Staying Small Improves Communication

Staying small helps keep the amount of time you spend retraining your team, especially in the early days when you haven’t found your exact procedures. This allows for experimentation in what your ministry does by the few, before you try to train the many.

Here is an example from my own life: I had to keep a team of 18 people up-to-date for a project I was leading. While I was able to keep some amount of order, I spent most of my time talking to everyone on the team. This meant many meetings to ensure that my team had all of the information required and didn’t duplicate work. This problem is actually a corollary to Metcalf’s Law: the more people on the team, the more time you spend keeping everyone informed. This is a ministry-killer, especially in the early days of a ministry.

Staying Small Provides Focus

Stay small until you have found your team’s preferred process and procedures. Once you have a solid foundation, then begin to grow by adding new volunteers. Don’t recruit volunteers too fast, but don’t take on too much too fast either. By staying small, your time will be very precious and you will focus more on what is really important. You will also prevent burnout for yourself and your team.

Staying Small Creates Fellowship

There is a limit to the number of personal relationships that can be made within a church, from which true fellowship emerges. Large churches often encourage fellowship through numerous small groups, creating an environment that fosters fellowship as if they were a much smaller church. They often place limits on the size of a small group to prevent unhealthy growth. Learn this lesson and consider how to grow your team strategically. If necessary, build smaller teams to accomplish the bigger goals, but do it slowly.

Leave a Legacy

In the midst of the transition, the new leader must learn what was previously done, and why, as well as what is appropriate to do moving forward. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I encourage documenting the job roles, operational procedures, and functional structure of your ministry. When the time comes to hand off to the new leader, this documentation can become invaluable to the new leader, not just to those currently serving. Provide a copy of your ministry’s binder so that they can understand the why’s and how’s of your ministry.

Lead the Transition

As the current leader, you are the closest to the ministry and how it works. In addition to the documentation, you should establish a transitional role with the new leader. Obtain permission from the new leader to guide them through the transition process, allowing them to follow you and learn how you currently run the ministry. Then, allow them to slowly start to take your place, until they can handle the majority of the workload. Don’t just dump documentation and run – the new leader and the volunteers both suffer.

Let It Go

Finally, just let it go. Accept that the new leader will want to do things differently. Everyone is different and comes from a variety of backgrounds, so remember that it isn’t your team anymore. Don’t try to interfere, and only jump in if asked. And whatever you do, don’t speak ill of the new leader’s decision or abilities to your current volunteers. You may have a strong bond with them, such that you continue to meet with them even after you stop serving alongside one another. That is fine, just stay away from the ministry as a topic. Move on to your new calling and leave the next leader to theirs.

Transitioning a ministry is a tough thing to do – you have lots of emotional attachment and the new leader has a large desire to take over. Manage the transition using the steps above, and you’ll continue to see your ministry grow for the times to come!

[tags]church leadership, ministry leadership, volunteering[/tags]

Budget Constraints

Every leader is faced with budget constraints, but for most, it means having no budget at all. When I first started as a web ministry leader, we had no budget, one cobbled together computer, and little else. It can be tough to meet the needs of your staff, church members, and visitors when little budget remains. However, it is often under these conditions where the most innovative solutions happen.

Growing while under budget constraints:

1. If the task is important, spend the time to research your needs – we found that many software companies provide discounted or free licenses, which helped our web ministry take off sooner
2. Learn to budget with little – spend the time to learn how to manage whatever budget you have, even if you simply create a spreadsheet of what you need and what it costs, along with any spending to date. Staff often respect the stewardship of a ministry’s budget, so show them how you’d use the money to grow the ministry
3. People put money behind vision and value, not need – focus on what you do and how you do it; you may begin to see your budget increase once your staff see that you deliver value consistently

Resource Constraints

Resource constraints take the form of lack of skillsets, solutions, or volunteers. Lack of certain skillsets can limit your ministry’s ability to execute and will often reduce the solutions available to you. A lack of volunteers means that not everything on your list will get done.

