. And Sully did a million things that just led to the point that when something really horrendous could have happened, he avoided it. Did that thing make him a great leader? No, not in and of itself. And that's not what great leadership is. Now come back to the celebrity stuff. You then get the likes of Dear St. Steve of Jobs, who is a classic example of someone that did that thing of knowing of being the identity of everything very, very early on. Apple blew up in Whitewater. He got kicked out. It went almost straight across into treadmill under Scully, the coke guy. Steve Jobs does next doesn't really comes back in and he's worked out how to separate these. Now does that mean that he's not still up front? Everybody's seeing the stories, reading the biography, listening to the late night, you know, stories of the late night calls and da da da. But what's he been doing behind the scenes? Building a fantastic team.

[Gary]

Yeah. Apple is a much bigger company post Steve Jobs than when he was alive.

[Les McKeown]

Sure. And it's having its issues and time will tell whether it's able to keep. I talk a lot and teach a lot about institutionalizing vision, depersonifying it so that you're not dependent on one person walking out the door. That's still a little up for grabs. But the reality is you watch any great leader in a large organization. There are great leaders who are just pure all heroics all the time. And they're typically doing one thing and then they drop it. And you and I know a few of these folks and then they do another great thing and it's all meteor showers and it's fantastic and then they drop it and then they do Another thing, and it's all me. They're basically, I read a new book.

[Gary]

I listened to a new podcast, and this is where we're going.

[Les McKeown]

They're essentially pulling something through fun, and then as soon as it has the need for scale, they're dropping it. There's actually nothing wrong with that. But any really successful leader that gets his or her organization for profit, church or whatever, truly into predictable success with the ability to scale, they can still be the celebrity out front. But the only way that's working is if they're using that as a branding, marketing, selling tool. Maybe a bit of a culture icon as well. But you turn the camera lens around and look into the organization, they are building a strong, healthy leadership team. Right?

[Gary]

No, I want to underscore that. I don't think I've told you this, but in our multiple conversations and reading your books, I created this little game in my head that I play. I play it with myself sometimes. Once in a while, if I'm with someone I know well, I'll bring him into the game. But I get to go to a lot of churches, a lot of organizations, and this works better in businesses because nine times out of 10, people who know who the lead pastor is at a large church. But your argument is that if you're in predictable success, yes, you have a visionary leader, but it's difficult to spot that person around the table. So I played this little game because I get to a lot of, fortunately, some very successful companies, I'm very fortunate to be able to do it. But I'll play this game like spot the CEO or spot the billionaire. And often they're the most unassuming people in the room. They're not like, up there, large and in charge on the whiteboard. All right, everybody, let's go.

[Les McKeown]

Take this hill.

[Gary]

They're just sitting there, and they might talk for 5 or 10% of the meeting, and they might not even do so where everybody head snapped there. There might be somebody who completely disagrees with them 10 seconds later, but they're cool with that. And I think the church is missing that. I think often one of the reasons now you go to. I'm gonna pick on someone by name here, Craig Groeschel. I mean, very upfront. I don't know, you probably know Craig from the Gls and everything, but very upfront. He's on social media like a lot of pastors are, but you meet his team, it is unbelievable. And he's responsible for the overall thing. But when you look at everything that he has delegated and the level of authority and agency his team has, it's incredible. So I see that as a great example of that at Life in the Church. But do you find that often. And I know I got this insight from you, so I'm asking you a rhetorical question. But spot the CEO, spot the billionaire. That can be really difficult to do sometimes because they're not that visionary talk 90% of the time person.

[Les McKeown]

There was a bestseller many years ago called the Millionaire Next Door and this was back in the day when a millionaire was relatively something.

[Gary]

Yeah.

[Les McKeown]

And that was the point that that book made. Wasn't the main point, but it was certainly one of the secondary points. And yes, I find that the folks that are running truly successful large or complex organizations, particularly if they have spent time in the fun stage, they're very much like what you're talking about. Here's a fun part of what I still get to do is even though I'm a huge Teams Riverside Zoom fan, I love doing stuff virtually. I'm still a person that people call when they want to do something with their team together in person.

[Gary]

Consulting.

[Les McKeown]

Particularly this time of year, I'm doing leadership and management retreats a couple of times a week, most weeks, because it's built into strategic planning for the turn of the year.

[Gary]

Sure.

[Les McKeown]

And what I've learned over the years is that there are four levels that teams work at that you can see within seven to eight minutes of spending time with them. And it tells you all that you need to know about the degree of maturity of development of the leadership team. Now, to be clear, I'm talking about and what I'm about to say is going to sound judgmental and to an extent it is. But that's only if this is a group that are trying to stay in predictable success. If you're just a small group of people in fun, none of this really matters that much. But I get to go in and sometimes I know them well, sometimes I don't know them. But here's what happens. I'll ask something and I'll find something deliberately early on that's pretty a large strategic type of an issue. And I'll ask something that might just I'll position it as me needing clarification. That's all. Because all I want to do see what happens level zero is everybody just sits there with their eyes down and after a moment of something awkwardness, a few of those people will turn and if you don't know who the leader is, their eyes will tell you because they're turning to look at Kerry, see what he says, because that's where those sorts of things get. So that's not great, but that's typically what we're starting with as we begin to shift from a group of enablers to a true leadership team. So you've got to start with that and you've got to actually manage that process and work at it. You get them to level two, same question. Somebody's head comes up, they look straight at me and they'll say something and then their head will go back down again. And if I ask a follow up question, somebody might say, oh, Jenny would know about that. So look at Jenny. Jenny looks at me, gives me the information I need. The third level is that level I just talked about. It'll still always end with a look at whoever the senior person in the room is. The next level is somebody looks up, says something and somebody else speaks into it and clarifies or adds. And then somebody will speak to that and that'll be the discussion. And we're now at healthy ish. And then the truly healthy level is I ask a question, just it goes wherever it needs to go. It's like water flowing downhill. Whoever needs to say does say, I'm having to shut people up from time to time. And you cannot tell from the contributions who the most senior leader is. Here's the thing that most visionary leaders really, really struggle with is I'm talking about something technical here. I want to talk about visionary leaders because we've got operators, processors, synergists, other leadership styles. I'm talking here about the big picture. And most senior founding pastors or visionary leaders, they have two modes of operation. In charge or not here.

