Take a look at the agenda and minutes of one of your recent leadership team meetings:
- What percentage of the meeting incorporates administrative or operational functions and what percentage focuses on high-level strategic issues?
- Which items will significantly help advance mission?
- Is there a way to delegate some or all of these operational issues to another team? If so, how? [1]
These questions, as outlined in Shelley Trebesch’s Made To Flourish: Beyond Quick Fixes to a Thriving Organization, are intended to help you diagnose a common mistake that many organizations make: allowing the urgent to overtake the strategic.
Oftentimes, in meetings, it’s easier to brainstorm ways to solve the immediate parking issues, rather than plot out the church’s long-term strategy for city impact. Or, it’s easier to talk about ways to increase generosity and funding to meet this month’s budget, rather than thinking about how to move your church towards self-sustainability once the external funding runs out. The fact is, unless you consciously take steps to do otherwise, the urgent will always trump the strategic in your meetings.
How did we get to this place? Why is this the case?
Well, here is what typically happens in a growing church or organization. Let’s take a new church as an example. You start with the leader. As the church grows and you develop leaders to head up the different ministry departments, you begin having meetings with them. This team essentially becomes your leadership team because they are the ones in charge of getting things done in those areas. So right away, your leadership team is representative. While you might try to talk strategy in your meetings, the fact is, they weren’t recruited into their positions because they were good at strategy—you recruited them because they were responsible and knew how to get things done. Or, even better, you recruited them because they were warm bodies and had a lot of free time…okay, also because they love Jesus. No wonder the topic of your meetings always returns to logistics and operational matters—this is why they joined the team in the first place!
So how can you change the course and stop getting sidetracked by the urgent, so that you can focus on strategic issues?
Trebesch, in her book, Made to Flourish, suggests a simple, yet profound solution—it’s to separate out strategy from operations. Here is what she says,
Operational concerns have a tendency to become urgent and time consuming and then take precedence over strategic issues, such as creative envisioning and planning for the future, program evaluation, and considering of new opportunities. It is easy for leadership teams to spend most of their time discussing money and what color to paint the office rather than doing the high-level analysis for the vision to be accomplished. [2]
She is not saying that operational issues are unimportant or inconsequential to the vision of your church or organization. She is simply saying that they belong in separate meetings from strategic conversations. You can even systematize many of your operational issues as well, so that they inform your strategy, rather than dictate it.
For example, if the church needs a new water heater or additional parking spaces, those issues can be delegated to their respective operational teams. In those teams, they can discuss and debate the pros and cons, think through possible solutions, and then write up a one page recommendation that goes to the strategic lead team for approval. Perhaps the leader from one of those teams could join the last 20 minutes of the strategic leadership team meeting to talk through the proposal, answer any questions, and wrestle through the strategic implications of this operational matter before a decision is made. This way, the strategic leadership team stays in touch and remains connected with the respective operational teams, without having to sidetrack their meetings with non-strategic issues.
A few other alternatives that Trebesch suggests are:
- Form two leadership teams: one focused on mission and strategy, and the other one focused on operations. In this model, you can have several people belong to both teams, and also hold a joint meeting once per quarter.
- Have one leadership team with both types of leaders, operational and strategic. In this model, there needs to be discipline to ensure that meetings will either be focused on operations or strategic matters. Both issues would not be tackled in the same meeting. If operations is running smoothly, the team could focus on these types of issues once a month, while devoting the majority of their time to strategic issues.
Practical tips like this one to help your church or organization begin flourishing are all throughout Shelley Trebesch’s book, Made to Flourish. Pick up your copy here.
Footnotes:
[1] Shelley Trebesch, Made To Flourish: Beyond Quick Fixes to a Thriving Organization (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 133.
[2] Ibid.