Top Posts of 2014 #4: “The Four Stages of a Church Staff Team”

The Freshmen Get Smaller Every Year

Sunday, December 7, 2014

I took a trip down memory lane this weekend. I spent some time back east consulting with a great church in my hometown of Stafford, VA. It’s been 20 years since the last time I was in Stafford. And while I was there I took a minute to drive around a bit; and let me tell you a lot has changed in 20 years! I felt like I could get lost in my own hometown! I went by the house I grew up in and even past the High School I graduated from. First thing that came into my mind? “I remember my High School being a lot bigger than that.” And then another thought raced into my mind. It was a statement from a conversation that I had with Larry Osborne when he said to me, “The freshmen get smaller every year.” In other words every year there is a new freshman class. Every year as you get older they seem to get smaller, weirder, and more clueless. And somehow the older you get the more it seems you were never that small, that weird, or that clueless. But you and I know better, don’t we?

The best leaders I’ve ever been around know there’s great value in hanging out with the “freshmen.” In fact here are a couple of things I’ve seen some great seasoned leaders do over the years to invest in the next generation leaders.

1. Surround yourself with Young Talent

Not so they can admire how experienced and how incredible you are. You don’t need groupies. But so you can invest in them. Spend time with them, let them ask questions and simply talk about leadership. Let them see you lead up close and personal. And then debrief with them about what you did and why. Share with them your greatest leadership struggles, challenges, failures and successes.

2. How Young Can you go with your Next Hire?

When you are getting ready to make that next hire ask yourself, “How young can we go with this hire and not jeopardize the job that needs to get done?” It’s a simple question that will force you to think differently about bringing young talent onto the team. And frankly, it’s a question that I wish I started asking a long time ago.

3. Invite Young Talent to the Adult Table

Thanksgiving was just a couple of weeks ago. And if your house is similar to mine you had a kids table and an adult table. In leadership the same is often true. One of the most simple and overlooked opportunities to develop young talent is to periodically invite young talent to the adult table. Let them sit in Sr. Leadership meetings and see how the top leaders in your organization or church think, problem solve, interact with one another, make decisions and well, lead. This kind of access is an incredible gift to a young up an coming leader.

4. Remember to Tell Yourself the Truth

No matter how good you were as a young leader, you weren’t as good as you remember yourself being, you just weren’t. And neither was I. The further you and I get away from being a young leader the more we think, “I was never that small, I was never that weird, I was never that clueless.” Tell yourself the truth and instead of criticizing the freshmen why don’t you choose to hang out with them and invest in them?

Photo Credit: Russ Allison Loar via Compfight cc

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

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4 Symptoms Your Church Needs More Volunteers

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

As you might guess, our Volunteer Rocket coaching is primarily about helping churches get more volunteers. With that in mind, you may be surprised to learn there are instances when getting more volunteers can actually create more problems.

The primary reason this happens is because you have a leadership shortage. If more volunteers create more problems, you very likely need more leaders. Here are some symptoms that you have a leadership shortage.

1. Your “span of care” is too high. In business, it’s called a “span of control.” Fortune 500 CEOs usually have seven direct reports. In ministry, I would argue our span of care should not be any higher than that because we’re trying to accomplish a mission and disciple people. So add up the number of volunteers and then divide by the number of staff and volunteer leaders. If the result is higher than seven, you have a span of care issue, and you need more leaders.

2. The mission is getting in the way of your relationships. Because we’re in the ministry, we can’t just focus on getting things done. We are also in the people business. When it comes to volunteer teams, that means we need time to share life together. We need to create space to coach, encourage, challenge, care for and pray for the people we lead. When was the last time you prayed for each person on your team? If you can’t remember or you didn’t know specifically what to pray, you need more leaders.

3. You are making all the decisions. If you have to touch every task and every decision, you haven’t learned how to empower your team. Of course, this begins with clarifying mission, vision, values and strategy. Everyone must understand their role and know the expectations for what success looks like. Once that’s in place, you need to challenge leaders to move from doing tasks to actually leading their teams. If they don’t have the capacity to do that, you need more leaders rather than doers.

4. You are waiting for leaders to magically appear. If you’re hoping and praying for more leaders but you don’t have an intentional strategy to develop people, you probably have a leadership shortage. Leaders just don’t grow on trees. They need to be mentored and discipled. They need to watch you handle leadership challenges. They need the experience of facing leadership challenges themselves. If that isn’t happening, you need more leaders.

When you don’t have enough leaders, more volunteers can lead to more problems. As you might expect, we don’t suggest you avoid adding more volunteers to the team. The solution is to raise up more leaders.

Because churches have limited resources, hiring staff leaders to do everything won’t work either. The only way to grow your teams will be to raise up more volunteer leaders. Here’s the great news–the spiritual gift of leadership isn’t just limited to people who are on church staff. Volunteers can be leaders too!

We’ll teach you how in our FREE upcoming event called Get More Volunteers. We’ve interviewed nine leading pastors and church leaders about how they’ve built healthy, thriving volunteer ministries and put it all together in this online training event to help you and your team.

You’ll learn from Dave Ferguson, Pete Scazzero, Larry Osborne, Ronnie Floyd, Chris Mavity, Dave Gibbons, Carey Nieuwhof, Sue Miller, and Matthew Barnett.

Click the banner below to register now!

