Will Mancini

#1 Write down your top 12 leaders and an action-item bullet point for each one. How can you invest in each this year? How will you spend time with them? What tools do they need? Do they require more support, direction, coaching or delegation? Don’t just look at your existing structure, look to who is emerging.

#2 Schedule a benchmarking trip to visit a church that’s 40% larger in weekend attendance than yours. Ask the church to invest team-on-team time and connect one-on-one in the designated staff areas.

#3 Take the Clarity Quiz in your first staff meeting in 2011. Use the quiz to prioritize a single staff goal for the next 90 days. Make the goal big, measurable, and define how each person will contribute.

#4 Schedule an offsite leadership retreat and make it a bigger event than in years past. Draw a pie cart for how much time to spend on fun stuff vs. strategic work. Delegate agenda development for each side of the pie chart or brainstorm the agenda with your key leaders in early January.

#5 Schedule an “hour of vision” in your monthly meeting pattern. Creating space for teams to have dialogue and to shape and own the vision is a huge move for the senior leader. Ask them a simple questions like, “What was your favorite thing about last year and how to we do more of it?” Or, ask them creative questions like, “If someone wrote a $25,000 check  to your ministry, how would you spend it and why?” If you would like a resource for ideas, consider buying a Vision Deck with 52 “vision-icebreakers” for this time.

#6 Cast a leadership vision to pray for people far from God. In the next several weeks, ask each person on the leadership team to share 3-5 people in their sphere of influence who are far from God. Pray for these people by name as a group every week in 2011.

#7 Schedule values-based leadership gatherings. Design several staff or leadership gatherings throughout based on your church values. For example, is you have six values, plan six special gatherings. During each experience, highlight the designated value in a concrete way. Celebrate and honor individuals who are modeling the value well.

#8 Increase your culture of collaboration. Find a coach or friend in ministry who can provide some staff training. Re-engage that personality assessment that came and went too quickly. Purchase a simple tool for each team member to bring to every meeting in 2011. I use this collaboration cube in every meeting I lead to encourage push-back, transparency, creativity, support and making final decisions.

#9 Create a stop doing list and execute. Whether your church is growing, plateaued or declining you will greatly benefit from identifying  and eliminating the 20% of church’s activity that is the lowest return on the mission. Play this short audio from Jim Collins as a staff exercise. As a team, ask the question ruthlessly, “Why do we do what we do?”

#10 Assess your vision and attend an event to boost your clarity. Here is the Vision Frame overview as a litmus test for your vision. If you can not answer all five questions of the irreducible minimums of clarity, then schedule today, one of the 7 best clarity experiences in winter/spring 2011. Events are in San Diego, San Antonio, Houston, Atlanta, Orlando with one being virtual.

#11 Take some new steps to develop leaders at every level of involvement. Many pastors hope to do this but never get to it. But it’s not that hard if you take a little time to plan. Spend 3 months designing, 3 months building behind the scenes and launch a dynamic process by fall of 2011. I co-authored a book, Building Leaders, to guide this process for you. I am giving away five books for leaders who want to engage this planning step. Tweet this post with the hashtag #buildingleaders to win. Two other great resources are The Leadership Baton by Bruce Miller and Mac Lake’s Blog.

Church planters stand in a unique intersection that brings five overlapping points of tension when it comes to vision and ministry DNA.  I see these five tug-of-war ropes with every planter I meet. Each of these tensions starts with a defining question.

#1 Am I running from or photocopying the ministry DNA of where I am leaving?

The first tension is between the ministry the church planter is leaving and the church they’re starting. There is a love-hate spectrum on the “leaving” side. Planters can err defining themselves by what they’re not (hate) or by simply photocopying the launching church model (love). I see both all of the time. In our ongoing Houston co::Lab, one planter left Sojourn Church in Louisville, KY excited to plant a church just like it in Pearland, TX. He is using the co::Lab to make sure he doesn’t short-circuit his own discovery and discernment process.

