How do you measure up with the seven S’s of leadership?

This matrix is a useful tool to evaluate the current state of the ministry and to help develop a plan for the ministry to become all that you want it to be. One of the drawbacks in a non-profit mission like YWAM, is that we don’t have the privilege of being able to hire people with all the gifts and competencies that we would like.  We simply utilise all the people that we have available. This can hinder our growth but by using this tool, we can at least map out a vision of where we want to be, and it can help us strategize to get there. I have borrowed content from whatfix.com for a structure for this article. https://whatfix.com/blog/mckinsey-7s-model/

These 7 elements can be split into hard and soft elements. Hard elements (strategy, structure, and systems) tend to be more black and white, clearly written and require the visionary leader and the more analytical implementing leaders to work together. Meetings need to be held to bring ownership for the elements of strategy, structure, and systems. They form the framework for all you do.

The soft elements (shared values, style, staff, and skills) tend to require more interpretation and need more development, training and mentoring to bring a sense of community. These elements of shared values, style, staff, and skills are vital to the success of the ministry but more to do with relationships, connections, atmosphere, and culture.

So here are the seven areas that leaders need to be thinking about in order to develop a strategic plan ahead for development.

1. Strategy

A well-crafted strategy is aligned with the other six elements of the 7-S model and is reinforced by a strong vision or mission statement.

YWAM talks a great deal about vision for the individual and for the base. The ministry may well have created a vision or mission statement that gives an overall sense of direction but often there isn’t any specific visionary goal connected. Without a smart big goal ahead, we have nothing to motivate us or aim at. Even when we have the big goal ahead, we also need a strategy to go with it. Strategy is the plan for implementation of the vision.

For instance, the big goal in a city may be ‘to reach out to the marginalised peoples and establish churches for them.’ So perhaps one of your objectives could be to see a ministry established for the homeless in your town, or to create a community development project for a certain housing estate or mobilise local churches in the area for a summer outreach each year.

If you are leading a training base, what is your overall goal? Where do you want to send graduates? Possibilities could include: to join teams or pioneer cities in the nation, to send to unreached people groups or specific nations that you are targeting. What courses do you want to establish? What staff do you need to recruit? What budget will be required? What connections do you need to make? What timeline are you looking at? How many students are you seeking to train and stay on staff? And a whole lot more questions that make up a project plan where you can see what needs to be done, when, and by whom. To create this plan, you need the partnership of the visionary dreamer and the visionary systematic implementer and at least a core group of leaders.

2. Structure

Structure refers to a clear framework for authority, responsibility, and accountability in leadership. Leaders need to know who they are accountable to, who is sending them out and what authority they have in their leadership role. Too often leaders are thrown into the deep end and are expected to swim but without the needed support some don’t make it. Within the structure it’s important to have visionary, operational, pastoral, and prophetic leadership to help in the launching and support of all the staff.

In a small project, the structure can be quite simply, you and your co-leader relating to the base leader for accountability. On a base wide project, it is vital to map out the roles and responsibilities of individuals and how they relate with one another for decision making, problem solving and planning.

3. Systems

Systems refer to the operational processes required in a ministry for smooth flowing of information, legalities, practices, and policies. Often MOU’s (memorandum of understanding) or SOP’s (standard operating procedures) can be developed in order to bring clarity for staff running the systems. When the base moves beyond the small team, the practices and policies become vital for growth.

In any base or ministry there are systems required in order to help make that ministry function and run well. This would include practices and policies in areas like finances, personnel, marketing, reporting, internal communication, staff & student application, orientation, debriefing, evaluation, police information checks or disclosure for working with children, starting new teams, holidays, training staff, ministry schedules and many more. To enable everything to function smoothly with staff knowing what to do and how to do it, systems are required.

4. Shared Values

We are very familiar in YWAM with our 18 foundational values, and these are to be shared on a regular basis to orientate new staff, especially to our YWAM culture. For us in YWAM these values have been formed from specific words of the Lord that were given to us in our history. These have become our DNA, our worldview if you like, our ways of behaviour in the mission. As a ministry you may develop a smaller set of particular values that you agree on as a team, that shapes the way you work, communicate, and relate together. Write these down and share them regularly to become values of the heart and not simply values in the bottom drawer.

