“No man is an island,” “the wisdom of the crowd is greater than the lone genius,” etc – We’ve all heard our fair share of quotes and thoughts about working as a team. However, at my organization, we use a collaborative management style and work closely with our colleagues across departments. In an attempt to learn more about working in a team-centered environment and improve my own management skills, I read Patrick Lencioni’s“The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”
Lencioni lists the five dysfunctions as:
Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results
Each of these dysfunctions leads to sub-optimal results. For instance, a lack of trust prevents conflict, which in turn prevents team commitment to decisions, where no-one is held accountable and results are never measured for achievement. He uses a simple pyramid to illustrate the concept.
His writing is easy to read as he couches his ideas and principles in a story format. This particular story focuses on a leadership team with a new leader who is attempting to turn around their organization. She takes her team to multiple offsite meetings to focus explicitly on teamwork.
As the book progresses you see the personalities of each of the characters and begin to wonder which one of them is you. As I read, I definitely found myself in the situation and thought “geez – I’ve got to be a real pain sometimes!” However, it’s because of the fact that we have a level of trust on our own leadership team that I am able to be myself and provide the critical input that myself and others were hired to provide.
If you’re someone looking to lead a team and don’t have a ton of time on your hand, I’d strongly recommend grabbing a copy of this one. I’m a really, really, slow reader and was able to finish this one in about 4 hours.
In the online marketing and advertising world, our process is what is commonly referred to as a “sales funnel.” At every point in the process, you can expect to lose some of your customers as you push them through to a conversion or sale. For GMO, we are striving to turn the process into a column. To have a greater kingdom impact, we work diligently to achieve our mission to “Share. Grow. Connect.” A greater kingdom impact would be a larger number of seekers engaged with all three pieces of our mission.
We’ve demonstrated a very successful model of sharing the gospel throughout the past 11 years. We have over 6,000 volunteer Online Missionaries serving as online disciplers for our seekers. We provide them the opportunity to download a bible, visit discipleship websites, share content with their social networks and become reproducing disciples themselves. Over the next couple of years we will be working to implement the third leg of the mission of connecting our seekers to local Christian community.
To do this, we are undertaking 3 strategies by asking the following questions: 1.) What languages do people use on the Internet? 2.)What is the most culturally relevant experience we can provide our seekers in order to shepherd them well? And 3.) How can we connect them to the local body? To achieve these strategies we are engaging with leading cultural experts and organizations “on the ground” throughout the world to serve our precious seekers God has entrusted to us.
We believe that with a proven model for sharing and growing our seekers, and a strategic focus on providing the most culturally relevant experience and connecting them to a local Christian community, GMO will remain one of the best kingdom investment opportunities that exists.
It’s important to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) regardless of the type of your organization. A KPI is a metric you measure to ensure that your activities are leading you toward achieving your vision. In ministry, it’s even more important to do this as you are stewarding resources that people have entrusted to you to achieve a vision that aligns with their heart.
For most ministries, the goal is to see lives transformed by Jesus Christ. For GMO, we hope that seekers’ lives will be transformed by being presented the Gospel, indicating they’ve prayed to receive Christ, connecting with an online missionary to be discipled, interacting with discipleship content, and eventually connecting to local Christian community. This leads us to the natural KPI’s of Gospel Visits, Indicated Decisions, Discipleship Engagements, and On the Ground Connections.
Over the past eleven years, we’ve seen several shifts in technology and marketing. For instance, when we began most of our seekers were using a desktop computer and typing in a search query in Google as they sought to answer deep questions about themselves, the universe, and their place within it. As we fast-forward to the present day, people are accessing the Internet from any screen – their mobile device, tablets, laptops, televisions, and watches! In addition, we’ve learned that in order to reach the world, we have to interrupt a person’s day by using display advertising on websites as opposed to search queries only.
These changes in technology and marketing have affected how people use technology. Consider yourself and how you engage with content online – you probably are consuming massive amounts of information in short pieces, rather than taking in a lot at one time. Also, when you consider “the world,” there are major chasms between the technology available in the developing world and the developed world. To best serve all device types and capabilities, GMO utilizes the “lightest” websites possible. This is based on the premise that if a website cannot load on a device because it has too many graphics, etc, then we will have lost an opportunity to share the gospel with that seeker.
In 2013 GMO adopted a strategy of “opening the flood gates,” driving for the lowest cost per gospel visit while we work to reach everyone on Earth multiple times with the gospel. After following this approach for approximately 18 months, our leadership team conducted a review of the strategy and determined that we could make a bigger kingdom impact by adopting a more balanced approach.
During this time, we also began tightening the definition around some of our main metrics, such as “gospel visits,” “indicated decisions,” and “new contacts.” In order for GMO to confirm that we have shared the gospel, we have placed a code at the bottom of the web page, which tells us that the gospel has been presented only when it renders on a seeker’s device as opposed to when it starts to download. When a person indicates a decision for Christ, we are not assuming a salvation. What we are assuming is that the seeker has indicated they are beginning their journey with Christ. And finally, for an individual to count as a new contact, they must submit a legitimate form through one of our websites. Through technology, we have been able to eliminate “bad submissions” from our numbers, which has helped provide our 6,000 volunteer Online Missionaries with “warmer” leads for discipling.
If you were to review our metrics over the past three years, what would you see? At first, there would be a decline in overall gospel visits, indicated decisions, and discipleship numbers. But upon further review, you would see that with fewer dollars, GMO has been able to stretch those funds for a greater kingdom impact than before. The proof is that with spending fewer dollars, we are seeing a higher percentage of Indicated Decisions, Discipleship Engagements, and New Contacts. This means that each gospel visit is netting a higher amount of engagement downstream.
