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Asking better questions.
Do you ever feel like you’re working hard to provide solutions…to the wrong problem? Are you exhausting your energy to make small gains relative to small problems, while the bigger problem is the 800 pound gorilla that no one is acknowledging in the room?
As church leaders we spend so much time trying to figure out how to get more. How to get more volunteers. How to get more people to come to church. How to get more people to give financially. So often we’ve defined the problem incorrectly.
We don’t need more volunteers, but we may need to ask ourselves how can we help people recognize their potential kingdom impact through serving?
We don’t need more people to come to church, but we may need to ask how can we motivate people to become active participants in their relationship with God?
We don’t need more money, but we may need to ask how can we help people see the fruit of giving to God’s mission?
A good question creates value through empowerment.
Asking empowering questions opens people up to dig deep, define nuanced problems and provide accurate solutions. This is critical to successful meetings, successful strategic planning, and successful relationships built on trust. If we’re not asking the right questions, it’s more than likely we’re not going to arrive at the right solutions.
Judith Ross has a great article over at Harvard Business Review that will help leaders ask better questions…in hopes of reaching empowered solutions.
The most effective and empowering questions create value in one or more of the following ways:
- They create clarity: “Can you explain more about this situation?”
- They construct better working relations: Instead of “Did you make your sales goal?” ask, “How have sales been going?”
- They help people think analytically and critically: “What are the consequences of going this route?”
- They inspire people to reflect and see things in fresh, unpredictable ways: “Why did this work?”
- They encourage breakthrough thinking: “Can that be done in any other way?”
- They challenge assumptions: “What do you think you will lose if you start sharing responsibility for the implementation process?”
- They create ownership of solutions: “Based on your experience, what do you suggest we do here?”
Create a culture that embraces questions
Are your leaders asking you empowering questions? Are you asking empowering questions as a leader?
Posted by jeremyscheller | 2 Comments
Leading Through Change: Thriving in the Unknown.
Many of you may know, my friend, pastor, and boss of 6 years has been called to a new position. Efrem Smith will be moving on from Sanctuary this summer to a new position as Superintendent of the Pacific Southwest Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church. It’s a huge honor with a new realm of influence and a higher call on his life in leadership.
This is really awesome for him, and while transitions are really hard, I think great things can come to Sanctuary during this time.
Anytime time there is a major shift in leadership in an organization there are emotional, visionary and team dynamics that are affected by the changes taking place. So how do you survive?
During this time of leadership change I’m planning on focusing on 3 areas as we move into a new season.
- Being a TEAM PLAYER
At this crucial moment, there is no room for sanding against the grain. When you sand against the grain, you leave deep wounds in the wood that requires you to remove even more layers to get things smoothed out again. Being a team player will make it less painful to readjust when new leadership is in place. - No Better Time for SELF EVALUATION
– How does my personal spiritual journey affect the spiritual journey of our community?
– What do I need to improve, let go, start or stop?
– Where have I been dropping the ball and what’s my plan for picking it up?
– Am I acting from my strengths and mitigating my weaknesses?
– How does my performance affect the whole team? - Finally, I plan on BEING HONEST about the future.
This will not be easy. In fact, if it is easy, I think we’re probably not living up to our potential. Being honest about what this team needs in order to fulfill the vision in front of us means we won’t dance around the holes. The holes in our team, the holes in ourselves and the holes in our faith.
Even though this will be a tough transition and I will miss Efrem and what he brought to Sanctuary, I’m looking forward to being pushed and pushing myself to grow in new ways.
What are your thoughts about leading through a leader change? Have you been on a team that lost a key player? How did you navigate?
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Have you created a "they" are the problem mentality?
In Tom Kelley’s book, “The Art of Innovation,” he writes,
ABOLISH “THEY”
One of the things that struck me the most about my first days at IDEO–other than the fact that I had no desk or office–was that try as I might, I couldn’t find a “they.” At my old job as a consultant at for a large international firm, there was always a spoken and unspoken “they.” If the coffeemaker was broken, “they” should fix it. If you were entangled in bureaucracy, “they” were the problem. “They” do not innovate. “They” leave less elbowroom for you and other individuals to solve problems from the ground up.
Technology has in some ways exacerbated this problem. I’m confounded at how many companies bring “they” in reach of your every keystroke. I think those large corporations who snoop on their workers’ e-mail are nuts–and not just for ethical reasons. If you practice monitoring or surveillance, your employees may end up being less productive and certainly less creative. But “they” companies can’t help themselves. They’re control freaks–even when they imagine they’re loosening they’re grip.
So who is the “they” in your team? Are you building trust or building a spirit of US VS. THEM?
I will admit it. I have always had an ego problem. Sometimes my head is too big to fit through the door. It has made me believe that I live in a Me Vs. Them world and workplace. I’m in a daily battle to believe and rely on my teams knowing we’re all in this together.
Kelley goes on to quote famous Notre Dame Coach Lou Holtz:
“The team changes every year, but each team member’s three implicit questions for him remain the same: Do you care about me? Can I trust you? Are you committed to the success of the team?
Trust is essential. I have to know that you care about me, that you’ve got my back, and that you’re in it for the success of the team and not your own personal gain. When all team members share this spirit of trust, they’ll move faster and more effectively towards the team’s goals.
So, have you identified the “They” in your organization? How are you working to make “they” all about “us?”
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Allow your team to be Mischievous
There’s a great short post on the Signal vs. Noise blog this week about creating a culture of trust with your teams.
A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden.
But “control” is a tricky thing. The tighter the reins, the more you create an environment of distrust. An us vs. them mentality takes hold. And that’s when people start trying to game the system.