[Gary]

Yeah, you're right. If I'm not running the whole thing, I'm not even going to go. Nope.

[Les McKeown]

And so what happens is whenever you. About a third of my time's coaching and when I'm coaching a leader and trying to help them begin to not essentially insist that they know everything and every decision comes from them, what they'll do in all honesty and genuineness from a good place and a good heart, they'll say, okay, I'm just not coming. You have the meeting, I'm not coming. Because if I come now, what then happens? Utter, absolute terrible failure. Because the people you've left in the meeting that you're not coming to, they haven't been developed to do this. You didn't leave them any decent instructions. They're scared to death they're going to get it wrong. They Never did it before. And so you end up jumping back in and making it all happen again. And just the ability to learn. And it takes time. This can take two years. And that's a long time in church growth to build a muscle of being able to be a team member, to be able to not. Not just either be in charge or not. Here I had a guy, he ran a. Founded and ran a very successful business of the telecoms industry. And he had a big problem with this. And he was the founder, the CEO and he was in charge of like 90 teams. He had a Toblerone, you know, the Toblerone chocolate bar, chocolate bar pyramid. He had one made with CEO on one, founder on the other side and team member. And he carried it around with him for over a year. And it wasn't for him, it was for the other people in the room. And what he would do is he would come down, he would put the default stance. He told everybody about it and there was a very mature group and they could do this sort of thing. And he said, look, I'm just. He blamed it on me, which is fine. Les is trying to coach me through not just either being here in charge or not being here. So I'm going to come in and I'm going to adopt my role and I'm going to try to do team member as the default as much as possible. And I'll put the Toblerone down there. And they had the right to reach over and turn it whenever he was moving.

[Gary]

So right now you're a team member.

[Les McKeown]

Right now I'm a team member and I'm contributing. And then my legs starting to jump up and down because that's not how we do this. No, no, don't make that decision. Don't make that. Okay, look, look, we're not going to do it that way. Well, somebody would reach over and turn to founder, because that was the founder voice. Now, like I say, that's a mature thing to do. And they were a mature group and they were able to do it. But that's really what we're trying to talk about now. If you're getting a lot of your North Star, from a leadership point of view, through the celebrity branding type of profile, you're not hearing an awful lot of that.

[Gary]

No, you're not getting pushback.

[Les McKeown]

You're the star of your own movie and that, I mean, that's, you know, if there was one sort of. Aha. For me, that, you know, this is problematic. It's that increasingly in the last. Let's give it four to six years, really. When reality TV peaked a lot a number of years ago, I began to. Nobody ever used this phrase to me. But what people I began to hear from, folks, not from the leaders, but from their team, was a sense that they were extras in this guy's movie.

[Gary]

They were extras.

[Les McKeown]

Yeah. This thing is my auto parts manufacturing company. That's the lot, the film lot. Right. And I'm here. That sounds like I'm saying this is a terrible thing. There's nothing wrong with that. If you want to do that, start your business, start your church, get to fun, stay there, right? And do that, you know, and direct the thing and make it brilliant, make it a wonderful movie. But if you want to get to predictable success, that's not going to happen.

[Gary]

And real leaders don't want to be an extra in someone else's movie, as a general rule. They don't. They don't. Les. This is so helpful and so illuminating. So I want to go back to the mini celebrity pastor who's maybe in the fun stage, right? Like, things are going well. There's more people every month, more people every year. Church is growing, has the funds to operate. And I think one of the challenges, I mean, for a long time, you were the person who had the command of the room. Like, who else gets 40 minutes on a Sunday morning once a week to talk? And everybody's quiet. So that does something to your head as well. But now with social media, you're the person featured in all the clips. You're the person who is directing the content, the vision, the mission. We kind of see the downside of that now. If people have been tuning in, how do you start to disentangle yourself from that when you're still going to be the person on social media, you're still going to be the face with the place. As we sometimes say. How do you make sure that your church has an identity that is separate from the founder?

