Christian Leadership Alliance
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Encouraging the Extraordinary!
Why aren't people performing at the levels we had hoped? The answers are in defining, assessing and releasing performance.| Outcomes, Sep/Oct 2006
As we look at faith-based ministries, we're constantly confronted with a pervading lack of money and human resources. Managers and leaders anguish over this dilemma. Most of the time they need the money because they need more people power. They need talented people who can help them achieve the goals God has given them.
Leaders feel they can't afford to hire in the first place, or can't afford to hire the people with the skills really necessary to accomplish the job. Clearly, we have a talent shortage in virtually every ministry organization. Or do we?
If we worship such a big God, and these are the resources he has put into our stewardship, are we sure we don't have enough? One of our observations is that very frequently we do have enough people—often enough talented people. However, these people are not releasing their full potential.
This past year, I sat with a ministry leader wrestling with serious staffing needs, along with the pressures the organization faced because of constituent needs and opportunities they couldn't pursue for the lack of enough talented people.
As we explored the situation, I commented that they appeared to have a sizable staff for a ministry of this type and scope. "It's not the size of my staff," he explained, "but rather the performance. In contrast to the community, we cannot pay competitive wages and therefore we don't have the needed skill levels to get the job done."
"How can you tell?" I asked.
"Results," came the quick reply. "Our people cannot perform at the needed level."
Over the next several hours, we identified a laundry list of issues that would drain the productivity of any organization. The list of issues was long. But five stand out that played the largest role in reducing staff performance. Here they are:
Lack of a clear definition of performance
In too many instances I find ministry leaders intuitively feel that levels of performance are less than what they should be but are, at the same time, unclear about what the performance plumb line really looks like. In other instances, the leader is clear about performance standards but the employees responsible for delivering performance are not. Before any conversation on performance can take place, everyone has to be clear about what good performance looks like.
Look at the clarity of Paul's description of performance standards as he speaks to the Colossians: "Conduct yourself with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned, as it were, with salt, so that you may know how you should respond to each person" (Colossians 4:5-6).
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