5. Style of leadership

This element refers to the leadership or management style prevalent that decides the speed of vision development and the level of involvement and influence from leaders and staff. There are many leadership styles, some to be avoided, others to be encouraged. Different names are often used but here is an adapted list from the QuickBooks blog:

• Autocratic Leadership – generally wouldn’t be encouraged, but it is best served in pioneer situations where the leader is the author of vision and clearly is in the first stages of formation. We would then encourage this style to move towards a shared team style very quickly.
• Facilitative Leadership – emphasizes communication, culture, and relationships and seeks to gain consensus on a topic before making any decision. It is useful for a board of directors or volunteer groups.
• Laissez-Faire Leadership – would not be encouraged in the leadership of young inexperienced staff but if you have more senior experienced staff not needing supervision, and involved in a variety of separate projects, this style can work for a while, although doesn’t develop overall team relationships or overall vision.
• Transactional Leadership – would not often be used in mission environments where staff should already be motivated for the vision. You will find this style where rewards are given for reaching certain goals for progress. 
• Participative Leadership – values teams, peers, and collaboration. This style works well where community engagement is necessary. This style involves the staff in major decisions that affect them and gives opportunity of influence. The leadership considers all the input received and makes the decisions.
• Shared leadership – is used for leadership teams, where a diversity of gifts is present, and each leader is called upon in their specific area of anointing. So, roles and responsibilities are shared, and decisions and plans are made together. This moves us away from the one-person leadership style where they are expected to be expert in all areas, which of course isn’t possible.

6. Staff

This element represents the talent pool required, the size of the existing staff, and their motivations. It also considers how they are trained, what career path is open to them and their potential. In YWAM without the reward of financial incentive, we need to look at the sense of fulfilment, inclusion, influence, affection, and recognition they receive by being a part of the community. As we consider these areas, we will stand a greater chance of keeping our staff longer term as they find their niche, and in the language of John 15, bear much fruit.

7. Skills

Skills refer to the abilities of staff to complete tasks. Different roles will require different skill sets and so to have these documented is helpful in the recruiting process. As was said earlier, this is the drawback in a non-profit organisation like YWAM where you don’t have the ability to pay salaries for the kind of person you really need. Our approach must be to pray these people and gifts into the mission. Of course, we can also train staff ‘on the job’ and with our many training courses in YWAM, this has been very effective around the world.

Application of the tool:

There are a few different ways to map out the 7S Framework, but one common method is to create a matrix or table with the seven elements of the framework listed in a column and the sub-elements or specific areas of focus listed along the top row. For example:

As you go through the seven S’s, you can identify the elements of the model that need refining, realigning, or creating. It may be best to draw some senior leaders in to help participate in the process and bring some wise counsel for the way forward.

The findings from working through this process may include: a positive sense of the ministry functioning on all cylinders and doing well, or it may highlight areas of need like the strategy, structure or systems lacking implementation or not existing at all. It may be that shared values aren’t being shared and the culture has taken a dip and staff are discouraged. Or a certain skill is missing or there are too many staff with the same skill and therefore not enough of the same role to go around. YWAM is a short-term mission and so there may be a high turnover – this has to be checked to make sure staff aren’t leaving for the wrong reasons.

I hope you can bring your leaders together and work through this process and see clearly how the ministry is developing or requires help.

Until next month
Stephe

Which keys can unlock the impact your life or team has on others?

Patrick Winston, a respected MIT professor from the USA said, “Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order.”

What do you think of that statement?

In the west, we tend to be focused on our identity, our success, our legacy, and we enter the comparison game, reaching our goals, and making a name for ourselves. In contrast, Hebrews 11 would tell us that the Christian life isn’t about success – all these heroes of faith mentioned didn’t receive the promise, were cut off before their time and suffered greatly. David Benner, in his book, ‘the gift of being yourself’ writes, “to get a sense of your identity, notice how you introduce yourself to others.  Perhaps you describe yourself in terms of your work, your accomplishments, your family, or your beliefs.  Each in turn gives us a snapshot of your identity.” The men and women in Hebrews 11 died for their belief that their life was wrapped up with Christ. They had a sense of calling but didn’t get to live it out. So, they were ‘successful’ without seeing the fruit of their passion.

Let me go back to Professor Winston’s belief and add a prior step. As followers of Jesus, we believe that God has a calling on our lives. Sometimes that is an individual calling like Mary the mother of Jesus or Esther who saved her people from destruction. Many though have a calling that becomes corporate. Moses received a call to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and the whole community heard the call and adopted it as their own. David had a call to create a 24/7 prayer and worship ministry, and in the process, he recruited musicians and singers and song writers. Jesus had a call to bring good news to the poor, to release captives, to enable the blind to see, to free the oppressed and proclaim the time of the Lord’s favour has come. His apostles took on that call and lived it out. Paul had a call to preach to the gentiles and mobilised many in his church planting efforts.  Each one grew in their passion, communicated the vision and were strategic in the steps they took.

