Greatness and leadership in the church
Like the business and government sector, the church needs to embrace the dogma of greatness. One of my passions is to help churches or Christian organizations implement best practice business standards. I have found that many pastors, church leaders, and local church boards have minimal business knowledge. This lack of training has lead to legal problems, which has ruined lives and drained financial resources from ministries. For example, I served in a church where a board member and a few other individuals decided that the church needed to replace the stove in the kitchen. So, one of them donated a stove, and they switched out the old stove for the new one. I explained that they could not do this, as we were still trying to get final occupancy for the building. (The church had built an addition 10 years ago and never got the final inspection done!) The stove (cost was $300) was replace anyways. Due to this decision, the church had to spend an additional unplanned $15,000 to put in a new stove hood to accommodate building codes.
Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, emphasizes five concepts that help any organization improve their standards.
These five concepts are:
1 – Defining “Great”— Calibrating Success without Business Metrics
2 – Level 5 Leadership— Getting Things Done within a Diffuse Power Structure
3 – First Who— Getting the Right People on the Bus within Social Sector Constraints 4 – The Hedgehog Concept— Rethinking the Economic Engine without a Profit Motive
5 – Turning the Flywheel— Building Momentum by Building the Brand[1]
Changing the “DNA” is not easy and it must start with leadership, but once the process has begun and takes hold it can radically transform individuals and organizations into unstoppable forces.
Having definable metrics is one way an organization can determine if they are effective in their mission. Unlike business, which often uses finances as a key metric, Collins suggests “social sectors measure effectiveness by how effectively they deliver on their mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to their resources?”[2] Many Western Churches use attendance and membership metrics to determine the effectiveness of their ministries. I have seen that some churches cut ministry efforts in the areas where they don’t see growth or a quick return on investment. Instead, they need to determine what their calling or mission is, and then measure how effectively they are accomplishing it. The church needs to stop worrying about how many people are in the seats every Sunday morning or how much they received in offering. They need to focus on doing the work they are called to do, and my experience has shown that the resources will flow naturally if the are pursuing God’s mission diligently.
Collins hypothesized that there two types of leadership skills found in the non-profit sector: executive and legislative. “In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decisions. In legislative leadership, on the other hand, no individual leader— not even the nominal chief executive— has enough structural power to make the most important decisions by himself or herself.”[3]
A point that Collins makes is to get the right people, on the right bus, and in the right seats. Churches often put people in wrong positions, because they need a warm body to fill the role. Organizations need to fill positions in the church with diligence and care. They need to evaluate work performance with metrics. The author states that, “In the social sectors, where getting the wrong people off the bus can be more difficult than in a business, early assessment mechanisms turn out to be more important than hiring mechanisms. There is no perfect interviewing technique, no ideal hiring method; even the best executives make hiring mistakes. You can only know for certain about a person by working with that person.”[4]
Collins also explained his Hedgehog concept. The essence of a Hedgehog Concept is to attain piercing clarity about how to produce the best long-term results, and then exercise the relentless discipline to say, “No thank you” to opportunities that fail the hedgehog test.[5] This is where churches need to define what God has called them to do as a church body. For example, some churches are called to serve in the inner city, while others may be called to minister to older generations. Too many churches attempt to model themselves after the “big” church down the road. We each have a purpose in the body of Christ, so churches will fail if they put their efforts into being like someone else.
The last concept is the hardest to achieve. It is about getting people motivated and onboard with changing the culture of an organization. Most individuals do not like change because they fear a loss of power or control. Many Americans are extremely resistant to embracing new concepts or ideas that challenge our perceived notion of how things are done. They often live on their past successes, and forget that you must continuously change and adapt to move forward. A sign of an unhealthy organization is one who says “we’ve always done it this way.”
[1] Collins, Jim (2011-09-27). Good To Great And The Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great (Kindle Locations 41-47). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid 79-81
[3] Ibid 145-147
[4] Ibid 204-206
[5] Ibid 239-241
About the Author
Richard Volzke
7 responses to “Greatness and leadership in the church”
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Nice summary of Collins’ monograph, Richard. Given my experience in social services, I was also interested to see how Collins would approach the non-profit world. I think it is interesting that you focused on the metrics of success. It reminded me of that very church-y thing of counting numbers and not impact or outcome. In the non-profit world, we shifted away from mere number counting in part back in the Reagan era. We had to demonstrate not only that we served people (process objectives, we call them) but that it made a difference (outcome objectives). Non-profits no longer get paid to just do stuff – it has to make a difference. So what if you served 200 kids every day in your after school graduation-retention program… The real question is how many of them graduated as a result of participating? I am curious why the church has been slow to understanding this. Perhaps because it is harder to measure change. We don’t have people complete spiritual growth surveys every six months and track progress. That wouldn’t be realistic. So what can we really measure that is meaningful, and how? Thanks for prompting the thoughts, Rich! See you (and you wife) in a few days!