[Les McKeown]

There are a couple of very specific things that need to start going down instead of going up, and I'll go through them one at a time. The first one is the footprint of your curse of knowledge, because that's really a large part of what we're talking about, is this isn't all about ego and desire and wanting to be the man in the big picture. As my mother used to say. That was the worst thing she could ever say about somebody, was he always wants to be the man in the big picture. And we all have that. We're humans, we have egos. A Lot of this isn't actually driven by that. A lot of it's driven by the curse of knowledge. I was the one who did it and I know best now how to do it. I've done my 10,000 hours. I not only know how to do it, I know how to do it really, really well. So it's going to take forever to show somebody else, I mean literally forever. And even then they're not going to do it that good. And the only real response to that, and I get it and I understand it and I face it myself in my own world, the only real response is, well, how's that working out for you? Just don't do that. You can't make it a non negotiable, you can't turn it into a zero sum game because it's not. If it is a zero sum game, we're all doomed. None of us are going to grow our charts right. You're just making the trade off that you're choosing. You're choosing the trade off. That means you don't have to put the time and work into training somebody into helping somebody do it. And by the way, in terms of baby steps, just making a start is ask whoever knows you best in the church leadership. Actually maybe a spouse or close friend might be able to help you with this as well. To just tell you 10 things that you could just stop doing right now and not only would nothing go badly wrong, that would go better and people would be happier. And let me tell you something, I assure you, their problem will be stopping at 10. Right?

[Gary]

No, you're right. Because just to underscore that for a minute, Les, if you're the founder or if you're doing what I did originally, which is revitalizing churches, you do know pretty much everything about how everything is done because you brought in the new musicians, you redesigned the services, you started from scratch, you know how the toilets are cleaned and where the chairs are stacked, right? Like you know everything. And so you're saying at some point you're going to have to start dropping that stuff and letting other qualified leaders not only do what you used to do, but take responsibility for that ministry and be responsible for idea generation and execution and all of that.

[Les McKeown]

Correct. And there's an interesting other side of the coin here that the very same people, and I'm saying this in a way that makes me sound like everybody should just have this and I've got it and why are people so dumb? And that's not the case. I've struggled with all of this as well. I just have the the privilege of pattern recognition because I've been doing this for so long. The very same folks who cursed for whichever reason, the curse of knowledge and who therefore do everything also same people who either can only be there in charge or not there. They're the very same folks who you'll hear saying over and over again, why can't they just think like me? Why can't they think like me? In for profit world, this is why don't you think like a founder? You know, why can't you think like an owner? The church has mercifully exempt that because it doesn't have that direct correlation that it does in for profit. And when I hear that you think about the way you're working with these people, you've given them zero chance of thinking like you because you think like you and then tell people what to do. Where's the space where they got to think like you? Well, they don't get to do that because I know every time I give them a thing to do, they don't get it. Well, you've given this big thing to do and just disappeared because you can't bear to sit in the room and help them. There's a very straightforward layer of interaction that it's sort of. I always forget what this is. I don't have it in my knee. Whatever that fluid is that allows your joints to move.

[Gary]

It'Ll populate the comments because I don't know either. But I know what you mean, but I don't know what it's called.

[Les McKeown]

The loss of it leads towards arthritis and I have that in my right knee. I don't have this lubricating fluid. The thing that the sort of magic fluid in here is the ability to mentor and coach. Right. And moving into that mode as opposed to either I do it and I get it right or I delegate it to you and get offside and you get it wrong.

[Gary]

Is it oval fluid?

[Les McKeown]

I don't know.

[Gary]

A quick Google. Okay, I don't know. The comments will correct it.

[Les McKeown]

We're going to be told in no uncertain terms but there'd be some fancy medical word for it. The thing that bridges that movement from. I've only got two styles of interacting here, either in charge or not here. Towards being able to not need the Toblerone and show up and just be who you need to be in a group at any one point in time is developing the ability to mentor and coach in a consequence free way. Not saying you just let people get things wrong but give people an environment. Finish my sentence. Give people an environment where they can learn from you. And that's the bit that is really, really difficult to do, which is to say, okay, I'm not gonna dictate to you how to do this. And I'm not gonna say just you do it. I'm gonna say, so Christmas is coming up. I've always planned to the nth degree the Christmas party. I'm taking a trivial example, and it's always been fantastic. We're renowned for my Christmas parties. But this is silly. I should not be doing this. I'm not going to do it. Carrie, you do it. Okay. Never manage the Christmas party. And of course, now we're a relatively large sized church. There's 350 of us, and I've got to do this from scratch. So I'm going to mess it up and you're going to mess it up in this example. And so I'm going to end up jumping in and fixing it at the last minute.

[Gary]

I'm going to be a Christmas party.

[Les McKeown]

With myself instead of saying, well, look, I want you to do it, but why don't you do this? Just go off, take a few days, come back and tell me what the theme is that you're going to go with and a couple of other suggestions that you thought about, and I'll work through in my mind and communicate with you what I'd be thinking about that and how I might plan the next step. And then come back a week after that and show me the plan that you've worked out and use me as a resource. Help me help you. Rather than, you're going to do it, you're going to do it really well, aren't you? The answer is no.

[Gary]

That makes a lot of sense when you think about disentangling the brand and the communicator. What does that look like?

[Les McKeown]

Well, I think I don't know Craig Hozel at all. But as you have, I know you do know him well. But I've seen him many, many times. And from what I do know of his folks and the way in which he operates, you summarized it yourself pretty well. It means that if you had a real skill for it and a love for it, and you want to keep doing it, do that. But see it as a job. See it as part of what I'm here to do for the church, not for me. Right?

[Gary]

Boom. You just nailed it. For the church, not for me.

[Les McKeown]

Now, does that mean you can't have a side gig? That's just Yours, of course you can. We all do things. I mean like you could play pickleball just for you. You can do social media just for you. But if your main gig has been social media, print whatever it may be, or the church, and you're good at it, for goodness sake, don't not do it, keep doing it. But do it for the church. Don't do it for you. And don't confuse it. In fact, as much as possible, just assume that anything that you think is a leadership principle in that arena, stress test it like crazy because it almost certainly isn't going to hold up in your leadership of the leadership team in the church. Because I need to pull apart a little bit what I just said.