Growing while under resource constraints:

1. Less solutions available can often mean you will have to select the best option available at the time, but you will have more time to execute as you won’t get bogged down in research or decisions by commitee; it may also mean that you should walk away for now and concentrate on other opportunities
2. Lack of skillsets cause you to take a different view of a problem and finding more creative solutions
3. Lack of people forces you to focus on what is important and let go of the rest; the opposite of this is to spend more time doing more, which never works for the long term and can ruin your health and your family

Time Constraints

Of the three contraints that we are focusing on, time is the worst – you can’t make more of it and it keeps moving even when you aren’t. What people don’t realize is that time is sometimes our biggest ally.

Growing while under time constraints:

1. Time constrains us to be the best we can be in the time we have
2. Time focuses us so that we can realize our true priorities
3. Time enables us to depend upon God to get things done and grow closer to him

So, the next time you find yourself constrained by missing volunteers, budget, skillsets, time, or solutions, consider it as an opportunity for God to grow you and your ministry beyond your expectations.

[tags]iron triangle, ministry leadership, volunteering, volunteer management, recruiting volunteers[/tags]

An Issue of Quality

What would you do if your overhead engineers consistently have issues getting the worship song lyrics right during service? What about spelling errors or bad formatting? If you have issues like this, you might take several actions: add another task to your worship leader by assigning them the task, limit the slide creation to a single trusted volunteer or staff-member, or unnecessarily remove the volunteer from service.

Those sound like poor options. But, what if there was another option that hasn’t been considered? What if you modify the procedures by having them meet the worship team for practice? During that time, they work on changing the slides as the team sings and can make notes on special timings, as well as conduct quality control. You may even consider reworking your functional structure to make this a smoother process. This small change provides an extra comfort and familiarity to the engineer, builds a stronger sense of teamwork, and makes things more professional. Of course, this will also require you to grow the ministry more, as you’ll need to rotate your engineers more often due to the higher demands. This issue of quality may be an early warning of just such a problem anyway, so take advantage of it by acting on it early!

An Issue of Missing Skills

Sometimes teams inherit technology that “just works”, but when the first need to change it comes along, the necessary skills are missing to make it happen. In this case, it is a lack of Flash skills for updating a website. Your options to fix this situation may include: contracting someone to fill the gap, locating the skills from a neighboring church, or doing a sub-standard job by having someone with a less-than-optimal skillset make the change.

Instead, consider taking the opportunity to alter your approach. Ask if there is a way to continue to use what exists (assuming it still handles the job properly), but modify the usage through changing the structure or process. For this situation, it may be to alter the structure of the website, or by removing some existing content that is no longer needed. Possibly, the changes required start to show you that the updates really mean that a new front-facing website is needed to reach a new target audience. Finally, it could be a wake-up call that it is time to take the leap fo dropping the technology entirely.

Issues Create Growth

These were just two examples which may or may not be applicable to your situation. The end result, in either case, is to take a step back and assess the problem. Sometimes it takes a person outside of the issues and day-to-day procedures to see something new. These are often the ones that will give you a “why didn’t I think of that” moment.

No matter what, don’t let these opportunities pass by because you are focused on the immediate issue. Always be willing to allow issues to create opportunities to change your procedures while keeping your focus and vision. This is a key ingredient to any growing ministry!

[tags]church process, volunteering, volunteer management, ministry management[/tags]

As you can see, the diagram shows a few moderately skilled volunteers that may show up from time-to-time. I refer to these skilled volunteers as “heros”, as the staff and lay leaders often start to get “hero worship” when they depend on these “servant powerhouses”. While this is a great blessing, it isn’t the norm, as most volunteers fall into the lower category where they have little skills and effectiveness but a desire to serve. Keep this picture in your head, as it will help you truly meet volunteers where they are, not where you wish they were. The next diagram shows the real opportunity that exists when we realize where our volunteers actually are:

Here is where executing what the Bible says gets a little harder. You see, Eph 4:12 says, “…train Christians in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church…” We, as lay leaders and volunteers, are called to train our brothers and sisters in serving the Lord. When we opt out of training volunteers because it takes too much time, we are cheating ourselves and those that would serve with us. As I mentioned in a recent post on The Volunteer-Centered Leader, we need to invest in people, not tasks. This is where true ministry is, but often we can forget this when we are leaders of a service-focused ministry such as IT, media, worship, greeting, ushering, and others. The final diagram shows what your ministry may look like after investing in your volunteers:

As you invest in them, you bridge the gap that exists between you and them. You are beginning to train them in the skills they need, but more importantly, you are increasing their effectiveness. When this happens, you will find opportunities to fine-tune your ministry to accommodate their skills while ensuring that they are effective. I’ve posted about this before when I simplified the technology choices for creating the church website. This enables you to take on more strategic steps to leading your ministry, as well as giving you more freedom to take on new opportunities as you are called.