Julie,
Why can’t we have people fill out growth surveys? Why is it that the church no longer holds individuals accountable for spiritual maturity or growth? Western Christianity has bought into the lie that our walk with Christ is only personal and private. Nowhere in the Bible can I find that God commanded anyone to walk alone with Him, and to never share his or her faith with someone else. We need to start holding peoples feet to fire when it comes to their Christian lives and actions…of course in a loving way that spurs additional growth. I also think that people’s growth will be seen in their fruit. For example, our home church had over 200 sign up for serve day and help the community one Saturday. Our other church, who has same number of members, can’t get 25 people to sign up for any service project…let alone in one day. Now, I’d say that the serve day participation metric speaks volumes. These are the types of things that a church should measure…and their metrics should be unique and continuously adjusted to ensure ministry outcomes are being met.
Richard, great summary of the book! I always enjoy how you can extract on the high points and zero in on the lessons learned. I am 100% in agreement about your assessment that church leaders know nothing about business! In the midst of my research, I am wondering if pastors and missionaries should be required to have a MBA??
Ashley,
My wife and I would agree with you that pastors and missionaries should have some type of business education. I don’t have an MBA, rather my undgrad is business. My wife on the other had has her MBA. Dawnel served on a church board one time and it was such a bad experience that she swore she would never serve again. Not only were hearts not in the right place, but people just didn’t seem to have common sense when it came to basic business functions. I am not sure why mission organizations and mainstream denominations are so reluctant to embrace best practice business standards in the trenches? Having worked with a mission organization and church denomination, I have experienced the resistance by leadership to incorporate business standards into the organization. I’ve heard things like “we aren’t a business.” Yet, I have to ask why we aren’t adopting standard that will lead to better stewardship of God’s resources.
Richard,
Love the overview.
I have a semi tongue-in-cheek comment.
I really appreciated the first story about the stove. Certainly good intentions gone awry. However, you end your piece with “an unhealthy organization is one who says ‘we’ve always done it this way.'”
Remember, my comment is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think that there is a grain of salience here too with this.
So, the first story showcases a guy who wants to do things differently — donating (for free! 🙂 )a new stove for the church! He really messes it up. And in the first story you suggest that such a thing can’t be done because — in a manner of speaking — “we’ve always done it this way.” And you are proved majorly correct.
See, here’s the conundrum, the catch-22. Of course, you were right in the case of the first story, but your way was the “less-innovative” way per se. “Just follow the set rules sir, thank you very much.”
I am in complete agreement with you about your post, but I’m attempting to suggest the sticking-point that sometimes there’s a really good reason “we’ve always done it that way” even if the original intent has been forgotten. Sometimes the new way is not the best way.
Overall, I’m a person who leans toward innovation while keeping a healthy respect for tradition. So, again, I’m with you. I just hope I’ve been clear enough to communicate a bit of the trickiness that I see can ensue between the points of “we’ve always done it this way” and “onward and upward; tally-ho!”
I think there are helpful guides and processes to navigating this dilemma, but I thought I’d at least pose a bit of the problem here.
Richard, Thank you for the summary. In my post I mentioned something about the right people on the right bus. You wrote, “There is no perfect interviewing technique, no ideal hiring method; even the best executives make hiring mistakes. You can only know for certain about a person by working with that person.” Indeed we all make mistakes–it’s not that there is something wrong with the person—it’s just that they are not the right person for that particular position/job. And often times you don’t know that until you work with the person. Or perhaps, they are the right person for a brief time–and the wrong person for a long time—I wonder. Thanks Richard. See you soon.
Richard, great job on your post. You are the right person to discuss the topic of measurable impact in a local church setting. I recently read a report with indicated that most of the church in the South that pay their Pastor huge salaries are the larger and mega churches.
The more people in the church, the greater to Pastor’s pay check. I wonder whether this is why it is as you write that “many Western Churches use attendance and membership metrics to determine the effectiveness of their ministries.” Maybe church can be best served by heeding to your admonishment, “the church needs to stop worrying about how many people are in the seats every Sunday morning or how much they received in offering. They need to focus on doing the work they are called to do, and my experience has shown that the resources will flow naturally if the are pursuing God’s mission diligently.”
Thank you