#2 Will I build the church that’s in my head only, or the one that God will begin to grow?

The second tension is between the ministry DNA that’s in the church planters mind and the one that God actually begins to grow.  Defining values from the start should be a powerful magnet and filter for the core team, but this shouldn’t preclude God’s sovereign hand of provision and direction as the church takes-off. The balance here is important as I always encourage aggressive discernment and bold articulation from the start. The key is to pay attention and always ask the most fundamental question: “What is God up to?”

#3 Will my definition of success be limited by the metrics of yesterday?

The third tension is between the metrics of yesteryear and the new metrics that missional thinking and innovative ministry may birth. Planters need freedom and confidence to break from the past and the lingering expectations from peers and mentors. I am surprised by how many times a guy starts out thinking creatively only to fall into common patterns and butts-in-seats goals.

#4 Will I leverage the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lay a vision foundation?

Fourth, is the tension of the “get-r-done” factor and a sweat-saturated task list with the importance of taking time to think clearly about the church’s cultural foundation. You only pour the foundational concrete once. I encourage planters to fiercely protect the “important and non-urgent” task of articulating vision well. The Auxano Vision co::Lab is a great place for coaching and accountability for this work. Remember, you only have the lifetime of the opportunity to seize the opportunity of a lifetime.

#5 Will I choose to translate the DNA well to the core team or rely on my own talent?

Finally, planters wrestle with knowing intuitively what they’re about and creating contagious carriers of the church’s vision. Helping people tell the new story is not as automatic as we would like to think, even with the core team. Years into his ministry, Jesus was still clarifying the basics of his mission with his twelve. In Luke 9:55, he rebukes them once again for wanting to destroy and not save. If our perfect God-man-leader, Jesus, worked hard for vision clarity what makes you think it won’t take a lot of time and attention for you?

If you have recently planted or are in the process of planting, I highly recommend the Exponential Conference this April in Orlando. They will have a track for vision, values & culture, apart of which will be a pre-conference. Let me know if you plan to be there.

Do you lead a cause or an organization? “Wait,” you answer, “I lead both!” In that case let me ask it a different way:

Do you lead an organization with a cause, or a cause with organization?

There’s a big difference.

In an “organization with a cause,” leadership prioritizes the organization itself ahead of the cause for which the organization exists. From vision and strategy to systems and budgets, everything leans toward building and preservation of the institution. The value of “order” is placed ahead of need for “progress.” Despite the presence of a God-honoring cause, the sharp edge of a dynamic mission and risk-taking spirit grows dull. Eventually, a blunt point on the arrow of purpose stops penetrating the world and taking new distance.

Leaders don’t feel this “frog-in-the-kettle” dynamic. The cause cools over time. It dilutes without notice, because the organization has a large life of its own. Keeping the organization going feels good. It validates our success in the eyes of others. We can be impressive leaders when leading an organization with a cause.

In a “cause with organization,” however, the leadership’s emotional commitment to the organization itself is always subordinate to the emotional commitment to the cause. Decisions are made rigorously around expanding the cause-outcomes. Vision is visceral. Self-preservation is not even on the radar, because death-in-dramatic-attempt is more attractive than life-in-playing-it-safe.

In such a state, organization is not neglected. It’s important because it’s a platform for and instrument of the cause. But it refuses to take a life of its own. The organization is always changeable, rearrange-able and negotiable.

We usually only see this beautiful dynamic early in the life of new cause, like a church plant or social sector initiative. With success it doesn’t take long before the organization-cause equation reverses. Early on, leaders go for broke. Once established, we do anything to keep the organization from going broke. Risk is “immature” and “irresponsible.” The gravity of our nicety wins the day. Loosing the benefits of the organization hurts more than not taking new ground for the cause.

So what does a leader do to keep the cause first?

The answer always lies in the heart of the top 3-5 leaders in the organization.

