Why Your Church Needs PE

I hated P.E. I was a twig of a kid growing up, so being forced to play basketball with the jocks was always a lesson in humility. But I needed it.

And so does your church staff.

In a recent post I talked about Leadership and Ownership and asserted that taking ownership in an organization sometimes means replacing people that are hindering progress. This raised a valid question from Jeff Flowers, pastor and new Twitter friend, who commented:

"Replacing is probably the easy part. Could you give some of your insight on 'removing the people that are hindering progress'?"

Great question. The answer? P.E. Not Physical Education, mind you, but Performance Evaluations.

Simply put, if you don't have P.E. in your organization then you aren't leading well. Yes, even if your organization is a church! Scratch that... especially if your organization is a church. Why? Because what we're fighting for is more critical than any other organization on the face of the planet! That makes P.E. essential!

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about monitoring network activity, being 'big brother' to your employee's, or micro-managing every movement in the organization. I do, however, strongly believe in the power of feedback. As a leader, your job is to monitor the health of your organization and encourage those struggling to fit in to the mission and vision. If you don't have a system in place to do that, you aren't leading well.

At Chase Oaks our P.E. takes the form of a mid-year and end of year review. It's a very simple and very effective process. Quite honestly, nothing motivates me more than getting feedback from those around me on how I'm leading. The evaluation covers 2 main categories:

1. List 1 or 2 things this person has done well over the past six months. This is an extremely critical piece to any P.E. Be sure to take the time to acknowledge great work and great successes. Good managers spend the bulk of their time here because they know that a failure here will lead to poor production later... after all, why work hard if what you do never gets noticed?
   
2. List 1 or 2 things this person can work on over the next six months. This is where we have the chance to encourage growth. Most of us choose to focus on one specific area where improvement could be made, and we're careful to offer recommendations and practical suggestions based on what we've observed. For example, in a review I got last year my boss encouraged me to watch my emotions. My attitudes and emotions about what I'm doing and what the organization is doing directly impacts the way those under me view what we're doing. I need to lead emotionally. I needed that reminder.

So how does this relate to those 'hindering progress?' Simple. If we address something and don't see improvement during that 6 month cycle, we bring it up again in the next review... and if it really is a serious issue that's hindering progress then when we bring it up again we stamp a 90 day period on the issue with defined objectives that we need to see met. That's called accountability. And it's also called grace. Think about it... we give people 9 months to work on an issue; to grow. And we don't leave them in that alone. We help them. We resource them. We encourage them. But we also don't enable them. If the 90 days passes without improvement then changes are made and sometimes that change is a staffing one. (For the record, more often than not the issues we address are related to character, not competency.)

P.E. gives your church staff the opportunity to constantly push forward, and it gives every employee the opportunity to grow. After all, that's why we are here: to help people grow. As a leader, you shouldn't just concern yourself with the spiritual growth of your Sunday morning crowd, but also the spiritual and practical growth of your Monday-Friday organization.