February 17, 2010
How Do You Keep Them Accountable?
Anyone who works with volunteers knows that often the hardest part of the process is keeping people on task and accountable for doing what they promised to do. The volunteer will offer all sorts of reasons and excuses why something didn't happen or get done. Pastors are often heard talking about the lack of commitment some people seem to have to the ministry. While the church is resourced with many gifted pastors and lay leaders, by far the vast majority of us have experienced the feeling of being let down when someone is not accountable for what they agreed to do, no matter the reason.
While this problem will not ever go away completely, there are some basic strategies in the recruitment and management of volunteers that can make a significant difference. A number of these ideas have been dealt with over the past issues of this leadership newsletter, but the process, when those tools are applied to the leader to leader relationship when someone volunteers, can make all of the difference.
February 10, 2010
Half Century In – The Best Leadership Style Is:
For all fifty years of the Post-modern Age most of our congregations have struggled and lost ground…MOST ALL of them. As we have searched around to see where things are working, what kept popping up the second half of those fifty years were the mega-churches. Most of us didn’t have a clue how to achieve that kind of success, but we respected it, very much. From the sideline it appeared these unique senior pastors were so charismatic they could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos. With charisma being pretty much something you have to be born with, not that many have it. This assessment of the mega-churches, however, is not completely accurate; not all mega-church pastors are charismatic, though many are.
With the sheer numbers these mega-church congregations were able to attract, they were able to support some pretty sophisticated programs, which led to the term “program churches.” Much more recent, however, we learned that in spite of their success at drawing huge numbers of people throughout the week as well as Sundays, it did not produce the spiritual growth that was assumed it would. Some of those congregations today are in their own type of struggle to refocus on discipleship, but that is not the only problem today’s program churches have.
February 8, 2010
Simply Relational - Part 2
My friend and mentor John Maxwell loves to tell the story of me walking briskly by a bunch of people with briefcase in hand. He asked me where I was off to in such a hurry and I replied, "Off to my office get my work done." In a private moment later that day, he let me know that I just walked by my work -- people! John taught me my first great lesson in leadership, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." (Note that he started with relationships.) He followed that up with "Walk slowly through the crowds." That was over twenty-five years ago. That lesson still stands today as the solid relational platform from which I lead. I'm grateful that it now comes naturally. On a Sunday morning, these days, it takes me thirty minutes just to walk across the lobby of the church because I'm engaged in so many conversations! And loving it!
One lesson - that was all I needed. I'd mastered relationships as a leader. Not. A few months later, round two. This time John sat me down in his office and said: "Dan, I know you deeply love and care about people. In fact you are passionate about people. But here's your problem. You are lousy at expressing that love and concern." That knocked the wind out of me. It was an epiphany. I had no idea people didn't know I cared. After all, I knew, why wouldn't they know?! Hey, I was young and stupid, give me a break! I had no idea that good relationships don't just happen, I didn't know I needed to intentionally invest in people. Like a good marriage, if you don't invest in the relationship it won't remain good for long. Again, the good news is that was over twenty-five years ago!
February 8, 2010
Accidental Growth Versus Purposeful Growth
John Maxwell
In 1940 two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald, started McDonald's Barbeque Restaurant in San Bernardino, CA. Typical of the drive-ins of its time, McDonald's offered an expansive menu from which customers could order and then be serviced by carhops. Through time, the brothers noticed a trend in their sales. A small number of items on the menu accounted for a bulk of their restaurant's profits.
Struck by the trend, the brothers embarked on a bold strategy to streamline McDonald's. They temporarily closed their doors, remodeled the restaurant, and did away with the carhops. Three months later McDonald's reopened as a self-service drive-in specializing in fast service thanks to a simplified, nine-item menu. The combination of low prices and speedy service made the new McDonald's a smashing success with motorists, who flocked to the restaurant en masse to buy burgers and milkshakes.
Accidental Growth
Despite their impressive innovations, the McDonald brothers never put together a growth plan to spread their concept of fast food across the country. Over the next few years, the brothers haphazardly agreed to open a handful of franchised McDonald's. However, the isolated additions were largely unintended, and they barely scratched the surface of the restaurant's potential to expand.
January 6, 2010
Sometimes I'm not willing to let God be God
I've been working with a spiritual director for the last six months or so. In my travels around the country developing the Transforming Leaders Initiative (TLi), I met another lay leader up in Salisbury, North Carolina with a story similar to mine. Mark Ritchie and his brother were the third-generation leaders of a family business named Cheerwine. It's a local soft drink company. Mark worked since college for the company rising to the top, where he and his brother grew the business far beyond what the founders imagined. Then, over a period of time, a calling unfolded, and he walked away to become certified as a spiritual director. Our experiences growing up in the South, spending our careers in the family business, and making a move from success to significance gave us a shared understanding of many things. He's also Lutheran with a real passion for discipleship. It's been a pleasure working with Mark since I met him last spring.
My good friend Ernie Hinojosa admonished me that on this journey, I am encountering spiritual warfare and need to pick up the armor of God. "They're right at your feet, brother." As I've read the books Reveal and Follow Me, coming out of the research behind the Reveal Spiritual Life Survey, I have been fascinated by their findings. They define Reveal this way on their website. The Spiritual Life Survey enables you to go beyond headcounts, providing you with the ability to get a snapshot into the hearts of your congregation and know for certain whether your church is truly meeting their spiritual needs and fostering their growth. It’s a focused, research-based view of how the spiritual journey unfolds, validated through extensive survey input from over 157,000 congregants in more than 500 churches. A number of Lutheran churches have participated, including the 15 churches of the pilot class of the TLi.
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