[Gary]

Sure.

[Les McKeown]

One of the most important mind shifts getting through Whitewater is really about and dear listeners, not viewers, I've got my four fingers pointing to my temples. The biggest single shift is in the 4 inches between the ears of the founder. That's what the majority of the shift. And one of them is this in absolutely an early struggle and by far the majority of the cases in fun. You're the person that ultimately decides and fixes problem comes up, you know, it escalates like through a chimney. And you have to solomonically fix things or decide things. Your job, the moment you make the decision that we're going to push through Whitewater, we're going to build the systems and processes to manage this complexity going to get into predictable success. Your job is to build the team that decides and fixes things. Your job is no longer to decide and fix things. Your job is to build the team that decides and fixes things. In fact, ultimately the through line is you're going to eventually become the leader of a team who builds teams that decide and fix things. That's where you're going to get to eventually. But you got to do it in steps. But that transition from everything comes through me somehow or other to no, my job is to build the team that everything goes through according to some guidelines. Everything gets thrown at people willy nilly. And that means you've got to begin to develop mentoring and coaching skills. If you haven't got them, you've got to begin to push away the curse of knowledge and give that to other people. And every decision you have between do I spend an hour doing this thing or do I spend an hour investing in somebody so they can do the thing? It's a no brainer.

[Gary]

Yeah. Les, what do you do? Because we talked about everything so far through the senior leader line of vision, there's a lot of people listening who are not the senior leader. And they've got that mini celebrity pastor who really enjoys leadership, who's sort of the I'm all in or I'm gone. I'm either here or I'm gone. I'm running things or I'm I'm out leader. And we hear from them all the time. What advice do you have for those listening who realize that, oh, my gosh, the senior leader is just that person who wants to do everything. The whole thing revolves around him or her. What's your advice for those leaders?

[Les McKeown]

First of all, to know what you feel about that and how it aligns with what you want. There are many, many people. I had the wonderful guy. I mean, I don't know if there's a chance that Ian could be listening to this, but Ian, if you are, you're gonna recognize yourself immediately. I had a guy I worked with for must have been almost 15 years when I was doing a lot of the stuff that was in fun, and he loved the job of basically being my chief of staff, which was just to block and tackle everything possible to let me do that so that I could get as much joy out of being king in my own world as possible. And if you like that, if the stuff that your lead pastor is flying off because they've got a particular set of things that they want to focus on and other things need done, and you love doing those other things, this could be a marriage made in heaven. So it's not necessarily difficult. Where it's problematic is if either of the two sets of expectations are not being met. And so I get to spend a lot of time with Second Church. And I realize you're talking about beyond just that, but it's most obvious in this position, the XP or whatever you want to call it, that role, if you have somebody in the second chair who really wants to help a leader build an organization in predictable success, and you've got that dominant visionary leader who's doing all of the things to keep us in fun, you're eventually going to get incredibly frustrated. I mean, there's just. There's no way around that. And you'll have to, at some point either accept it and change where you're going to get your joy from, or say, well, this is not the right role for me, and maybe I'll go do it somewhere else. If, on the other hand, you have a leader who is successfully making that transition and you're an equivalent of what my aim was, you're going to get Left behind because you're going to end up, and I see this quite a lot, that a lead pastor will have a group of people who are quotes in a leadership position, but nobody was ever given the title sort of emerged. It was sort of like a crust that grew around a group of folks. And it was as much to do with willingness and showing up and being there with competence. That got you there. And now we need to get into predictable success. And I, as the lead pastor, am making those changes behaviorally, and other people just don't have it.

[Gary]

Yeah, some people are happy to be extras in a movie.

[Les McKeown]

Right. Also, there are some people who are just really good at doing block and tackling. And now that the leadership thing is getting serious and we gotta put a capital L there and you got to lift some leadership. It's just not what they want to do. Right. But it's really tough. And in the church, it's harder than anywhere to say, because you wouldn't say this, but this role has outgrown you, completely outgrown you. You don't have the skill set that I need. That's where it needs to be. The church with its own voice, so to speak. That's becoming clear. Forgive me here, because I'm going to geek out on something that's really important, but I'm going to guarantee you, when you look at your leadership, your listenership, everybody's going to fall fast asleep here. You know what the first thing is I get people to work on whenever they're deep in Whitewater and they're committed and they want to get to predictable success. No clue what's the first thing you're going to want? And everybody thinks I'm going to say, it's a big leadership thing. It's the org chart. It's the org chart. Because what I say to them is, you've got but to step back and say, what does this church require from a lead pastor, a worship pastor, an admin pastor, Gotta define it. What does the church need? Not, what do you want, what does the church need? What is the church saying? Please, I need an admin pastor that does this. I need a missions pastor that does this. I need a worship pastor that does this. And then you've got to step back and say, okay, now let's adultly, maturely look at the current incumbents and say, where do we go from here? Oh, she's knocking it out of the park. Fantastic. She's doing good. He's doing okay. A couple of areas need to work on. Let's find some coaching, some help. Jim is not ever going to really be the sort of missions pastor that we need. And why? Because here's the church has said that we've sat down and worked it out.

[Gary]

Here's the church needs.

