"Decision Quality is Not the Same as Decision Outcome" by Ken Evers-Hood
Failure is never easy -- even for God.
In the middle of the wilderness, God made a decision, and it didn't go well at first. God made the call to summon Moses to the top of Mount Sinai and give him the law inscribed on two stone tablets.
In Moses' absence, the people grew anxious and demanded of Aaron, "Come, make gods for us." To mollify them, Aaron took their jewelry and fashioned a golden calf. "Here are your gods, O Israel," he said. To celebrate, the people ate, drank and were very merry indeed. God was angry and wanted to destroy the people, but Moses talked God down off the ledge. Yet when Moses descended and saw for himself what was going on, he threw the tablets down and destroyed them.
There's no other way to say it: the first attempt to give Israel the law was an epic failure. But was it a bad decision? Was the decision to give Israel the law in the first place a poor one?
Failure is a hot topic in church leadership today, with seminaries and denominations and congregations exploring the relationship between failure and creativity, innovation and institutional problem solving.
With all of this talk, however, we're still missing one crucial element in our conversations around failure: decision-making. We rightly talk about the importance of creating cultures of trust and experimentation. We point out the importance of distinguishing between good experimental failures and bad ethical ones.
But more fundamental is decision-making itself. How do we distinguish between good decisions that happen to result in failure and bad decisions that lead to failure? Or how do we tell the difference between a bad decision that just happens to turn out well and a good decision that succeeds according to plan?
Let's say my high schooler attends a wild party, drinks and then makes the decision to drive home.
This is an absolutely terrible decision.
If he makes it home without incident, this is a good outcome, but we would never say he should repeat the initial decision to drink and drive. On the flip side, if my kid drinks at this party but then calls me to come pick him up, we would commend him for at least having the sense to call for help. If we have an accident on the way home, this is a poor outcome. But the bad outcome doesn't mean the decision to call me was wrong. It was a good decision that just had a bad outcome.
Church leaders rarely make this distinction, and it's a problem.
I started out in ministry leading a new church development. I had no idea what I was doing, which is probably the only reason I agreed to try. You learn to fail in new church development. A lot. But we have no idea in advance which plants will fail and which will thrive.
Every group starting out thinks it has a chance, or no one would invest the time, energy and resources. Yet every time a new plant fails, people come out of the woodwork to say that they were afraid this would happen and that it was a mistake all along. If the outcome is bad, it must have been the wrong decision in the first place.
We have to stop reasoning like this. Good decisions can and will lead to bad outcomes.
Instead of reasoning from the outcome, we have to spend more time thinking about the quality of the decisions we make.
Read more »
MANAGEMENT, STRAT
Ken Evers-Hood: Decision quality is not the same as decision outcome
Image courtesy of Strategic Decisions Group
A pastor writes that Christian leaders must stop arguing that if an outcome is bad, the decision must have been bad, too.
TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 2015
Failure is never easy -- even for God.
In the middle of the wilderness, God made a decision, and it didn’t go well at first. God made the call to summon Moses to the top of Mount Sinai and give him the law inscribed on two stone tablets.
In Moses’ absence, the people grew anxious and demanded of Aaron, “Come, make gods for us.” To mollify them, Aaron took their jewelry and fashioned a golden calf. “Here are your gods, O Israel,” he said. To celebrate, the people ate, drank and were very merry indeed. God was angry and wanted to destroy the people, but Moses talked God down off the ledge. Yet when Moses descended and saw for himself what was going on, he threw the tablets down and destroyed them.
There’s no other way to say it: the first attempt to give Israel the law was an epic failure. But was it a bad decision? Was the decision to give Israel the law in the first place a poor one?
Failure is a hot topic in church leadership today, with seminaries and denominations and congregations exploring the relationship between failure and creativity, innovation and institutional problem solving.
With all of this talk, however, we’re still missing one crucial element in our conversations around failure: decision-making. We rightly talk about the importance of creating cultures of trust and experimentation. We point out the importance of distinguishing between good experimental failures and bad ethical ones.
But more fundamental is decision-making itself. How do we distinguish between good decisions that happen to result in failure and bad decisions that lead to failure? Or how do we tell the difference between a bad decision that just happens to turn out well and a good decision that succeeds according to plan?
Let’s say my high schooler attends a wild party, drinks and then makes the decision to drive home.
