Remember the last time you sat down to do a jigsaw puzzle? The work proceeds in two basic steps. First, you put the edges together. Finding all of the little pieces with straight edges is the easiest way to begin. As you piece together the top and bottom and sides, the puzzle is framed up within a relatively short period of time.
The second part of the process is now ready to begin, because you have defined the basic shape and outline of the puzzle. Before building the frame, it would have been exceedingly difficult to put many of the middle pieces together. But now, all of those elusive jigsaw shapes and unclear image fragments have perspective and boundaries.
Even though the frame makes the puzzle-building project easier, more work remains. You pick up awkward shape after awkward shape, twisting and turning them and turning again, until you get just the right fit and-snap-the image develops, one piece at a time. After a long journey that may take days or even months, the final image emerges.
Articulating your church’s vision is like working on a jigsaw puzzle.
Auxano co-founder Will Mancini developed the Vision Frame concept to show you how to articulate your vision the same way you would build a puzzle: in two basic steps.
This SUMS Remix will introduce the Vision Frame, guiding you to first think about the four outer edges – the components of your church’s identity that frame everything else you do. These edges anchor the second part of the process (a future SUMS Remix), which involves the direction of living and articulating the dynamic vision of your Church Unique through the daily work of turning and twisting the pieces of the organization. The edges of the frame are definitive, but the middle of the puzzle is dynamic. The fixed nature of step one, building the frame, anchors the fluid nature of step two, where your vision picture slowly develops into the better intermediate future God has entrusted to you.
THE QUICK SUMMARY – The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are.
In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.
Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent, and complete, when its management, operations, and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion, and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave.
Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health complete with stories, tips, and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way, one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION – Values: Why are we doing it?
A church without values is like a river without banks – just a large puddle. It is missing an opportunity for white-water movement. As with any organization, your church has a set of shared motives, or values, underneath the surface of everyday activity. The problem is that they stay weak because they are unidentified and unharnessed in guiding the future.
The role of the leader is to identify the most important values and pull them above the waterline of people’s perception. Once they are in clear view, the leader can nurture their development, enabling the church to do more of what it does best. Once your people know and own the values, it’s like creating the banks of a river to channel energy and momentum.
As you clarify your deeply held values, they become tools for shaping culture only to the extent that they are captured and carried.
If an organization is intolerant of everything it will stand for nothing.
The importance of creating clarity and enabling a company to become healthy cannot be overstated. More than anything else, values are critical because they define a company’s personality. They provide employees with clarity about how to behave, which reduces the need for inefficient and demoralizing micromanagement.
That alone makes values worthwhile. But beyond that, an organization that has properly identified its values and adheres to them will naturally attract the right employees and repel the wrong ones. This makes recruiting exponentially easier and more effective, and it drastically reduces turnover.
An important key to identifying the right, small set of behavioral values is understanding that there are different kinds of values. Among these, core values are by far the most important, and must not be confused with others.
Core values are the few – just two or three – behavioral traits that are inherent in an organization. Core values lie at the heart of the organization’s identity, do not change over time, and must already exist. In other words, they cannot be contrived.
An organization knows that it has identified its core values correctly when it will allow itself to be punished for living those values and when it accepts the fact that employees will sometimes take those values too far. Core values are not a matter of convenience. They cannot be extracted from an organization anymore than a human being’s conscience can be extracted from his or her person. As a result, they should be used to guide every aspect of an organization, from hiring and firing to strategy and performance management.
Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage
A NEXT STEP
Values Defined
Values are the motivational flame of the church. They are the shared convictions that guide your actions and reveal your strengths. Values answer, “Why do we do what we do at our church?” They are springboards for daily action and filters for decision-making. Values represent the conscience of the organization. They distinguish your philosophy of ministry and shape your culture and ethos.
While values are a leadership tool like the mission, they are not expressed verbally everywhere and all the time. Therefore, people coming to church will encounter the atmosphere that is shaped by values before they hear the values themselves. Ideally, values will define the experience for an attender before they are a conscious thought. Values are “what Joe feels” at the church.
Values Reminders
- Anchor your values in reality (actual vs. aspirational is 3:1)
- Consider not “what we do” but “what characterizes everything we do”
- Remember “a river without banks is just a large puddle”
- Avoid ideas of individual spiritual growth and think “organizational glue”
- Do the organizational “checkbook test” – prove the value with church finances
- Capture uniqueness and personality, be distinct
- Think essence not event
- Articulate at four levels: name, definition, “demonstrated by” statements, and scriptural support
Gather the team and ask this question: If a new guest was to report back after six months of consistent worship attendance, what would they saw we truly value based on their experience and observation? How does this influence our current values language or inspire us to create new values?
Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 115-2, released March 2019
Part of a weekly series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader
Regular daily reading of books is an important part of my life. It even extends to my vocation, where as Vision Room Curator for Auxano I am responsible for publishing SUMS Remix, a biweekly book “excerpt” for church leaders. Each Wednesday on 27gen I will be taking a look back at previous issues of SUMS Remix and publishing an excerpt.
27gen.com 