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 us.
Together we took a careful, thoughtful, and often painful look at our organizational health, when it comes to our leadership team. One of the great values Pat emphasizes is clarity when it comes to leading our parish. To establish and maintain organizational clarity it is important to ask and answer the following questions:
Question #1: Why do we exist?
This is the organization’s core purpose, beyond making money.
Question #2: How do we behave?
This is about the limits of diversity that can exist within the organization – the core values that all employees must share to thrive.
Question #3: What do we do?
This is a simple statement that defines the organization’s business.
Question #4: How will we succeed ?
These are the anchors that define the strategy of the organization.
Question #5: What is most important – right now.
This is the organization’s rallying cry and over-arching objectives that are shared in a solid way across the leadership team.
Question #6: Who must do what?
This is the role of each leader in achieving those objectives.
We felt good we could all immediately answer question #1 consistently. We had to discuss #2 before we were all on exactly the same page with our answer. #3 and #6 were actually easy for us. #4 and #6 are questions we’re still answering.
The faster, clearer, and easier you can answer these questions, the healthier and probably more productive your team is going to be. We will be working on this until we get it down cold, and then the exercise becomes driving the answers through the whole organization, until everyone can answer with ease, including volunteers and parishioners themselves.
We’ll let you know.