So, whenever you feel like you are getting bogged down by working with volunteers, take heart – Paul assures us that it is the right thing to do so that “we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ. ” (Eph 4:13-14, The Message). Now, go grow your ministry through volunteers!

[tags]volunteering, volunteer management, church leadership[/tags]

Find people with passion

As you know by this blog, I’m passionate about encouraging healthy volunteers and volunteer management. For the Volunteer Dept, we needed to find people equally passionate about meeting new people and helping them get to their purpose and calling. So far, we’ve found five key people, including a manager to oversee them, to head up our call team. We also found some volunteers that would help us with data entry into our centralized database.

Put them where they will succeed

The Volunteer Dept will be the first line of contact with those that decide to give of their time to volunteer, so they are friendly and have great phone etiquette. If people had the passion but not the desire to be on the phone, then we placed them on the data entry team. This worked out, as those that volunteered had computers at home to do their work and were willing to be trained. The structure was starting to shape up!

Revisit your structure often

With the overall job roles of data entry and call team defined, we needed to define our structure. We knew that we needed a manager to handle the week-to-week call team management, but we also noticed that data entry and call team overlapped considerably. We opted to have one manager handle both job roles for the immediate timeframe, since the number of volunteers was small right now. This manager has been assigned her first major task – to document what she’s been doing so far into a training manual and training her new recruits.

Adjust as needed

As we started to dig deeper into the data entry process, we realized that there was considerable overlap with other data entry procedures. We had to quickly assess what our overall focus should be and what was outside our centralized volunteer management goals. As we started to determine what to do, we found that the department should not take on this role and that it would be managed by a different group that would be responsible for consistent data entry. This was the hardest step, as we didn’t want to let them just walk away from our team. But, it was the right decision in the end as it frees up our ministry to be focused on the mission of recruiting and retaining volunteers. We did make sure that they understood our decision and that they were still able to do what they signed up for – just with another team.

Communicate a Plan

Finally, we created a plan and communicated it to our staff and team. Writing a plan should be simple, and has been outlined here as a series in the past. Use this plan to communicate to your staff and your team about the plans for the next few months. For us, it will be to finalize the training materials, train our volunteers, and begin to educate a few ministry leaders on what the Volunteer Dept is about and how we’ll be helping them out. After making our adjustments, we were able to define a plan with 4 major milestones that allows us to focus on our primary goal. This is important!

Keep in mind that this process took us only a few weeks, not months or years. So, be willing to make adjustments for the health and growth of your ministry. Focus on your core passion and let the other things go. We did this and now we are even more focused on what needs to be done (and what doesn’t) by our team. This is a key step in growing your ministry!

[tags]volunteering, volunteer management, ministry management, church leadership[/tags]

To continue to grow your ministry, you need to recruit new volunteers. But, what happens when you interview these volunteers and they are eager to get started? You will need a definition of your ministry’s purpose and documentation of procedures. Even if your ministry is simple – greet people at the front door – you cannot go forward without documenting your procedures. Why? Because defining and documenting isn’t about the level of complexity within a ministry, but rather it is about the experience of the ministry. That experience helps make your newly-recruited volunteer comfortable, which in turn helps them stay and potentially even recruit others to join.

