28 Oct 3 Ways to Increase the Productivity of the Whole Church
As pastors, it’s important for us to be productive. We all have 24 hours in a day to get things done and we need to make the most of our time. But have you ever thought that as the leader of your church, your productivity is determined by more people than just you?
Now what we mean by that is that your productivity as a leader or pastor is not only the productivity of yourself and your to-do list. Your productivity actually equals the productivity of your ministry or organization. So everyone under you and their level of productivity will determine your productivity.
Our goal as a leader should be to look for an activity or behavior that can be greatly improved by your brief, focused words or actions. By applying your knowledge passion, or perspective to the people who work for you, you’re gonna make them more productive which in turn makes the whole organization more productive. So here are three quick things you can start doing this week to make everyone more productive.
The first thing is advanced planning which is where you take a small portion of your time before a project starts to put in some time so do these things-eliminate confusion, make clear expectations, set clear boundaries, and give measureable goals to whomever you are overseeing. So you are going to take the time ahead of time to plan out on paper on purpose the reason for the project.
The next type of leveraged leadership activity is imparting knowledge skills and values. Now this one might be a little more obvious to people in the church. This is where you can use things like sermons, new member’s classes, staff meeting, small group leader meeting or retreat and you can take a little bit of your time and speak to a large group of people and give them your knowledge, skills, or values. Now while this can be really important, it will be directly tied to any advanced planning that you do. So if you show up unprepared, then you are actually going to hurt the productivity of the whole team. Or if you try to impart knowledge, skills, or values in an unclear manner, it won’t have a good effect.
The last one we are going to cover is having 1-on -1’s. This can come in the form of having weekly check ins, performance reviews, and debriefs after events. So in doing this you are going to take 30 minutes of your time with whoever you delegate activities to and sit down and have weekly check ins with those people to see how things are going. Thirty minutes of your time is going to make their 40 hours that week way more productive. Then you want to have either monthly or annual performance reviews or debriefs after events. Again, you taking 30 minutes of your time is going to change the productivity of their month or their year by making.
{This is a short excerpt from one of our recent leadership videos on Leveraged Leadership from the book High Management Output}. If you would like to learn more or watch this leadership video, please click here.
