Heard

Last night I had a great meeting with some of the church's volunteer leaders. I have been researching a potential change in how we do our offering collections: potentially moving from the standard collection process to something more along the lines of giving stations. Several new churches have done this and others have made the transition. I feel this change would be a great one for our culture, creativity, etc and based on my conversations with several church attendees as well as church leaders who have made the change, I felt it would be best to move forward with it.

So last night I pulled the ushers and counters together to chat about the implementation of this process, but I also wanted to get their thoughts around making this potential change. I encouraged them to give their honest and candid feedback so that we could reach the right decision for New Hope. We had a great conversation mainly around their consensus that this would not be a good move for us at this time. We ended up not discussing the implementation, but instead the pros & cons of such a move as well as ways we could streamline their current process.

There is a lot more background I could give here as it truly was a fantastic 60 minutes, but my key takeaway was a statement one person made, "Well, the decision is not going to be made in this room and how we feel isn't going to matter; we should probably focus on how we are going to implement this new process." I'm paraphrasing here, but that was the tenor. I assured them all that this input was valid and will be considered (since I'm the decision-maker on this one). This comment triggered several thoughts and insights on leadership in the church (here are three):

1) Ownership is critical; for changes like this we need to make sure that the time is spent in clearly communicating and casting vision for change to all of the groups throughout the church. Honestly, although this group did not feel this would be the right move, I felt like if we did (or do) implement the change, I would have a core group of champions who would at least understand why the change was made. I think a change like this is possible, but only if we take the time to champion the change in advance. This is similar to our unveiling of the new strategic plan where we tried to get to all of the small groups and share the plan, answer questions, and create champions for it. Communication is key, but more than just one-way, "here's what's going to happen"; instead we need to allow the input side both for ownership as well as getting to the best decision.

2) Building ownership and creating avenues for 2-way communications can be perilous. As I shared with the group last night; if I set up several meetings for input & feedback and half the groups are strongly opposed to an idea and the others are strongly in favor, I end up in quite the pickle. No matter what I decide, 50% of the people will feel they were heard and 50% will feel they were not heard. How do we help people feel their input was valid and considered even when the decisions don't go they way they felt they should. Perhaps the answer is in follow-up sessions; perhaps we should not only have input sessions, but we need to make sure we get the people in a room who had the opposite viewpoints and spend the time explaining the decision to them. We may "convert" them to the new way of thinking, but even if we don't we have honored them by sharing with them why the decision was made the way it was.

3) Both of the above explain why non-profit leadership, where the primary human resource is volunteers, is a much more challenging leadership responsibility than with all hired staff. Jim Collins in his watershed book "Good to Great" followed it up with a supplemental chapter on applying it to the non-profit sector. In there he talks about how he feels the key leaders in industry will come out of the non-profit sector (reversing the trend of marketplace leaders moving into the non-profit world). The primary reasons are the vision-casting and collaborative leadership skills needed by the non-profit leader. The new post-modern workforce is not going to be motivated by the whip or the carrot, but instead through feeling they have a voice and through collaborative thinking - these are skills currently developed in effective churches and other non-profits.

Wow, this was a long one. Sorry about that; I never know what to expect when I start hammering the keys. Thanks for sticking through this one with me...