What tips do you have to make sure a project is completed successfully?
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There are signs of encouragement and life returning to the economy. The unemployment rate is a factor that usually lags behind other indicators, so that’s still very discouraging, but there are hints of better days to come. How should we react during the waiting times like this? Let me offer a few suggestions:
The list of top small workplaces for 2008 is challenging and inspiring, even convicting at times. Some of the practices of these companies address issues our organization is experiencing and that was reflected in the staff’s evaluation of my leadership.
With the process of inviting our staff to evaluate my leadership two things needing improvement in our organization were clearly evident. My current thought is that these two things apply to every organization that desires to function effectively as a team.
I learned something about leadership in the process of inviting our staff to evaluate my leadership. You must treat the people you manage differently.
If you are following this series you know that I invited our staff to evaluate my leadership. As I said in Part 1 of this follow-up series, we gathered for lunch after a regularly scheduled staff meeting. Essentially the luncheon was to accomplish three things.
This is a follow up to my post about inviting my team to evaluate me. Here are some of their comments. (Just FYI, I’m not hiding any of the bad answers, but I am condensing some of the similar or repeated comments into one comment. I feel bad sharing the good stuff too, like I am bragging or something, but I guess to be fair I must.)
That makes me wonder a few things. What is the advantage of telling about a loss? Is it so they can assure people they are okay financially? Is it to get press attention? Is it the modern idea of being upfront, honest and open with people, even if it’s not necessarily good news? Is this unique to Belk or is this a mindset of other organizations today, including churches? Personally I like this new approach. Do you?
Last month I posted about my invitation to our staff to evaluate my performance as a leader. You can read that post HERE. I promised to do a follow up post with their input. This will actually end up being more than one post, because of length.
We started, as most church plants and new organizations do, with loose rules and fun times. There were just a few of us and we didn’t need much in the way of structured systems. In fact, some of us were running from the strict structure of larger environments. What we have realized, as we’ve gotten to be one of those larger environments, is that we need more structure in place in order for growth to continue. We need some rules to help level the playing field among staff and volunteers, making things fair for everyone, improve accountability, and insure we are good stewards of the resources entrusted to us. We need to use words like policies and manuals and enforce office hours and do staff evaluations and offer constructive criticism and keep an organizational calendar and….well, you get the idea. We have to put on our big boy clothes and be a real organization.