This is a guest post by my friend David Leuschner, the Executive Director of the Technical Arts at Gateway Church in the Dallas area.

It was late. I walked into my house and sat down with a lot on my mind. As I sat there and thought about the day’s events, some good, some bad, a thought came to my mind: Am I leading my team well?

One person I have read a lot about and continue to learn from is Steve Jobs. He once said, “The most important thing is a person.”  His passion on this statement created some of the most dominant products and product following we’ve seen. More importantly, that statement is the key to answering the question, “Am I leading my team well?”

So, how does focusing on people show you’re leading your team well?

Change the mentality of what your team is doing.

Your production team isn’t just behind the scenes. They are the scene.

Like a worship leader on the platform playing a keyboard, techs are playing an instrument that mixes everything together to create the environment that ultimately sets the environment of worship and hopefully leads people to Christ.

Without this vital group, the spoken word would not reach satellite venues, recordings or the masses.

Technical artists are fulfilling the Great Commission.  If your team can grasp this, it’ll change the way they act and interact with each other.

If I do this will everything run perfectly?

No, tough situations arise. Leading well means you’re ready to address these tough situations. You’re monitoring the health of the team and ready to help someone if they get hurt or out of line. Similar to a sports team, you’re ready to bench people who don’t live up to the values of the team.

As I drifted off to sleep, I wrote down one last item. We have to hold ourselves accountable to be the best we can be, but our team is made up of people. They make good decisions and bad decisions. We can’t expect perfection, but we can expect excellence.

As Max DePree says,

Our first obligation as a leader is to define reality, the last is to say thank you, in between, be a servant.

Live that and you’re leading your team well.

Goodnight.

This is just an excerpt of David’s thoughts on leading well. Check out www.audiovideolighting.com for a more complete version of his perspective on what it means to lead a production team in the local church well.

Connect with David on Twitter: @davidleuschner

I don’t subscribe to many magazines, only because they just pile up on my desk. Lately, for whatever reason,  a small stack has developed, so I took the time to go through them the other day.

One article that caught my attention was about Elton John’s Diving Board Tour, especially since it was one of the last projects that Mark Fisher worked on. I’m a huge fan of Mr. Fisher’s work, more specifically the process of how he worked.

In the article, LD Patrick Woodroffe talked about how the show came together. It started with Sir Elton wanting to take his show on the road, and basically saying, whatever Mark and his team came up with for the production design would be fine. Talk about a blank check!

For many tech people I know, this would be the chance to try all the most cutting edge things I’ve been dreaming about. To pull out all the stops. Yet, here’s what Patrick said:

“The last thing you’d want to do in creating a rock show is to come up with a big concept that has nothing to do with the person sitting on the stage. It’s always been our view that you start with what’s on the stage and work from there.”

This is some wisdom.

No wonder Elton John trusts the people at Stufish so blindly; they have proven that they only want to create something that fits what he is trying to do. They don’t just want to take his money and do whatever they feel like with it. Their goal is to steward his trust and create something that will enhance the person and the music of Elton John.

For those of us doing production in the local church, it is so easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest. Or doing cool production-y things, for their own sake. What our churches need, is for us to have a similar attitude as the crew working with Mr. John.

What’s happening on our platform? How can we help enhance it? How can we make it the best version of itself?

Is your idea to fill your room with haze going to help make your services better?

Will a louder mix satisfy your own desires to feell the bass, but distract people from why they are in church in the first place?

Does all your crazy dutch angle camera shots help people engage with what’s happening on stage or is it just making them sick?

Taking Patrick’s advice will do at least two things for us, make our services better, and build loads of trust with whoever your version of Elton John may be.

I am currently listening to a recorded book called Neptune’s Inferno, which is about the US Navy’s battle with the Japanese over the island of Guadalcanal. As I have been going through the book, the author, James Hornfischer has done a master job of writing the narrative of all the different ships and the people who worked on them.

Part of the story of World War Two in the pacific is about the many technological advances the Navy had put into all their ships and how in many ways, they were on the cutting edge of technology. Sonar and radar just being a couple of examples. But just because they had the latest and greatest in technology, didn’t mean everyone was using it effectively.

Here is one quote from the book that seemed to apply beyond naval warfare, to where most of us live:

“Tools do not make the craftsman.”

In the area of production in the local church, having the most advanced technology isn’t necessarily the answer, especially if you don’t have the people who understand how to use it.

For many of us, making the most out of the tools that are right in front us is the first step to great production. If you aren’t a “craftsman” when it comes to audio or video or lighting, having the newest LED fixture, or the latest plug in, or a 4K camera, isn’t going to turn you into a craftsman.

Working diligently to master your craft is going to turn you into a craftsman.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the “10,000-hour rule”, which basically says that it takes about 10,000 hours to master a specific task.

Are you putting in the time to develop your craft? Or are you blaming your lousy tools on why things aren’t better?

From another perspective, are you putting your time in on the wrong craft? Maybe no amount of hours will make you a craftsman at a particular task. I’m sure I could spend 10,000 hours trying to become a competitive short distance runner…and I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t win any races. Getting the latest plug in for your console isn’t necessarily going to make you a great audio engineer.

At most of our churches, we don’t have the resources to be on the cutting edge of technology, but when we are entrusted with the churches funds to purchase the next new thing, are we confident that we have mastered what we already have?

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I love connecting with other technical artists. I love the chance to be around people that think like me and that struggle with similar issues; to be around people that view the world from a similar vantage point and who help build the kingdom in similar ways.

In my earlier years as a technical artist, I spent a good deal of time looking for community, for people who understood my point of view and wrestled with production type issues in the local church. Cold calling large churches that might have a TD, just so I could commiserate with someone. Reaching out to other churches in the Detroit area, just so we could get together and build each other up.

Fast forward though something called the Tech Forum, held for a few years when I was at Kensington; then onto the Willow Creek Arts Conference and finally Gurus of Tech first in Louisville, then to Willow Creek for the last few years. This list not only points to how passionate I am about bringing technical artists together, but it really points to the need that exists among local church technical artists to be in community together.

At least for this year, Gurus of Tech will not be at Willow Creek, and there isn’t much to it. Just like your church, everything our church does requires production’s involvement. In our case, God has been moving and working in the life of our church and things are growing and changing and requiring us to think differently about how our production team does ministry. Basically, just like many of you, we have a lot going on.

This doesn’t change the fact that there is a need for us technical artists to gather and it doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in what Gurus of Tech stands for. What it does mean, is that our team’s number one priority is to facilitate ministry at our church. Maybe even more than that, it means that we need to devote our best to what God wants to do here in our local community.

We have some really exciting things happening at our church, that we are privileged to work on and put our best energy toward.

The team at Mankin Media is developing plans to carry Gurus of Tech to other places, not just geographically, but in concept. The production team at Willow Creek is excited for the opportunity we’ve had to participate in the very cool idea of Gurus, as participants and as organizers, and we look forward to being involved as much as we can in the future.