[Les McKeown]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Gary]

So start with the org chart. Interesting.

[Les McKeown]

Start with the org chart and the job descriptions which are the two very rightly maligned. Much maligned. Oh my goodness. Are you kidding me? And let me be clear. I get the fun of meeting up with. I don't work a lot in the fun area anymore these days, but I get the delight of still having a lot of fun. Friends who are in fun. That's the last thing you want to look at in fun. It'll kill you. It'll just kill you. And it's one of those things that's not important. Ernest Hemingway, the author, forgive me for jumping around. Ernest Hemingway, the author was asked about going bankrupt, which was an experience that he had. And somebody asked him what was it like, how did it happen? He said very slowly than all at once. And the importance of the org chart and good job descriptions is completely unimportant until it is. And it's a huge thing. And it's part of that ability to begin to separate the voice. Because most leadership structures are rightly in the fun stage based on what I call heads. It's people. What does a worship pastor do here? Ask Jimmy. It's whatever Jimmy does. Right? That's it. Jimmy's the worship partner. So that's what happens. Part of getting into and staying predictable success is to move from a heads based organization to a hats based organization. What are the hats that need to be worn? Right. I mean think about it. If church is the bedrock of this, it's all about steward leadership, moving into steward leadership. I'm here to steward this role.

[Gary]

Yeah, you're not going to be there forever.

[Les McKeown]

And not only you're not going to be there forever, but also and this is the hard thing, unlike in fun where it is right and good. Nor are you the personification of that role. If as I do do I go into an organization of predictable success and I meet people, I want to meet a leadership team who absolutely wow me with being really, really good. But when and it happens a lot in tech for reasons that are similar in the church, but we probably don't have time to go into it. If I meet somebody who as far as everybody in the organization is concerned, they're indispensable, then we have a problem that's not a Predictable success organization. If one person personifies a role, you don't have predictable success. You've got a temporary. You're living temporarily in that state.

[Gary]

Right. Because you don't have the systems to support it.

[Les McKeown]

Correct.

[Gary]

And predictable success. My working definition, and I'm talking to the guy who coined it, so correct me, is it's the tension between entrepreneurial zeal and systems that sustain it. Right. And help it scale. So it's that you're not a bureaucrat where it's sort of like just fill out the paperwork. Right. But you're not this like pure vision. Pure vision. Pure vision. No systems.

[Les McKeown]

Correct. If you've got too much of either too much systems, you're on the decline side. You're gonna. And if you're constantly just coming in and ripping up the playbook every Monday morning, you're going to go back to fun. Be fun. That is fun. But you're constantly ripping everything up to see whether the roots have gone. No, let's do something else. And it's about getting that balance right. And the way I like to talk about it is if you think about what you're trying to build as a multi story building, like, you know, apartment block or something, in fun. We're growing by running up the stairwell, right? Some visionary leaders. Bangs open the fire door, come on, boys. And we all run running up the stairs, second floor up to the third floor. Oh, shit, I left my wallet down there. I gotta go back down again. What we do in Whitewater is we build the elevator. We build the elevator, we put the systems and processes in place. So we want to go to the 14th floor, we go in, we press the button, we go to the 14th floor. Now that's a gross oversimplification.

[Gary]

Sure, sure.

[Les McKeown]

But there's something so heroic about running up and down the stairwell. And there's just so much. There's such a huge behavioral shift needs to happen to prevent you as the visionary leader from when things get tough. Just going back to Marshall Goldsmith, what got you there, and saying, okay, we've got to go back and start doing it the way we did in fun before. Why can't it just be like that? You asked me a question a while back. There was one part of it that we didn't finish off, which is the warning signs. And I was talking about things that need to start going up that usually are going down. One of them, one of the most important ones is the footprint of stuff that's not really talkable about with you. Oh, the stuff that we Just could. You'll have talked to leaders in churches who aren't the lead pastor and you talk about trying to do something or trying to.

[Gary]

Yeah, we can't talk about that.

[Les McKeown]

She wouldn't talk about that. Wouldn't even have a conversation. That needs to start to contract the footprint. I'm not saying that you don't have non negotiables and you don't make clear where the guardrails are, but it's got to be conscious and it's got to be justifiable, got to be right. But I'm going to assume that you're going to get it right and you can't just have it be the footprint of your personal preferences. And that's the thing that we find very hard to separate is what am I saying? We're not going to talk about that. We're only saying that because I'm fearful that if we talk about it, it'll be done differently than the way I would want it to be done. So that's one of the things that should be being reduced. But again, if you have been doing a lot by building this branding platform, you're used to expansiveness, you know, you suggest we'll do something, we go do it. The thing that when I see it happen, I think you've got a gift. There is, and I've said about it before, when I see somebody, whether it's a CEO or a lead pastor, a founding pastor or a founder and a for profit, and I know from experience of working with their team that at least one in three of the suggestions, somebody's just going to say no, then I know they've got to a healthy place. Just the fact that somebody's. Whether the person that says no's right or not, the fact that they've got.

[Gary]

The fact that they could say no to the senior leader.

[Les McKeown]

Yes. Yeah.