• How does the leadership team embody the cause?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• What is winning the tug-of-war between safety and risk in their collective soul?
• How many times do personal benefits invisibly weigh-in with decision-making?

Ask these questions for yourself. Then ask these questions as a team. Identify the first places that each team member is susceptible to “organization-before-cause”

Commit to a new action together that firmly models and reinforces a “cause-before-organization” commitment. Improve your cause with one question this week: What are you leading?

We are exploring the fifth reason of 5 Strategic Reasons to Change Your Church’s Name:

#5 When an original name works against building awareness

Okay, that’s a nice way of saying that sometimes a name is just bad. I don’t mean a bad reputation, but a name that doesn’t mean anything. It may be too long, too generic, or too specific. It may sound funny, or just may never stick in a person’s mind. It may sound too close to another name that has much more awareness (and therefore, live in a shadow foerever).  

A golden rule of naming is that a bad name keeps getting worse and a good name keeps getting better.

Just for fun, here are three of my favorite bad names that I have run across.

The first is a classic example of too long, in this case six words. If you chuckled at this name look at the back of the van.

Have you ever wondered whether to take “Baptist” out of your name? Why not put it in there twice!

How about a name that contradicts itself? I would have liked to have been in room the night the committee chose this name.  

So what do you when you wake up one day and realize that your ministry’s name is not helping the ministry? You change it!

Years ago, I met a pastor outside of Portland who leads what used to be called the Christian Life Center. Over time, he realized that the name was too generic.  In addition it gained very little awareness in the community.

After walking the Vision Pathway with his team, they were ready to communicate a new vision and build a new brand with people inside and out side the church.
We tested names through primary research in the community offering variations that built from the Christian Life Center but connected to their vision. As a part of the process I identified over 200 churches in the Portland area and studied their names. Less than 10 had a name of two words. This was significant and led to the intentional development of test names that were short and sweet- the less syllables the better.

Of multiple options, “Life Church” was most favored by unchurched people in the area. (This name change was done in 2003 before Life Church in Oklahoma City had national awareness.) The Life Church logo shown on the sign was designed by Auxano’s creative director, James Bethany.

The mission of Life Church is to guide self-reliant people toward a Christ-centered lifestyle. 

When leaders shape organizational culture, they reflect and reinforce values as the things that matter most. Values are often articulated poorly or misapplied in the local church setting. In fact several writers, including my friend Alan Hirsch, see little value in values because so much of what is articulated in the church is “all talk.” But great leaders don’t abandon the idea of values. Rather, they mine out the actionable and demonstrate-able of their culture’s core identity. And remember, values are one of the five aspects of the Vision Frame that you want to have developed.

In order to show the meaning of values, take one value at a time and run each through these 18 questions as a team. You might consider having one person on team doing some pre-work on a particular value. When I work with teams I generally recommend recording 6-8 of your top “demonstrated by” ideas after each value. This will help other leaders appreciate and “live into” doing more of what your church does best. 

Value being discussed: _________________________________

1. How might this value be demonstrated in how I communicate each day?
2. How might someone lead a planning or small group meeting to better reflect the value?
3. How might I integrate this value into decision-making processes?
4. How might this value influence budgeting process?
5. How might this value influence the way I work when I am by myself?
6. What is the single greatest thing I can do daily, although unseen by others, that would reinforce this value in my life?
7. How might this value affect my time allocations? (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)
8. How might this value influence how I spend time with others?
9. How does this value get rewarded?
10. How do we celebrate this value together?
11. How do we talk about it when people “step over a boundary” with this value?
12. What practices need to be created, removed or changed to reinforce this value?
13. What strategies need to be created, removed or changed to reinforce this value?
14. What policy needs to be created, removed or changed to reinforce this value?
15. Which one time catalytic mechanism would most dramatically display our organization’s commitment to this value?
16. How do we ensure that this value gets talked about regularly and how often should the conversation occur?
17. How do we hold peers accountable to this value?
18. What other value in the organization creates the most tension with this value?