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?
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