Too often, we as ministry leaders and workers get too close to our work. We know how we do what we do, and even why we do it. The new recruit doesn’t, and if they don’t have a smooth transition into your ministry, they will leave. So, consider writing some training materials for your ministry, putting them into a binder, and handing them to each member of your team. Make sure that everyone is being trained the same, and that extra binders exist for when you have a new recruit. Things that should be inside your training binder:

1. An Introduction Letter

This should be a personal letter from you to the volunteer thanking them for serving with you. Welcome them to the ministry and make them feel comfortable for the step they have taken. It may be that they’ve stepped out of their comfort zone to serve, so make them be glad they did so. Encourage them to pray for each member of the team. For a personal touch, sign the letter (with a pen, not a digital image).

2. Your Ministry Overview

Introduce the ministry, including your mission and vision. Cover the functional structure (org chart from your senior pastor to themselves) so that they know where they belong and they know their manager. Provide a basic overview of your execution strategy (how the ministry does what it does) so that they have a big picture understanding of how it all works together. Include how other ministries integrate with your team, so they know where your team’s functions start and stop.

3. The Procedures Guide

For each job role, outline the procedures required to do their job. This may be workflow diagrams, step-by-step instructions, screenshots of software, references to other books or training manuals, and sample forms that they may be using. You have already done this based on a previous post on Growing Your Ministry Through…Procedures, right?

4. Team Contact Information and Resources

Provide a contact sheet with your ministry’s volunteers, including full name, phone number, and email. Also include any website locations where tools or documents are published. You may wish to write down their id/password for them, if you generated an account on their behalf. Bonus: include pictures of your team to help them know fellow team members that serve at alternate times or at different locations.

5. Update Often!

Ok, so this isn’t a specific thing to have in your binder, but rather it is something to do. Remember: this binder is a living representation of your ministry. As things change, update the documents and distribute pre-punched updates for your team to update their binders. Keep the binders you have near their work area up-to-date as well, in case a new recruit has questions or needs to contact a team member. Encourage your team to use the binder as recruiting tool, as they can show potential candidates how everything within the ministry works and how organized it is. They can even use the documented vision and mission to help during the recruiting process.

Take the necessary steps to train your new volunteers and you will see happier, healthier volunteers and a growing ministry!

[tags]church leadership, volunteer management, volunteer training[/tags]

Strategy #1: Establish a Single Focus

As we all know, there is always more to do than we have time and resources. Determine what your single focus for your ministry is by asking the following question:

If this ministry could only do one thing, what is it and can I confirm God’s calling?

After you answer this question, you know where to place all of your effort. Remove much of the cruft of your ministry – things that you’ve been doing but don’t really need to do. Once you’ve achieved this, you can move on to the next strategy.

Strategy #2: Create a Firm Foundation

Put all of your time and effort into this single focus and make your ministry be the best at it. Create job descriptions for recruiting and seek people to fill those needs. Create training materials for your new recruits and make sure everyone understands their job role. Recruit additional volunteers to backfill for your current team to allow for rotation and sick days. At this time you will also need to begin to identify one or more managers to help you oversee the week-to-week tasks, freeing you up for the next strategy.

Strategy #3: Grow Outward

As you begin to take on more people to handle your current focus, you can begin to take a small team and venture into the next territory. Now is the time to transition management of your teams to your new managers, if you haven’t done so already. Focus on the next aspect of your ministry and perform the same strategy to grow it in parallel. There may be times when you need to put your focus back on sustaining your current offerings, maybe even to the point that you need to pull back sometimes and refocus. That’s ok – everything we do is temporary in this world, so accept that things you do today may not be needed tomorrow.

By focusing your attention in small steps, you will create a growing ministry with a firm foundation that will enable your team to win the true victory.

[tags]church leadership, ministry leadership, ministry strategy[/tags]

Every Ministry Has Procedures

Every ministry, no matter how simple, has procedures. Media ministries have procedures for sound checks, selecting equipment, setup and teardown for satellite/multi-site configurations, and recording/archiving. Ushering and greeting ministries have procedures for parking lot assistance, giving hand outs, ensuring children get to their classroom, and guiding late comers to the right seats without disrupting service. Even the prayer room has procedures and guidelines on how to deal with alter calls.

The Problem is the Consistent Application of Procedures

Not every ministry, however, knows how to explain these procedures. Some, as I’ve alluded to in previous posts, just throw newly recruited volunteers into the wild. Other ministries are new and just jump in, start doing, and keep doing without any thought to the others within the team. The unfortunate side effect of this is low volunteer retention, constantly changing ministry leadership, and frustrated staff.