Since 2004 GMO has reached nearly 1.5 billion Gospel Presentations
The name Peter Drucker is synonymous with management, having written numerous books on management, politics, society, and economics over his storied career. I picked up a copy of The Essential Drucker which is a compilation of 60 years’ worth of his writing. It’s neatly divided into three sections: Management, The Individual, and Society.
In the Management portion of the book he speaks to the role of entrepreneurship and innovation for the enterprise. One of the best nuggets I’ve seen play out time and time again in my own work is “In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship.” In a technology-based organization we are always striving to discover the latest and greatest, but are always constrained by the existing successful model.
In the Individual section he speaks to how an individual can become an effective executive. One of the most important things I’ve learned from this portion is to ask those who report to me ‘What are the contributions for which this organization and I, your superior, should hold you accountable? What should we expect of you? What is the best utilization of your knowledge and your ability?’ Then they write out a management letter to let me know where they see themselves contributing the most. Drucker points out that often, where the manager sees the worker contributing and where the worker sees themselves contributing are often quite different. The point of the exercise is to open up better lines of communication between managers and their workers.
In his writing on Society, he traces the transition from the farmer to the industrial worker to the knowledge worker and how each have disrupted the social fabric for a time. The rise of the knowledge worker has led to an increase in education, placing it at the center of society, a redefining of what it means to be “educated,” and an increase in competitiveness. This book is a fascinating read and I would highly encourage reading it if you don’t have the time to pick up Drucker’s numerous volumes.
I’ve been very fortunate over my career to lead teams that produce results. Often you’ll find me spending time thinking about how to better lead them to continue achieving, and hopefully surpassing our agreed upon goals. Much of the success is based on focusing on people and process. On people – hire competent people, provide an environment for them to succeed and get out of their way.
In this post, I want to focus more on the process. I work at an organization that runs Internet advertisements on a global scale 24/7. Nearly 500,000 people land on our web pages in 26 languages on a daily basis. We are data driven which means that we have to take time to see what the data is telling us, think about what changes we can make to increase performance, and then implement them.
Let’s talk then about how to give ourselves the space to do this in the midst of all the other “work” that has to be done. It’s starts with how you plan out your week. I divide my week into two parts: “operations” and “strategy.” Operations is managing today, today, while strategy is planning for tomorrow, today. Think of it like this: you’ve got to spend time working “in” the business and time working “on” the business.
With data coming in over the weekend, I like to spend Monday and Tuesday focused internally. This means that my meetings are focused vertically inside the organization. On Mondays, I review what is happening with those who report directly to me. On Tuesdays, I meet laterally with those on the leadership team and with my leader.
I try to hold off on external meetings and conversations for the first two days of the week and push them to Wednesday and Thursday. I love Wednesday’s and Thursday’s because those are the days we dream. I’ll often meet with different people throughout the organization asking “what if” questions. You’ll see me writing on the writeable walls and brainstorming about new opportunities.
On Friday’s, I like to focus a little more on myself, the manager. I like to spend Friday mornings focused on reviewing our strategic projects, and my calendar for the next week. I’ll look at the meetings coming up and make sure that I’ve got my ducks in a row before they arrive so that they are as fruitful as possible. Then, we have Friday afternoons. This is when I spend some thinking time by myself. I’ll read some articles on leadership, strategy, technology, innovation, etc and see if there are a few opportunities for me to implement what I’m reading. It’s also a way not to sprint into the weekend, but to ease into it.
Businesses and organizations are in one of four cycles: Accelerating, Booming, Decelerating, or Tanking. Regardless of where they are, they search for ways to continue growing, get out of ruts, or prevent having to close the doors. They do not lack vision, but often lack a management process that allows them to see where they should be spending their time and resources. The Paterson StratOp Process provides exactly that. It is a six-step process consisting of perspective, planning, action, structure, management, and renewal.
StratOp walks leadership teams through a three-day process where we focus on perspective, planning, and action. Upon the conclusion of the three-day session, we break into teams that develop detailed action plans. Approximately one month later, the teams present their plans to the leader and StratOp facilitator where we work to ensure they are logical and feasible. Afterword, the facilitator and leader discuss the structure of the team to ensure that all of the members are poised to succeed in their roles.
Once structure is confirmed and a launch date is set, teams begin working their plans. StratOp reinforces the adage: “Plan your work. Work your plan. Your plan will work.” This is where StratOp truly separates itself from any other strategic planning process- it equips your team with a new strategic operating and management system. This system allows you to set goals, measure outcomes, and adapt to emerging trends.
StratOp is not a process to take lightly and requires dedication to trusting the process. If you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself wanting to do things outside your normal scope of business…which is why StratOp is so important. It keeps you focused on “what’s important now” so you can move the chains down the field.
A great tool to help you find your purpose is a LifePlan. A LifePlan will develop the perspective of how you got where you are, plan for where you want to go, and begin taking the next steps for how you will get there. It focuses on the five domains of an individual: Personal, Family, Vocation, Faith, and Community.
During the LifePlan, we help you assess your talents, passions, and heart– discerning your life purpose and what type of future you want to create for yourself. When completed, you will have the necessary tools to filter career decisions, educational opportunities, and relationships to become truer to who you are and want to be. The process takes two full days, and when completed you are given a hard and electronic copy of a LifePlan manual.
The people who complete LifePlans are usually those looking at their next step in life:
-Baby Boomers looking to have a meaningful life in retirement
-Recent college grads hoping to make a career choice
-High school juniors and seniors trying to pick a college
-Employers pouring into their people as part of their professional development.
LifePlan provides one of the most important aspects to life that anyone (people or organizations) desire — clarity. LifePlan participants leave the process knowing who they are, what they’re meant to do, and what they need to start working on to get there.
If you are needing a little clarity about the next phase of your life, contact me today.