[Gary]

Wow. Les, this is sort of an extra motivation question. And if there's not a good answer to this, then that's fair. But you hinted at it a couple of times. You think about the seven stages, right? So you start at early struggle, you get to fun, you go to Whitewater, predictable success and then treadmill and big rut and death rattle. Majority of organizations, I think as you've surveyed them, are on the other side of growth. They're in a treadmill or so. But for the churches that are growing on the growth side, are there size limits you're going to get to as a general rule? Like in other words, if you really want to break the 500 barrier, the thousand barrier, the megachurch barrier of 2000, you've got to get to out of Whitewater and into predictable success. Are there particular sizes, attendance wise, that are attached or limited to the certain stages of your model?

[Les McKeown]

I'm going to say no in a strange way. So if you'll allow me a moment or two to break out why I'm say no. The tenant size does bring complexity. But all of you out there, please don't hate on me for the way I'm about to put this. Your congregation is in the terms that we're talking about here, which is growth, organizational growth. They're more like a customer base for a for profit organization than an integral part of the organization. Now they are clearly because they're the congregation of the church, just like a customer is a customer of the thing. But from an organizational, from the management of complexity point of view, the complexity really comes from the employee group that you're having to manage to manage the size of the church.

[Gary]

It's true.

[Les McKeown]

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So what that means is that the church of Tennis is sort of like the top line figure. And the employee groups like your net and some groups of people can. And it depends how you host your services and depends on the mechanics of your location. You've got an owned facility different from if you're renting and all that sort of stuff. But what's much less variable is the complexity that's caused by the size of your employee group. And by the time you get to 20 full time employees, there's no way you're not going to start having those issues.

[Gary]

You're going to hit Whitewater, you're going to start again.

[Les McKeown]

How intense it gets and what number it gets to before it becomes problematic to the extent that you've really got to fix. It will vary from group to group. But by 20 full time employees, you're going to start getting the ripples. And probably by the time you're 35 or 40, the ripples are going to be going like this. Wow, does that make sense?

[Gary]

So it's more related to team staff size than it is congregation.

[Les McKeown]

And I'm quite sure there is a subsequent correlation then to the congregation size. But there are just so many things that you could do that would enable you to manage that top number in a way that wouldn't necessarily affect the complexity of what you have in here. Right. If you're renting, you start out like my first church plant, just renting a school building that otherwise not being used and it Happens to be a very large building that you were able. We put sign sheets up and just six of us camped in one corner. But we could get to a really, really quite large size before we started having to make major internal decisions about how to manage that growth. Right. But the people that's necessary to manage it immediately jumped as soon as we moved to our own building. Because now we've got to do all of the facilities management, we've got to do all the da da da da da da da. Does that make sense?

[Gary]

It does. This has been so helpful. This is why I love these conversations with you, man. Les, is there anything we haven't talked about today that you think is important to this conversation?

[Les McKeown]

A millions of things. I think the only aspect of it that we haven't gone anywhere near and I'm almost hesitant to bring up because it's absolutely.

[Gary]

That's all right.

[Les McKeown]

It's outside my pay grade because I can only point it out as a, an issue and leave it to other people. You'll understand what I said way back at the top of the call I said this pattern happens in all organizations and for various reasons I see it a lot, particularly in tech and fintech where it becomes really amplified in the church is when you bring God into it, which is hard to do, hard not to do when you're in a church. Right.

[Gary]

I'm glad you went there. Right.

[Les McKeown]

You know, when you have the hard driving founder who also gets to say, well the Holy Spirit told me that's, you know, just in a totally for profit environment where none of the leaders are particularly, particularly religiously inclined. And you may say, well for them. And I get that. But you don't have. That additional aspect of this is not negotiable and it's only not negotiable. We're just not going to discuss it now. Like I say, I can't fix that. I wouldn't want to fix it, but I would want to. And I do point out you have to work extra hard at this whole area of being the one that's making all of the decisions because you have a card you can pull out that nobody else really can and you just gotta be really careful when you pull the card out.

[Gary]

I am so glad you said that. My take on that, Les, is I only really pull the God card out if I'm actually preaching something I try to like. If it's an opinion, if it's something I believe to be right, I'll say, here's where I think we should go. I Don't say God is telling us that we should. Cause I see that abused so often in the church and misused and people get hurt and they end up leaving a church. It's like, hey, my judgment's pretty fallible. That's why one of the criticism I get in my writing all the time is you don't have any Bible in it. It's like, yeah, because I'm writing about cultural issues and I'm doing my best to interpret what I can, but I'm not actually preaching a sermon and I'm not going to say my way of understanding this is the best because as we see in Ezekiel chapter, blah, blah, blah, save that for preaching. I don't know that that's a. Do you have a rule of thumb on that? That's my rule of thumb is like, I will speak for God when I'm actually quoting God's word. If it's my interpretation of it. I'm going to be very careful.

[Les McKeown]

I think it's a wonderful word of thumb. I've got to be very, very careful that I'm not a pastor and I'm not.

[Gary]

That's a word we need to hear. And there are so many broken hearts over the Lord said and people gave everything to it. And then the church went belly up. And it's like, well, what was that?