This is an absolutely terrible decision.
If he makes it home without incident, this is a good outcome, but we would never say he should repeat the initial decision to drink and drive. On the flip side, if my kid drinks at this party but then calls me to come pick him up, we would commend him for at least having the sense to call for help. If we have an accident on the way home, this is a poor outcome. But the bad outcome doesn’t mean the decision to call me was wrong. It was a good decision that just had a bad outcome.
Church leaders rarely make this distinction, and it’s a problem.
I started out in ministry leading a new church development. I had no idea what I was doing, which is probably the only reason I agreed to try. You learn to fail in new church development. A lot. But we have no idea in advance which plants will fail and which will thrive.
Every group starting out thinks it has a chance, or no one would invest the time, energy and resources. Yet every time a new plant fails, people come out of the woodwork to say that they were afraid this would happen and that it was a mistake all along. If the outcome is bad, it must have been the wrong decision in the first place.
We have to stop reasoning like this. Good decisions can and will lead to bad outcomes.
Instead of reasoning from the outcome, we have to spend more time thinking about the quality of the decisions we make.
Leaders at Stanford’s Strategic Decision and Risk Management program offer a “decision quality chain” for distinguishing between decision quality and outcome. It contains six elements: appropriate frame; creative, doable alternatives; good information; clear values; sound reasoning; and commitment to action.
In the first step of this process, leaders consider the frame, or context, of a decision to ensure that they are solving the right problem. The right solution to the wrong problem will only lead to frustration, and it happens all the time.
Second, leaders articulate creative and doable alternatives. Especially when we feel convinced we’re on the right path, it’s easy to avoid thinking through alternatives at all. This is a mistake. Without identifying and evaluating several doable alternatives, including doing nothing, we haven’t really made a decision.
The third step is assessing the value of our information: is it based on the intuition of the loudest person in the room, or is it rooted in something more solid? Good information is particularly challenging to come by in the church.
Because of this, this fourth step is all the more important for us. Leaders carefully consider whether the proposed solutions are grounded in the core values of the body we serve. The principle of traditioned innovation holds that new ideas must be rooted in who God has always called us to be, not just the latest and greatest trend.
Next, leaders use sound reasoning to consider whether they have blinds spots that are coloring their judgment. Do we think we are seeing clearly when we really aren’t?
Finally, leaders assess whether the organization is committed to the proposed action. This last step brilliantly pushes leaders to think through all the parties who will ultimately need to embrace the changes ahead. If there isn’t commitment to action, even the best decisions will be dead on arrival.
This process is invaluable -- but it includes only a single step inviting leaders to consider what biases may be influencing our thinking. We might infer that heuristics and bias can be dealt with by simply being aware of them.
Yet over and over behaviorists have shown that cognitive bias is far more deeply rooted than we’ve realized. With each step of the process, then, I suggest that a particular bias be considered, to remind leaders to be attentive throughout the decision-making process.
For instance, during the first step, setting the appropriate frame, leaders must guard against “narrow framing,” the temptation to transform complicated decisions with many facets into overly simplistic questions. It’s important to slow groups down to make sure they’ve considered every angle. When dealing with a challenge, I lead groups to pose solutions only after they have restated the challenge and asked for clarification. This can be frustrating to the people who want to move immediately to problem solving, but short-circuiting the process often leads to good solutions to the wrong problem.
When it comes to creative, doable alternatives, leaders should be mindful of the anchoring effect. Anchoring causes us to get stuck on early ideas, making it difficult to think creatively. Design firms like IDEO avoid using the staple of so many church boards -- the traditional brainstorming session -- because of this. It can be more effective to break into small groups to work on multiple ideas at the same time. If a team has only one or two good options at the end of the day, members should demand more possibilities.
During the third step -- getting good information -- the greatest threat is confirmation bias. Even experienced pastors have seen only a small number of congregations, and all of us are prone to remember experiences that confirm our beliefs. The danger is that groups will make decisions based on little more than hunches and anecdotal experiences from a tiny set of data.
At the next step, affect bias can lead groups away from the deep values that root them. Anxiety or fatigue -- common among decision-makers -- can affect our perception in powerful ways. To counter this, leaders must regularly articulate the organization’s deepest values to keep the group on track. This is one area where the church should really shine in comparison with other institutions. Prayer and theological reflection are not only our birthright; they are the very practices that help us slow down and remember that God is God and our fears are not.