One thing that has been a continual learning process for me over the years has been to give up control to my teams. I generally know how I want to do things and I’ve always kept a tight reign on my teams to make sure things fall in line.
This type of control generally leads to
- me over-working myself
- my teams feeling un-empowered to serve
- a stifling of creativity
Over the last two years, I’ve been working to give up control to allow room for others to lead and for others to serve in freedom. I’ve been working to widen the boundaries and allow people to be mischievous. What I’ve gotten is
- teams that are more committed
- teams that do better work
- teams that feel empowered to be creative
- I also end up not feeling like I have to do everything.
It’s a win/win.
Even though I’m still the lone staff member over IT, Communications, Media and the Web and I have more teams that I’m responsible for, we’re actually producing more outcomes and I’m not feeling as stretched thin with church work as I used to.
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Human-Centered Design Toolkit
This really is one of the more brilliant gifts for non-profits/ministries that I’ve come across in a long time. I can’t believe I haven’t seen it earlier.
The Human Centered Design Toolkit is a free innovation guide for NGOs and Social Enterprises. It’s basically a blueprint for identifying key problems and developing innovative solutions for them. The It’s designed to help NGO’s tackle the biggest issues that affect those living on $2/day or less. However, it’s ministry implications are far greater.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the brainchild of IDEO (the World’s Greatest Design Firm) and others, it’s an irresistibly clean, well-designed guide for innovation. Useful at so many levels of an organization.
Check it out over at IDEO’s website:
http://www.ideo.com/work/item/human-centered-design-toolkit/
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Innovate Conference – Session 1, Mark Beeson
Beeson always brings it.
The innovations of ministry will need collaboration and teams creating for common purposes that give God glory.
God is calling us to take people he brings to us to build a core, to build a team.
So How do you build a team?
- Make sure everybody is clear about the Mission, Vision and Values. Can everybody on your team clarify your mission? You need to be able to say, “This is why we’re here. This is what every bit of our energy is working toward.
- Create a place of Covenant Community. Not free association. Make it a place where people know that commitment is key to truly be a part of the team.
The place where people, you, mission, vision and values intersect creates the fabric that holds a team together to do the work of the kingdom.
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Reflections on DC09
Spent the last few days at the Dynamic Church Conference in Dallas. It’s a conference for users of Fellowship One, a Church Management software from Fellowship Technologies.
Here’s what I like about this software, these people, their passion:
- Passion drives their purpose.
There is a genuine heart and belief that technology can be harnessed to help people become more fully devoted followers of Jesus. - They know that their technology is not the end but the means.
Fellowship One is about all about helping the church clear the administrative barriers to make way for real relationships. - They have an impressive road map.
Ftech has clearly been putting in the work to architect or rearchitect the product to be more agile and responsive to the growing technological needs of the evolving Global Mobile Church (GoMo as @terrystorch labeled it). - The don’t have the answers.
They made it very clear that the users of F1 are vital to drive future developments of the product. They call us church partners…and they mean it.
In my roll @theSanctuary, I see a long relationship with F1 in our future. If we’re diligent about it’s implementation, realistic about putting a SuperTeam around it, and intentional about pursuing the relationships on the other side of the data, this should be a beneficial partnership now and into the future.
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It's About People, Not Policies. Create Margin.
Policies are frames that you put around people when you want them to act a certain way. Policies create the acceptable range of motion. the extent to which you will say Yes, and the boundaries where you must say no.
Think about it for a minute. If you’re anything like me, you love setting the broad frame under which everything else must operate. Haven’t we all gotten a little caught up in creating policies…especially the idealistic communications people. I like to have:
- policies about deadlines.
- policies about content.
- Policies about who can update the website.
- Policies about why your ministry can’t have a logo of it’s own.
- Policies about which logo to use and whether or not to make it the biggest thing on the page.
Recently, I visited Substance Church. Pastor Peter Haas said in the midst of his sermon, “When you don’t have margin, you manipulate people.”
Policies need to have Margin.
- Margin is for people who don’t think like me.
- Margin is the room you give for people to be people.
- Margin allows ministry leaders to be strong at helping change people’s lives, but not be strong at communicating for their ministry.
- Margin is the space we allow our policies to bend.
- It’s about letting people come first, before the “policy things” that matter most to policy-makers.
While it’s ideal to think that people will be good at adhering to the frames we set for them, the reality is that People, not Policies are the reason we all do ministry.
Something I’m learning to do now that I haven’t done well in the past is creating margin.
Here’s some ways I’m trying to bring margin into my role at the church:
- Take time for conversations. Without engaging with people to learn what drives their passion for ministry I make a lot of assumptions about them. And then I manipulate them. Conversations lead to understanding. Understanding leads to mutual respect. I don’t manipulate people I respect. Take time for conversations and really try to know the heart of the person your working with.
- Create Yeses out of No’s. I use to think I could keep up by doing every little communications need that people had. I needed to brand it and make it professional. I couldn’t keep up, but I still get the requests. I’ve been trying to learn the art of saying, “I know I can’t physically do this for you and still get home and see my wife and kids at a decent hour, but here’s how I can empower you to do it for yourself…No I can’t, but yes you can.”
- Provide context, make exceptions once, then define the lines. I often get asked to put stuff in the bulletin or announcements past the deadline. I really don’t want to take on your late planning as my problem. But I will if it can be used as a one-time opportunity to share with you how being late affects the process. If you know that somebody ends up working on Saturday to compensate for your late action and they’re missing their time with their family to make sure your info gets out to the community, that context will make them think differently in the future.