Posted in Volunteers

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The Four Stages of a Church Staff Team

Sunday, January 26, 2014

If you’ve ever been a part of a growing church you know that growth changes everything. Especially the relational, organizational and working dynamics of the staff team. Larry Osborne, Lead Pastor at North Coast Church writes the following in his book Sticky Teams:

“Never forget growth changes everything. A storefront church, a midsized church, a large church, and a mega-church aren’t simply bigger versions of the same thing. They are completely different animals. They have little in common, especially relationally, organizationally, and structurally.”

Fortunately I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with Larry and hear him expound on this idea and talk about what he describes as, “The Four Stages of a Team.”

Stage 1: Track Star

The track star performs alone. They may train with others and their score may affect an overall team win, but they operate by themselves. This is the solo pastor. Typical Church Size: 0-150

Stage 2: Golfing Buddies

At this stage the church staff is highly relational. They enjoy deep relationships and doing life together outside of work. They’re doing what they love with people that they like. Typical Church Size: 150-600

Stage 3: Basketball Team

Basketball is a team sport not a friendship sport. It requires working together, trusting one another and sharing the ball. While there are still meaningful relationships, genuine camaraderie, and a shared sense of purpose; there are too many players for everyone to be best friends. On a basketball team there are star players and role players. And they’re paid differently due to the role that they play. Typical Church Size 600-2,000

Stage 4: Football Team

This is the most drastic and difficult change. And it’s the reason why so many churches get stuck and so few ever break 2,000. Football can be a dangerous game if you think you’re still playing track, golf, or basketball. In the game of football there are highly specialized roles and team work is essential. The offense, defense and special teams all have different playbooks. Often times the offense isn’t even watching what the defense is doing while they’re on the field and visa-verse. They’re preparing for the next time they’re on the field. Everyone no longer knows what everyone else is doing. When the defense adds a new blitz package without telling the offensive line, the offensive line doesn’t care. They’re just glad someone sacked the opposing teams quarterback. And even in football there are different levels of the game. There is a big difference in talent, coaching, speed of the game, and complexity between High School, D1 College, and the NFL. Typical Church Size: 2,000+

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

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5 Articles to Help You Make Vision Real

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Craziest thing just happened. You helped make the month of August the highest trafficked month on Helping Churches Make Vision Real! If I haven’t said it lately, thank you! It’s fun to see the comments and interaction through social media each month about the content and articles that are posted here! It’s always good to hear that the content is helpful! So thank you for connecting with me through the content on this blog! You made these the top 5 Posts from this last month. If you missed out on any of them, here they are all in one place for your convenience!

1. What the Church can Learn from Southwest Airlines about Volunteers

I was recently on a Southwest Airlines flight and witnessed one of the most amazing volunteer moments I’ve ever seen. When it came time for the midflight snack of pretzels and peanuts a woman on the flight stepped up and volunteered to pass out the snack. And here’s the amazing thing…they let her! No application, no waiver, and no complex training classes. They simply handed over the basket of snacks and said go for it! Watching this whole thing go down I couldn’t help but think about how difficult we make it for people in the church to volunteer. Here are a couple of observations from that moment that I think are worth the church considering.

2. A Large Multisite Church in Phoenix is Looking for a Campus Pastor

I’m pleased to announce a new Staff Search. Sun Valley Community Church, is beginning a search for a Campus Pastor to serve on our Tempe Campus. Sun Valley began as a church plant in 1990 in Chandler, Arizona. Over the years Sun Valley has grown into a large mult-site church in the Phoenix metro area. Currently there are three campuses located in Gilbert, Tempe and Casa Grande with a total weekend attendance of over 5,500 people. Sun Valley was recently named by Outreach Magazine as one of the top 10 fastest growing churches in America. The Tempe Campus is the result of a merger in October of 2011 with Bethany Community Church. In the merger Sun Valley acquired a 16-acre, 8 building campus with over 100,000 sq. ft. under roof. Since the merger the campus has doubled in attendance and at present attendance is over 1,000. When fully utilized the campus capacity will accommodate 7,000 people. Sun Valley was recently featured in a new book by Leadership Network about church mergers: Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work. To learn more about that story click here Part-1 and Part-2.

3. A Leadership Conversation with Larry Osborne

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in a post entitled “Making Small Groups the Hub of Your Ministry” that I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at NorthCoast Church with Larry Osborne and his team to talk about Leadership and Small Groups. If you don’t know already, NorthCoast is an outlier when it comes to small groups and you need to get to know these guys. While the norm across the nation is hovering at about 50% of weekend worship attendance in groups, NorthCoast is shattering that norm and boasts just over 90% of their weekend worship attendance in groups. That was enough for us to get on a plane and spend some time learning from these guys. While that original post focused on Small Groups these are some of my take aways from the conversation that had broader implications for pastors and leaders.

4. Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit

If you missed the 2013 Global Leadership Summit, then you missed some great content, great speakers, and incredible ideas that have the potential to shift your thinking when it comes to leadership. This really was one of the best Leadership Summits I can remember. But no worries! Now you’ve got all the notes to every session right here at your fingertips for free! Hope you enjoy!

5. Leadership Lessons from a Family Vacation

Like many families this summer, we did a family vacation. Lisa and I had the opportunity to take the kids (all 4 of them now) for an incredible week in the mountains! Like any leader, it’s tough for me to just “turn it off.” So…upon reminiscing, here are five leadership lessons that parallel our time together we had as a family this summer.

Posted in Leadership