Next, when it comes to reasoning, one of the most common biases -- the optimism bias -- leads us to overestimate our abilities. Simple awareness of this bias does not make it go away; leaders must keep in mind that it will inevitably affect and hinder our thinking.
In the final step, commitment to action, leaders must be mindful of the power of loss aversion. Behaviorists have shown that people are twice as unhappy about losing an object or practice as they are about gaining something else. Change, in other words, is painful. Even good change means loss in some way. It’s easy for leaders to become so focused on our brilliant and exciting solutions that we forget about the living, breathing humans who need to be convinced of them.
Remember how God’s first attempt to give people the law resulted in miserable failure? I asked whether it was a bad decision. What do you think?
I say the answer is absolutely not. While the first outcome was terrible, the decision to give the law was still a good one.
When leaders face good decisions that result in poor outcomes, they have to persevere and try again, and that is exactly what God and Moses did.
Two chapters after Moses destroyed the first tablets, we find God telling Moses to cut two more, just like the others. God again inscribed the tablets with the law. God didn’t modify the plan. God didn’t say he had made a mistake.
No, the first decision really was a good one. It just had a bad outcome. And so God and Moses tried the same idea again, and the second attempt resulted in the same commandments that continue to guide us today. Thank goodness God and Moses didn’t confuse a bad outcome with a bad decision.
Monday, July 13, 2015
In When Better Isn't Enough: Evaluation Tools for the 21st Century Church, author Jill Hudson argues, "We must identify new criteria for success, and perhaps even for faithfulness, and hold ourselves accountable to them." Approaching the postmodern era as a tremendous opportunity, Hudson identifies 12 characteristics by which we can measure effective ministry for the early 21st century.
Buy the book
Ideas that Impact: Evaluating Ministry
"Making Pastoral Evaluation Worthwhile" by Gil Rendle
Doing pastoral evaluations that are helpful to both pastor and church can be very tricky, especially in churches that tend to have unclear goals and volunteer leaders who don't always know all that their clergy do. Here are cautions and suggestions for the evaluation process.
Read more »Doing pastoral evaluations that are helpful to both pastor and church can be very tricky, especially in churches that tend to have unclear goals and volunteer leaders who don’t always see and know all that their church and their clergy do. Let me begin with some cautions!
"Ask Heart-Awakening Questions" by Diane Millis
In When Better Isn't Enough: Evaluation Tools for the 21st Century Church, author Jill Hudson argues, "We must identify new criteria for success, and perhaps even for faithfulness, and hold ourselves accountable to them." Approaching the postmodern era as a tremendous opportunity, Hudson identifies 12 characteristics by which we can measure effective ministry for the early 21st century.
Buy the book
Ideas that Impact: Evaluating Ministry
"Making Pastoral Evaluation Worthwhile" by Gil Rendle
Doing pastoral evaluations that are helpful to both pastor and church can be very tricky, especially in churches that tend to have unclear goals and volunteer leaders who don't always know all that their clergy do. Here are cautions and suggestions for the evaluation process.
Read more »Doing pastoral evaluations that are helpful to both pastor and church can be very tricky, especially in churches that tend to have unclear goals and volunteer leaders who don’t always see and know all that their church and their clergy do. Let me begin with some cautions!
- Many congregations don’t want to evaluate their clergy until they are unhappy with him or her. Be sure that it is not unhappiness or conflict that is driving your evaluation. These issues are best addressed in other ways.
- Most personnel committees do not know all that their pastor does or should be doing. Don’t try to evaluate everything about your pastor’s work. Is there a part of your pastor’s work or goals where she or he would most like feedback?
- Clergy and staff should not be evaluated apart from the goals of ministry for their congregation. (The laundry list of duties and roles in the denominational book of polity is not helpful, and the personal preferences of the personnel committee members are equally unhelpful.)
- Evaluation should be formative (What have we learned over the past year and what should we work on next?) rather than summative (Is he/she good or bad? Do we keep her/him or not?).
- Many denominations provide standardized evaluations forms or processes for all of their congregations, which may or may not be helpful to you. Standardized evaluations may not honor the size and uniqueness of your congregation and your evaluation needs. Before you begin with any of these standard forms ask, Will it help? Does this get us to the conversation we need?