The Solution is Repeatability Through Documentation

To solve this problem of consistency, ministries need to properly document their procedures and make them available at all times. This means that ministries need to value repeatability over new features or service offerings. You, as a media leader, must ensure that before you go from a one camera to three camera setup, you can consistently execute the one camera setup for your existing and future volunteers. You, as the ushering ministry, need to document how to ensure the different types of visitors get the attention they need before you add a new welcome center or events booth. It also means that your volunteers have access to these procedures at any time by placing them near their work area or in a back office that is accessible before, during, and after service. That way, if someone calls in sick that normally performs the audio archiving, a manual is available for a backup volunteer to do the task. Of course, not all situations are interchangable, but you get the idea.

Here is what this means for you and your church:

1. You value consistent execution of your ministry over every new opportunity that becomes available (discernment)
2. You value defining and documenting procedures for current and new service offerings over short-term outcomes (following-through)
3. You value the quality of execution (or depth) of your offering over the number of offerings (breadth)

Getting Started

1. Identify all of the functional jobs in your ministry
2. Find one or more volunteers that know and/or execute the process often
3. Start documenting! Begin with flow diagrams and text that describe when, what, and how things need to be done. If it is software-related, take screenshots and make notes below it

Start simple, grow your documentation over time, and begin reaping the rewards of defining your procedures!

I typically see 2 types of interviews conducted for church ministries: those that look for a specific type of person and reject all else (the “exclusive interview”) and those that don’t care who they get (the “inclusive interview”). What I prefer to see is the “prayerful interview”, one that is focused on an overall fit rather than skills or need.

The Exclusive Interview

The exclusive interview is often seen in high-skill areas, such as IT, Web, Worship/Music, and Media/Video. These are the interviews where people of all types that often have a minimal interest and right heart get pounded by questions regarding TCP/IP, CSS level 2, obscure musicians, and how many short films they’ve produced. These interviews are often, but not always, intimidating for those that don’t fit into the top 1%. These ministries suffer from lack of volunteers, putting more pressure on those that do fit the high skill level to serve even more than they should.

The Inclusive Interview

The inclusive interview checks for a pulse or other signs of life, and willingness to give more time than they really have. They don’t check for skills, though they will do a background check if required. Often, these ministries are focused on “survival” and rarely retain their volunteers for long periods of time, causing knowledge to be lost and cycles of reinventing the wheel or doing it the way we always have.

The Prayerful Interview

The third type is a balance between the two other interviews, the prayerful interview. This kind of interview performs the following steps:

1. Prior to the meeting, the interviewer prayerfully seeks guidance regarding the ministry needs and for guidance regarding the candidate
2. Prior to the meeting, the interviewer prepares a list of job roles that the candidate will be offered, identifies any necessary skills for each one, and considers what she is looking for in this candidate
3. During the meeting, the interviewer asks important questions to determine length and depth of their salvation (spiritual maturity), how they arrived to select their ministry (calling), and what skill(s) best fit the ministry (capabilities). The interviewer may also briefly discuss the ministry, its mission/vision, and the job roles available and time investment expected
4. After the meeting, the interviewer reviews and prays over the meeting and seeks guidance. Reference and background checks may be conducted at this point for high-security or childcare-related ministries
5. Finally, the interviewer extends an offer to the candidate or offers another ministry that may be better suited, conducting a face-to-face introduction/handoff to the other ministry leader

Notice that no where have I mentioned spirtual gifts tests, personality profile tests, or anything remotely close. While these types of tests may be helpful for those uncertain of their calling in life, they should in no way influence an interview. They are tools for the candidate, not the leader. Sometimes people pick a ministry due to interest or God-given calling that is beyond their normal skills or comfort zone (aka being “stretched”). Prayer, above all else, is the most essential test to confirm an interview. If you don’t have a healthy prayer life to enable you to confidently seek the Lord for this decision, you need to deal with this before you begin to add new people to your ministry!

Now, go interview for your growing ministry!