[Les McKeown]

Yeah. I think there is also one imperative in and around that can be helpful, I think, to see. And what I say to for profit owners, what they do, their equivalent is I own this business. I own 100% of this business right out. So whatever I say happens. And I say two things. Most funders don't have a particular problem with it, but when it is happening a lot, I ask them to think about two things. One is everybody knows it, right. Anyway, you're not saying anything new and everybody knows that I'm sure 98% of the time that their lead pastor loves God and is seeking on a daily basis to hear God's word. They get it. They know that. They don't think you're not first of all. The second thing that's the most problematic aspect is you take it from the for profit point of work perspective. Every time you do that, you're reducing the possibility of the person that you say it to or make it clear to or imply it to, or emotionally construe it to develop as a leader. Because you've just shut down any chance of them stepping into this thing, whatever the topic is, and trying to give the their best and the same thing happens. Just be careful when you're about to. And it's not that most pastors are going to outright say, look, God told them, there's ways to convey it. Just bear in mind that you're preventing something happening that you really need. I realize we're opening up a massive area here, but if you take two businesses going head to head, or you take two churches that are not competing but you just want to see why is one growing and the other one's not. In my experience, the number one long term differentiator is the degree of effective discretionary effort people bring every day. That's the distinguishing factor these days. There isn't going to be a business in the world can't get chatgpt to spit out as good a strategic plan as any other. Right. Nobody's wandering around with a Coke secret recipe anymore. Those barriers to growth and inhibitors of competitors don't exist anymore. By and large, the main distinction is as a group of people, when we come in here every day, everybody brings with them an unopened satchel of discretionary effort. Folks want to do what they had to do to get paid, because otherwise they don't get paid, they get fired. I do this every minute. I do it with every podcast interview you do it with every line that you write is how much discretionary effort am I bringing to make this the best it can possibly be? And when you shut down the possibility for me to speak into something by telling me or making it clear, look, I'm the boss, I own this place. What I say, you shut that all down. Now, am I saying that there are not situations in which it's right to just say, look, hold on a second, this is what we're going to do. No, I'm not. But it's again, it's one of those things. If you want to make the transition out of fun and into predictable success, it's one of those things that's got to be going down, not going up.

[Gary]

Yeah, no, I think that's so true. It's about ownership. And people feel ownership of the mission, even the mission of a church, when they feel like they have a say, when they feel like they're actually contributing to make a difference, rather than whatever you said I'll just try to help with. Right.

[Les McKeown]

So, yeah, and you've just said a hugely important thing. I realize we're pushing our time limit here, but I want to put one more thing, what you just said in the context of what we've been calling the mini celebrity pastor. In fact, any Pastor who wants to take their church, particularly if they founded it, into predictable success. You're going to many, many more churches than I do. And I'm sure you'll agree with me that in many cases, if the founding pastor is still there, the vast majority of people's really true commitment, if you scratch them to the core, isn't to the church, it's to the pastor. Right? And that's good. There's not a darn thing wrong with that. But if you want to grow this church and be able at some point move on, you've got to begin to build that separation I've talked about so many times so that people can begin to make that transition from having their commitment to you individually to the church. And it's a healthy thing. Possibly the most healthiest stage a church can be in is when there's a core group of people who were around whenever the pastor was first making this happen. But there's also a group of people who didn't know those early days at all and are equally committed, but they're committed to the church.

[Gary]

So I want to test this out with you. When I was leading Connexus, I realized because people say you got a charismatic personality, definitely went through early struggle, fun, all of those stages. And there was the worry and the criticism that my identity was fused with the church. And I took some very intentional steps in the last five years of my leadership, more than that, maybe to build a team, quality team based decision making to hire the right people, et cetera, et cetera. And it got to the point where I want to be careful to. I think we were in predictable success. Certainly the church didn't struggle much after. Well, didn't struggle at all really, after I left and, and has continued to grow and flourish under Jeff Brody, who succeeded me. But in those last few years, less, it was weird because our church kept growing and I almost got bored because I was so not in the weeds. You know when you're in the weeds and you're like, ah. And I went through a period of burnout, you know, maybe eight years, nine years before, before I left as lead pastor, where you were so in the weeds you couldn't get a break, every time you looked at your phone, every time you blinked, there was new stuff. And by the end, after all of that had been done and given away and quality team based decisions and the right leaders, right seats on the bus, all that stuff, I had a ridiculous amount of time to work on my message. Sometimes I'd be like, doesn't anybody need to talk to me? I was out maybe one or two nights a month at the most. Whereas when the churches were small and we were in early struggle, I was out five nights a week, which I would love to get back because my kids were young then, you know, still had kids at home when I was leading the church. But is that weird or is that like a pattern that you've seen?

[Les McKeown]

No, it's probably one of the top three most frequent outcomes. Most frequent, successful outcomes. There are a lot of different unsuccessful ways that story can end. But you think about it. You just talked about an encapsulation of all that we've been talking about on this call. So there you are. You're doing all this stuff, and you're the curse of knowledge, and you're juggling everything. You're making all the decisions. You get this church to the point where you're not having to do all of that anymore. That's a success. Your personal response to it, which is, that's fine, but doesn't mean it wasn't a success. It was a huge success. The other options that happen are some people just think this new version of me is really what I was born for. And they jump into that and they just immerse themselves in being the mentor, the teacher of the folks that are in place there and stick and hang in with it. But very many people just say, okay, I've done a great thing here. It's time for me to go make books, make podcasts, do the next thing.

[Gary]

I think I had three to five years left, and then my successor had just had his 40th. I had my 50th. And so I'm like, oh, gosh, if I wait a couple more years, I'm not sure he's gonna be around.

[Les McKeown]

That was absolutely the right outcome because you had nominated a successor, which that's a relatively uncommon thing. It's much more common, is for lead pastors, founders of businesses who want to do the job themselves. They want to change themselves and become the predictable success lead pastor. And so they're going to stay around. They're just going to become a different person. But the route you took is by far the better one in terms of success for everybody. Then you have Jefferson. He stepped into something he wouldn't have had before. He's developed as a person. The church is better for it. I don't mean they're better. Not the church is better for you not being around. It's better for him being.