- The time of evaluation is an opportunity for conversation about the state of the ministry of the church. The evaluation tool or instrument is best used as a means to structure an honest conversation about what is happening, or not happening, in the life of your church and what the relationship of the role and work of the pastor should be to that work. The form of the evaluation process may not be as important as the shared conversation about it.
- I like to use a performance planning meeting document that you can find here. This is actually a form and process for staff supervision to be used by the senior clergy with other staff. However, the basic flow of the conversation and the periodic revisiting of the conversation is something that I encourage personnel committees to adapt with their clergy.
- One of the healthier resources that I know is Jill Hudson’s book, When Better Isn’t Enough, published by Alban. There are tools in the back for the clergy’s self evaluation and for the personnel committees (and other groups if adapted) to self evaluate their own role and responsibility in the work of the church.
- Good luck.
"Ask Heart-Awakening Questions" by Diane Millis
People in authority are often reluctant to ask questions of others. In this piece, a leadership coach offers tips on how to ask questions that generate better ideas, make fewer errors in judgment and increase our agility.
Read more »
MANAGEMENT, COMMUNICATION
Diane M. Millis: Ask heart-awakening questions
Bigstock/PixelsAway
People in authority are often reluctant to ask questions of others. A leadership coach offers tips on how to ask questions that generate better ideas, make fewer errors in judgment and increase our agility.
TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2015
Editor’s note: In her new book, “Deepening Engagement: Essential Wisdom for Listening and Leading with Purpose, Meaning and Joy,” leadership consultant and coach Diane M. Millis offers advice on how we can engage more deeply with our true selves, one another and the communities in which we live and work. In the following excerpt, she explains how to ask meaningful questions.
Pause
“No other person can ever chart a course for you, but a friend and a host who is really present can at times firm up what you in your own deepest heart of hearts have already felt drawing at you.”[Douglas Steere, “On Being Present Where You Are”]
Ponder
“Have you ever told your story before?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No one ever asked.”
Dave Isay wanted to change that. In 2003, he set up a recording booth in Grand Central Station and launched the StoryCorps Project. Isay had learned, through his work as a documentary radio producer, that a microphone gives people permission to ask questions of others that they normally wouldn’t ask. Since then, close to fifty thousand people have been asked by a friend or family member to share their stories in one of the StoryCorps recording booths found throughout the country. Isay reflects in his book “Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps” (New York: Penguin, 2013), “We can discover the most profound and exquisite poetry in the words and stories of the noncelebrated people around us, if we just have the courage to ask meaningful questions and the patience to listen closely to the answers.”
Read more »
MANAGEMENT, COMMUNICATION
Diane M. Millis: Ask heart-awakening questions
Bigstock/PixelsAway
People in authority are often reluctant to ask questions of others. A leadership coach offers tips on how to ask questions that generate better ideas, make fewer errors in judgment and increase our agility.
TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2015
Editor’s note: In her new book, “Deepening Engagement: Essential Wisdom for Listening and Leading with Purpose, Meaning and Joy,” leadership consultant and coach Diane M. Millis offers advice on how we can engage more deeply with our true selves, one another and the communities in which we live and work. In the following excerpt, she explains how to ask meaningful questions.
Pause
“No other person can ever chart a course for you, but a friend and a host who is really present can at times firm up what you in your own deepest heart of hearts have already felt drawing at you.”[Douglas Steere, “On Being Present Where You Are”]
Ponder
“Have you ever told your story before?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No one ever asked.”
Dave Isay wanted to change that. In 2003, he set up a recording booth in Grand Central Station and launched the StoryCorps Project. Isay had learned, through his work as a documentary radio producer, that a microphone gives people permission to ask questions of others that they normally wouldn’t ask. Since then, close to fifty thousand people have been asked by a friend or family member to share their stories in one of the StoryCorps recording booths found throughout the country. Isay reflects in his book “Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps” (New York: Penguin, 2013), “We can discover the most profound and exquisite poetry in the words and stories of the noncelebrated people around us, if we just have the courage to ask meaningful questions and the patience to listen closely to the answers.”
Asking meaningful questions requires courage because asking is such a countercultural activity in our tell culture, observes Edgar Schein in his recent book, “Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling” (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013). Schein has taught and studied organizational dynamics throughout his career and observes,
Our pragmatic, problem-solving culture values people who know things and tell others what they know. In such a culture, having to ask is perceived to be a sign of weakness or ignorance. Asking temporarily empowers the other person in the conversation and temporarily makes me vulnerable.
