All this week we have been in Denver for the first ever Amazing Parish Conference, and it was, well, amazing. The brain child of several Catholic lay leaders including, most notably, best selling author and business consultant Patrick Lencioni, the basic idea was to bring together parishes from across the country to share ideas and […]
Category: Team Building
Even teams made up of great players fail and fall because of bad cultures, or worse, toxic cultures. This goes for any team: sports, corporate, church. Ensuring a successful culture means taking proactive steps, and it starts at the top. Here are just a few critical ones. Ask yourself these questions: 1: Would I do […]
We spent a good part of this week with our friend Patrick Lencioni. Patrick is the founder of a leadership consulting firm, The Table Group, as well as New York Times Best Selling author of half a dozen books on leadership and management. Fortunately for us, he loves working pro-bono for not for profits like […]
This week senior staff leadership (me, Tom, Chris, Brian, and Alison) have been invited to California for a review and evaluation of how we work together as a team. The invitation comes from our friend Patrick Lencioni, founder and president of The Table Group, a management and consulting firm specializing in organizational health and executive […]
“I suppose the title of my friend Patrick Lencioni’s book (see above) came to mind because I just spent the better part of today in a meeting. It was a staff meeting, with our senior team, to discuss a reorganization of our team and some of our meetings. Now I will be the first to […]
“As part of our book roll out we have been traveling to interesting places and meeting even more interesting people. So I spent part of the week with my associate Tom, in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the invitation of author Patrick Lencioni. Patrick is the founder and president of The Table Group, a […]
“Our weekend messages, which are presented in series, are put together in a collaborative process, on an ongoing basis. We have a team, we call it the “message oval” (me, my associate Tom, and Chris, our Youth Minister). We talk about possible series and topics all the time, everyday, and from time to time read […]
“At this point I have 12 full time and 7 part time pastoral ministry staff. I suppose, for a Catholic church, we have a mid to large size staff. For Evangelical churches our size we have an incredibly small staff. All of our part time positions could easily be full time ones, and some of […]
“Not so long ago our staff was small enough that everyone reported to me. As we’ve grown we recognized the need to change that: Now, out of a staff of twenty something (full and part time positions), only a handful of people report to me directly. I have come to call them the “Strategic Oval” […]
In our upcoming book we devote a whole chapter to small groups, because that’s how important we think they are to parish life. And we acknowledge that they are a very hard sell in a Catholic setting (maybe they’re a hard sell in other settings too, I’ve never tried to sell them anywhere else). So […]
