You were supposed to receive your copy of the newly redesigned Global Advocate (replacing both The Church Advocate and The Missionary Signal) a couple of weeks ago. You don’t have it yet.
This is a different kind of post. It is partly a point of information: The Global Advocate is running late. It is coming, but it will be later this month. I know some of you have contacted the office in recent days to check on its status.
There’s another reason why I wanted to share this information with you. I want you to know why it’s late. It’s my fault. I was embarrassingly late on two of our deadlines and failed to produce the material I was asked to produce. The reason you don’t have your Global Advocate yet is because I didn’t get my work turned in on time.
One of the most difficult aspects of being a leader is being able to own when you mess up or make mistakes. I need to own this mistake: I failed to get to my work done on time and it’s impacted a lot of people. I don’t like making mistakes. I don’t like making myself look bad (that’s my own pride and a subject for another day). Even more than that, I don’t like making anyone else look bad either.
I’ll be honest, I’m tempted just to let this go and not address it. In the silence, in the lack of information, people tend to make up their own version of the truth. Some might blame our CGGC Communications staff. It’s tempting to play it off on someone else, but that would be wrong. It’s tempting to play it off as a problem with the printer or the fault of the U.S. Postal Service, once again, wrong. All those different spins are tempting, but none of them are true. I blew it and I felt it was a big enough error that you all need to know why the October-December Global Advocate is running so far behind schedule.
I don’t want my co-workers to take the blame for something that was my fault! I don’t want our printer to get blamed for something that was my failure. As tempting as it is to blame the postal service, I know that I would be telling a lie by letting them take the fall for something that I had caused.
For the record, I make mistakes often. There are lots of moments where I must own the many ways in which I fail to get it right. Given the scope of this mistake, I felt it was necessary to let you all know what was going on. I regret the stress I’ve caused for my coworkers and I regret the stress it may have caused others. In the future, I will certainly work harder to not let this happen again.
I’ve still got lots of room to grow in many areas of my life and ministry. A long time ago, I quickly learned to appreciate the leaders in my life who were able to own their mistakes and move forward. That’s the kind of leader I want to be as well.
This one is squarely my fault and I want to help make it right by letting you know where to place the rightful blame.
We’ll get back to some of our more normal fare in the weeks to come, but today I felt like this was important enough that I needed to address it here.
Christ’s Peace,
Lance
CGGC eNews—Vol. 13, No. 40