Those with the most authority tend to tell more often than ask, and those who ask are often viewed as either naive or bothersome or both. Case in point: Just last week, a client recalled how her boss told her not to ask so many questions during meetings. He insisted, “It makes it seem as if you don’t know what you’re doing.” Yet the primary benefits of asking, according to Schein, are that we generate better ideas, make fewer errors in judgment, and increase our agility.
Our tell culture is so pervasive that many of the questions we do ask are just another form of telling. Our questions reveal our assumptions, reflect our projections, and relay our agendas. In asking questions, we often have an answer already in mind. For example:
The remainder of the questions we ask are generally conventional in nature. They require very little effort to ask and even less effort to answer. Conventional questions are designed to elicit information. They take on predictable forms at all stages of our lives:
Asking good questions requires courage, patience, and, as Edgar Schein underscores, skill and art. He defines humble inquiry as “the skill and the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”
I’ve found the following guidelines especially helpful in developing the skill and practicing the art of asking heart-awakening questions:
Practice
This day, in each of the conversations you participate in, try to ask at least one heart-awakening question. As much as possible, tailor your question to the unique aspects of the person -- being attentive to his or her manner of speaking, preferred phrases, and expressions.[Excerpt is from “Deepening Engagement: Essential Wisdom for Listening and Leading with Purpose, Meaning and Joy” © 2015 Diane M. Millis. Permission granted by SkyLight Paths Publishing, www.skylightpaths.com(link is external).]
Doing pastoral evaluations that are helpful to both pastor and church can be very tricky, especially in churches that tend to have unclear goals and volunteer leaders who don’t always see and know all that their church and their clergy do. Let me begin with some cautions!
Many congregations don’t want to evaluate their clergy until they are unhappy with him or her. Be sure that it is not unhappiness or conflict that is driving your evaluation. These issues are best addressed in other ways.
Most personnel committees do not know all that their pastor does or should be doing. Don’t try to evaluate everything about your pastor’s work. Is there a part of your pastor’s work or goals where she or he would most like feedback?
Clergy and staff should not be evaluated apart from the goals of ministry for their congregation. (The laundry list of duties and roles in the denominational book of polity is not helpful, and the personal preferences of the personnel committee members are equally unhelpful.)
Evaluation should be formative (What have we learned over the past year and what should we work on next?) rather than summative (Is he/she good or bad? Do we keep her/him or not?).
Many denominations provide standardized evaluations forms or processes for all of their congregations, which may or may not be helpful to you. Standardized evaluations may not honor the size and uniqueness of your congregation and your evaluation needs. Before you begin with any of these standard forms ask, Will it help? Does this get us to the conversation we need?
Having said all that, let me offer several things to consider:
The time of evaluation is an opportunity for conversation about the state of the ministry of the church. The evaluation tool or instrument is best used as a means to structure an honest conversation about what is happening, or not happening, in the life of your church and what the relationship of the role and work of the pastor should be to that work. The form of the evaluation process may not be as important as the shared conversation about it.
I like to use a performance planning meeting document that you can find here. This is actually a form and process for staff supervision to be used by the senior clergy with other staff. However, the basic flow of the conversation and the periodic revisiting of the conversation is something that I encourage personnel committees to adapt with their clergy.
One of the healthier resources that I know is Jill Hudson’s book, When Better Isn’t Enough, published by Alban. There are tools in the back for the clergy’s self evaluation and for the personnel committees (and other groups if adapted) to self evaluate their own role and responsibility in the work of the church.
Good luck.[Copyright © 2006 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce, go to our permissions form.]
"Measuring Ministry Impact Takes Years" by Dave Odom
Your supporters might want to see immediate results. But your role as a congregational or institutional leader is to focus conversations around long-term impact and vision.
Read more »
ANAGEMENT, EVALUATION & ASSESSMENT
Dave Odom: Measuring ministry impact takes years
Bigstock/cynoclub
Your supporters might want to see immediate results. But your role as an institutional leader is to focus conversations around long-term impact and vision.
TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2015
How long does it take to know whether a new ministry is effective?
Three years to get the initiative properly established and aligned. Seven years to start seeing signs of its influence. Fifteen years to see the full flourishing of the work.