[Gary]

I can argue with that.

[Les McKeown]

Better for it being depersonified from you, you know.

[Gary]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, there's a handful of people. It's funny, Jeff told me this the other day. He said there's a handful of people who still call it Carrie's Church, but they're probably old and dying now, I think. And the vast majority of people don't know who I am, which is wonderful. I mean, that's a great success. And we still attend.

[Les McKeown]

There's just a world of difference between being out every five nights a week because if you don't, things will fall down and break, and being out five nights a week because you love it and you just want to go be there.

[Gary]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. One more thing. Since we've overshot our time over and over and over again, one of the stories I'm getting regularly now is founding pastors or longtime pastors who set up a succession plan and then they keep extending the timeline. It's like, Les, you're going to be senior pastor in two years. A year and a half goes by. Nothing. Are we doing this? Well, you know, I was rethinking and I'm thinking maybe another year or two. And then I've seen them go five years, seven years, nine years, and. And these poor would be successors are just sitting there on the sideline.

[Les McKeown]

Just.

[Gary]

Any thoughts on that? And let's talk to the senior pastor who has the indefinite ending to their ministry even though they've announced it multiple times.

[Les McKeown]

Yeah, and it's one of those things that I'm not saying heartbreaking, but you get a little twinge with those types of things because it's done out of the best will in the world. I mean, for somebody even. And to say in any organizational context, I'm going to think through my succession is relatively much more unusual than you might imagine. But to short circuit it is. It's all about set a metric, not a time. Pick a number. When we get to 1,000 people, or when we add another ministry or when we start our Spanish work or whatever it is, add a metric that you can see in the future, make it.

[Gary]

A reasonable one, and then when that.

[Les McKeown]

Happens, and when that happens, then we'll pull the trigger because the time doesn't mean anything. They say two years. Well, why two years? Right. I'll be old then. Well, you're old now, you just don't accept it. So set a metric. And then you gotta. And then if you find what you. If what you find you're doing is you're self harming the metric Then you really know you have a problem. You can't let go.

[Gary]

Yeah, exactly. I can see. Well, we're not going to launch that yet.

[Les McKeown]

Let's not do that yet.

[Gary]

Les, I'll tell you, this has been so much fun, predictable success. Highly recommend that book, the Synergist. You wrote another one recently. Do scale. Do you have any recent projects and if not, what is a good place for people to connect with you online these days?

[Les McKeown]

But the minute I'm about two to three years into a three month project of moving as much of my stuff online as possible, the folks that are watching were in my studio here because I want to enable it for as many people as possible. I love the in person work and I love personal coaching. I'll never not do that. But I want people to have as much access to it as possible. And I set up a little page for folks if they just go to predictablesuccess Carrie, they can get free chapters from the book. They can sign up for my blog and get a whole bunch of resources.

[Gary]

Yeah. Get your newsletter. Love it. And by the way, if you're looking for consultant less as among the very. And I'm so glad that you're still doing that. So thank you so much, Les. I know this won't be the last time, but I'm really grateful you helped us figure some stuff out today. Grateful for you.

[Les McKeown]

Yeah, I feel a little bit like Drew Barrymore and Late Night, you know, back for the fifth visit. So let's.

[Gary]

Hey, that's great.

[Les McKeown]

We'll do it again.

[Gary]

Thank you, Les.

[Les McKeown]

Thanks, Gary. Thanks, everybody.

[Gary]

Hope you found that to be a really stimulating conversation. I know I did. And speaking of interesting conversations, next up on the podcast, John Chris. That was a lot of fun. We were in Nashville when I shot that podcast. I had him on my podcast. He had me on his podcast Net Positive, which is a really fun listen if you want to check it out. And then we went to see him perform at New Material Monday night. That was a lot of fun in Nashville at Zany's. That's something I'll do again. I don't go to a lot of comedy clubs, but anyway, that's coming up next episode. If you want more, you can get show notes and everything. We keep them in the Art of Leadership Academy. We've got over 15,000 leaders inside the academy. You can join. Absolutely. For free. And guess what? We have really meaningful conversations around these episodes and a whole lot more. And by the way, for those of you who listen, we often, you know, if you listen to a lot of podcasts or watch them like I do. There's always been a divide between, you know, do you watch podcasts, do you listen to podcasts? And did you know that just very recently Spotify rolled out a feature where you can toggle between audio and video seamlessly? So maybe, you know, I find that I'm usually an audio listener and the, the vast majority of people who access this podcast are audio listeners. But sometimes I want to pop on and just see, hey, what does a guest look like? Or if there was some kind of graphic or something, I want to see it. But then you got to find that moment in the podcast. Well, anyway, if you listen via Spotify now, you can seamlessly toggle between audio and video. That's a cool new feature. Just podcast listeners. A lot of you listening on Apple podcasts on overcast like I do for the most part, that's probably going to make me migrate to Spotify. So I just wanted to post that, I should say. And that is a brand new feature. So thank you so much for listening, you guys. You mean the world to me. We have the best audience in the world. I'm so thankful for you. And when you share this with a friend, you help the podcast grow. And you do the same thing when you leave a rating and review. So thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you next time. I've got John Krist up and I hope our time together today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing.

[Les McKeown]

16.