The participants in Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external) did not like my answer.
They lead services offered by Christian institutions. Frequently, these denominations, seminaries, missions agencies and large congregations are under great financial stress. Their supporters want to see immediate results; their critics accuse them of being all talk and no action.
Yet if leaders give in to supporters’ or critics’ short-term thinking, we end up focusing our evaluation on the day-to-day work. We end up spending more time counting how many events we’ve held or meals we’ve served. We end up being micromanaged, with supporters and critics telling us how to do the work, without a clear picture whether anything we’ve done is transformative.
It may not be satisfying in the short term, but a more constructive focus is on impact. Leaders should focus conversation on these guiding questions: What is the impact that the ministry is aiming to make? How will we measure the impact, both the early and long-term signs?
For example, some congregations and their denominations focus on the transformation of individuals, or making disciples. How might we measure that? We might describe the traits of a transformed life, such as being generous, compassionate, humble and dedicated. A number of activities could form these traits and qualities in individuals. The particular ministry activities might change over time, but the impact of the ministry will be something more durable.
In the first three years of a ministry, leaders make all sorts of adjustments in activities, because the targeted constituency is not attending or people are not motivated to follow through. Once people are participating, it takes time to know whether the activity is really making a difference in people’s lives. Three years is enough time to get the activities right, but seeing the impact takes several years longer.
After seven years, the activities have taken root and the impact becomes visible. Seven years is also a natural turning point in the tenure of a leader. It is a natural time to examine the work and renew one’s commitment to it or find the next challenge.
A few years after Leadership Education at Duke Divinity was established, I had a conversation with a military strategist, retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik. He asked me about the impact of the ministry. I fumbled around with a response, and he finally stopped me. He said that after three years, he would not anticipate much of an impact. Anything worth doing requires 15 years of work, he said. Not long afterward, business strategist Roger Martin similarly said that his work at Procter & Gamble required 15 years to see the full impact.
Fifteen years is the long view that institutions should use in evaluation. Most of us don’t serve in a specific role over that many years. Yet anything we attempt that affects the culture of an organization takes more than a generation of leadership to implement.
When Dubik mentioned 15 years, I asked him how long he had held a given assignment in the U.S. Army. His answer? Three years. He kept a 15-year horizon in view, and he did what he could to advance the work for his three years.
Last month, I met with a recent seminary graduate who had been tasked with founding a church within a church. She asked me what she should measure. She had asked the leaders of the sponsoring congregation and officials from the denomination, and no one would answer the question. Really? No one would even attempt to envision the impact this new congregation should have? The pastor was right to be nervous about the situation. Yet the lack of clarity is very common.
Occasionally, I meet leaders who are frustrated in their work with foundations, denominations and other funders. Typically, these leaders don’t want “the money people” telling them what to do. They argue that the leaders are the ones with the experience to decide the best course of action. I answer that one of the most effective ways to work in partnership with funders is to focus the conversation on impact and connect that impact to a vision for a flourishing life that can be available for all.
Most reasonable people realize that the impact takes time. Setting expectations for measurable progress in three-, seven- and 15-year periods can help focus the conversation with supporters and critics to be most fruitful.
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"Finishing Strong, Ending Well: Crafting the Culminating Chapter of Your Ministry: A retreat with Dr. Larry Peers in Marriottsville, MD on July 27-29, 2015
Are you planning to retire from full-time ministry during the next two to ten years? This event will help you make these years a vital, intentional time for culminating your ministry and also a time of exciting preparation for what's next. This retreat will feature techniques for personal preparation and also help you plan effectively with your congregation so that you finish strong and end well.
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Our pragmatic, problem-solving culture values people who know things and tell others what they know. In such a culture, having to ask is perceived to be a sign of weakness or ignorance. Asking temporarily empowers the other person in the conversation and temporarily makes me vulnerable.
Those with the most authority tend to tell more often than ask, and those who ask are often viewed as either naive or bothersome or both. Case in point: Just last week, a client recalled how her boss told her not to ask so many questions during meetings. He insisted, “It makes it seem as if you don’t know what you’re doing.” Yet the primary benefits of asking, according to Schein, are that we generate better ideas, make fewer errors in judgment, and increase our agility.
Our tell culture is so pervasive that many of the questions we do ask are just another form of telling. Our questions reveal our assumptions, reflect our projections, and relay our agendas. In asking questions, we often have an answer already in mind. For example:
- Do you really think that [x, y, or z] is a good idea?
- Have you always been so overly concerned with what your boss thinks of you?
- Have you thought about using this approach instead?
The remainder of the questions we ask are generally conventional in nature. They require very little effort to ask and even less effort to answer. Conventional questions are designed to elicit information. They take on predictable forms at all stages of our lives:
- How do you like school? (we ask the children we meet).
- What is your major? (we ask the students we meet).
- What do you do for a living? (we ask the adults we meet).
- What do you like most about the grade you are in?
- What are you enjoying learning about this semester?
- Where are you finding joy in your life these days?
Asking good questions requires courage, patience, and, as Edgar Schein underscores, skill and art. He defines humble inquiry as “the skill and the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”
I’ve found the following guidelines especially helpful in developing the skill and practicing the art of asking heart-awakening questions:
- If you think you already know how the other person will respond, try to come up with a different question.
- Begin your question with words and phrases like these: how, what, where, when, in what ways ... or tell me more about ... Open-ended questions tend to evoke more robust responses because they cannot typically be answered yes, no, or in a few words.
- Pay attention to key words and phrases that seem to have particular energy and meaning for those with whom you are speaking and incorporate their language into your question. For example, What are you getting jazzed about these days? What hit you at your core in that meeting? Tell me more about what floats your boat in this design.
- Maintain awareness of a person’s nonverbal responses and incorporate your observations into your questions. For example, I notice how your eyes lit up when you talked about yesterday’s presentation. What was the highlight of that presentation for you?
- Go beyond the first response. Encourage others to keep noticing and naming what’s at the core, the heart of the matter for them. For example, Tell me more about why that is important to you.
- Continue to listen patiently as our deepest truths are often difficult to put into words quickly and continue to emerge over time.
Practice
This day, in each of the conversations you participate in, try to ask at least one heart-awakening question. As much as possible, tailor your question to the unique aspects of the person -- being attentive to his or her manner of speaking, preferred phrases, and expressions.[Excerpt is from “Deepening Engagement: Essential Wisdom for Listening and Leading with Purpose, Meaning and Joy” © 2015 Diane M. Millis. Permission granted by SkyLight Paths Publishing, www.skylightpaths.com(link is external).]
Doing pastoral evaluations that are helpful to both pastor and church can be very tricky, especially in churches that tend to have unclear goals and volunteer leaders who don’t always see and know all that their church and their clergy do. Let me begin with some cautions!
Many congregations don’t want to evaluate their clergy until they are unhappy with him or her. Be sure that it is not unhappiness or conflict that is driving your evaluation. These issues are best addressed in other ways.
Most personnel committees do not know all that their pastor does or should be doing. Don’t try to evaluate everything about your pastor’s work. Is there a part of your pastor’s work or goals where she or he would most like feedback?
Clergy and staff should not be evaluated apart from the goals of ministry for their congregation. (The laundry list of duties and roles in the denominational book of polity is not helpful, and the personal preferences of the personnel committee members are equally unhelpful.)
Evaluation should be formative (What have we learned over the past year and what should we work on next?) rather than summative (Is he/she good or bad? Do we keep her/him or not?).
Many denominations provide standardized evaluations forms or processes for all of their congregations, which may or may not be helpful to you. Standardized evaluations may not honor the size and uniqueness of your congregation and your evaluation needs. Before you begin with any of these standard forms ask, Will it help? Does this get us to the conversation we need?
Having said all that, let me offer several things to consider:
The time of evaluation is an opportunity for conversation about the state of the ministry of the church. The evaluation tool or instrument is best used as a means to structure an honest conversation about what is happening, or not happening, in the life of your church and what the relationship of the role and work of the pastor should be to that work. The form of the evaluation process may not be as important as the shared conversation about it.
I like to use a performance planning meeting document that you can find here. This is actually a form and process for staff supervision to be used by the senior clergy with other staff. However, the basic flow of the conversation and the periodic revisiting of the conversation is something that I encourage personnel committees to adapt with their clergy.
One of the healthier resources that I know is Jill Hudson’s book, When Better Isn’t Enough, published by Alban. There are tools in the back for the clergy’s self evaluation and for the personnel committees (and other groups if adapted) to self evaluate their own role and responsibility in the work of the church.
Good luck.[Copyright © 2006 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce, go to our permissions form.]
"Measuring Ministry Impact Takes Years" by Dave Odom
Your supporters might want to see immediate results. But your role as a congregational or institutional leader is to focus conversations around long-term impact and vision.
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ANAGEMENT, EVALUATION & ASSESSMENT
Dave Odom: Measuring ministry impact takes years
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Your supporters might want to see immediate results. But your role as an institutional leader is to focus conversations around long-term impact and vision.
TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2015
How long does it take to know whether a new ministry is effective?
Three years to get the initiative properly established and aligned. Seven years to start seeing signs of its influence. Fifteen years to see the full flourishing of the work.
The participants in Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external) did not like my answer.
They lead services offered by Christian institutions. Frequently, these denominations, seminaries, missions agencies and large congregations are under great financial stress. Their supporters want to see immediate results; their critics accuse them of being all talk and no action.
Yet if leaders give in to supporters’ or critics’ short-term thinking, we end up focusing our evaluation on the day-to-day work. We end up spending more time counting how many events we’ve held or meals we’ve served. We end up being micromanaged, with supporters and critics telling us how to do the work, without a clear picture whether anything we’ve done is transformative.
It may not be satisfying in the short term, but a more constructive focus is on impact. Leaders should focus conversation on these guiding questions: What is the impact that the ministry is aiming to make? How will we measure the impact, both the early and long-term signs?
For example, some congregations and their denominations focus on the transformation of individuals, or making disciples. How might we measure that? We might describe the traits of a transformed life, such as being generous, compassionate, humble and dedicated. A number of activities could form these traits and qualities in individuals. The particular ministry activities might change over time, but the impact of the ministry will be something more durable.
In the first three years of a ministry, leaders make all sorts of adjustments in activities, because the targeted constituency is not attending or people are not motivated to follow through. Once people are participating, it takes time to know whether the activity is really making a difference in people’s lives. Three years is enough time to get the activities right, but seeing the impact takes several years longer.
After seven years, the activities have taken root and the impact becomes visible. Seven years is also a natural turning point in the tenure of a leader. It is a natural time to examine the work and renew one’s commitment to it or find the next challenge.
A few years after Leadership Education at Duke Divinity was established, I had a conversation with a military strategist, retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik. He asked me about the impact of the ministry. I fumbled around with a response, and he finally stopped me. He said that after three years, he would not anticipate much of an impact. Anything worth doing requires 15 years of work, he said. Not long afterward, business strategist Roger Martin similarly said that his work at Procter & Gamble required 15 years to see the full impact.
Fifteen years is the long view that institutions should use in evaluation. Most of us don’t serve in a specific role over that many years. Yet anything we attempt that affects the culture of an organization takes more than a generation of leadership to implement.
When Dubik mentioned 15 years, I asked him how long he had held a given assignment in the U.S. Army. His answer? Three years. He kept a 15-year horizon in view, and he did what he could to advance the work for his three years.
Last month, I met with a recent seminary graduate who had been tasked with founding a church within a church. She asked me what she should measure. She had asked the leaders of the sponsoring congregation and officials from the denomination, and no one would answer the question. Really? No one would even attempt to envision the impact this new congregation should have? The pastor was right to be nervous about the situation. Yet the lack of clarity is very common.
Occasionally, I meet leaders who are frustrated in their work with foundations, denominations and other funders. Typically, these leaders don’t want “the money people” telling them what to do. They argue that the leaders are the ones with the experience to decide the best course of action. I answer that one of the most effective ways to work in partnership with funders is to focus the conversation on impact and connect that impact to a vision for a flourishing life that can be available for all.
Most reasonable people realize that the impact takes time. Setting expectations for measurable progress in three-, seven- and 15-year periods can help focus the conversation with supporters and critics to be most fruitful.
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"Finishing Strong, Ending Well: Crafting the Culminating Chapter of Your Ministry: A retreat with Dr. Larry Peers in Marriottsville, MD on July 27-29, 2015
Are you planning to retire from full-time ministry during the next two to ten years? This event will help you make these years a vital, intentional time for culminating your ministry and also a time of exciting preparation for what's next. This retreat will feature techniques for personal preparation and also help you plan effectively with your congregation so that you finish strong and end well.
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