• Having passion for a God given calling
• The ability to communicate that calling     
• Creating quality strategy and steps to see that calling implemented

Let’s think about these three steps:

Calling: We can have a general sense of our calling at an early age. We are given the examples of Samuel who was to be mentored as a prophet by Eli, and David anointed as king in his teens or Josiah who became king as a boy and Mary in her teens to be the mother of Jesus. For many the life calling doesn’t take real shape, or the release doesn’t come until well into our 20’s and 30’s. There is a lot of growing up to do, of maturing and grasping an understanding of our gifts, abilities, and desires. It’s my belief that we can push young people into their calling too young. Youth have a need to explore experiences as wide as possible and to have a time of discovery of who they are and how they can best invest themselves as followers of Jesus.

I was 38 when I clarified the calling in my life to develop leaders.  I had been involved in many leadership roles up until that time, been enthused by many visions and recognised that I loved to create employment for others and see them take on responsibility. But it wasn’t until I had a conversation with a leader from navigators that the call to leadership development clicked. This has been my passion for the last 30 years. It might have been a conversation that clarified my call but it has taken many years to develop in the ability to communicate that call to others.

Communication: Depending on your personality, you approach communication differently. The introvert perfectionist may want to be very prepared and script every word down on paper and then continue to tweak it over the days leading up to the presentation. The extrovert however, may simply go over the thoughts and concepts in their mind and trust a flow of words will come at the appropriate time. Others will create a mix of both careful preparation and spontaneous inspiration. If you speak a lot, you will have developed an approach that works for you. The question though is this: How well does your approach communicate to your audience and are you sharing it in the way they best receive it and can most easily process and apply it?

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke we see Jesus speaking in parables and using many metaphors to get his message across. This way of speaking doesn’t generally come spontaneously but requires thought and preparation. If the aim of your communication is to bring about a response in the person or people you are speaking to, then it is vital to  prepare and find out how much your audience knows and something about their cultures, so you can really connect with them.

In our age of social media and digital communication, there is a growing need of expertise in sharing your ideas in writing and visuals that grabs people’s attention and ignites something in their hearts.  As we move on to bring presentations verbally, along with visuals on PowerPoint and hands on activities we are able to move concepts from people’s heads to their hearts.

This last week, my wife and I were speaking at a YWAM leaders conference. The focus of our messages was to encourage change, broader vision and greater collaboration together. As we prayed in preparation, we sensed we should create activities in stations for leaders to contemplate alone and others to process together. The focus of these was spiritual growth in ourselves and in our teams. The next session we shared ideas of possible vision development and moved them into prayer and group activities to encourage dreaming exercises for what God has in store for the whole nation.  The next step is moving to a clear strategy, and this becomes vital to see the transformation they desire.

Strategy: We can have a great calling, an ability to communicate that calling but the way we seek to put that into practice has to be well thought through. Moses’ strategy was to appeal to pharaoh to ‘let his people go’ and then stand back and watch what God was going to do! It took bravery and perseverance. David’s strategy was to create a tabernacle or meeting place, provide resources in many psalms he had written, recruit musicians and singers and encourage them to worship, compose songs and create an atmosphere for people to meet Jesus. Jesus’ strategy was to preach and heal in the villages all around Israel and train up a team of men and women to follow in his footsteps.

The big visions connected to our call require the best ideas of how we approach those visions, how we recruit people into those visions and how we create steps to implement and bring those visions to reality. This takes a commitment to research, to get feedback from others and to pray and seek God as to the best way forward. It takes time and careful planning but reaps great rewards when all three steps are prepared well.

Until next month

Stephe

Where are you going?

At the end of every year, we have an evaluation time as a couple.  We look at what we have been doing, how effective it was, what fruit was produced, how fulfilling it has been and on the basis of these questions decide what needs to be changed.  A couple of years ago, we were aware that we were being spread too thin and were getting tired.  The challenge was that the ministry was being fruitful, so we said, ‘Lord we are tired but you are able to give more grace, so we receive from you the energy and vitality we need.’

 

This last year we went through an evaluation but this time with others who helped us to recognise that pruning was necessary.  To prune you need to discern what the Lord is saying to you with regards to:  Where you are going, what your assignment is for this season and what he wants you to accomplish.  You may have written all kinds of direction statements over the years but they need to be revisited and reviewed on a regular basis.  Everyone calls these statements different names – mission, vision, purpose, passion, etc.  So whatever you call them, now is the time to take a re-look at what you have written and do some tweaking, or re-writing to come into alignment with what God is presently saying to you.

 

I have come up with my own names for specific types of direction statement, so here are three aspects of our direction – passion, strategy and target.  Each of these need reviewing but the passion statement is usually much longer lasting.  The target statement may change every few years unless there is a very long range target and the strategy statement will change as your approach to reaching your passion is re-shaped in order for you to become more fruitful.

 

Passion Statement: What do you do that is life giving?  What do you dream about accomplishing?  What brings a sense of fulfilment?  What makes you feel like you are living a life of abundance?  Passion comes from our heart.  When you are wholehearted about something, you give it your total focus.  If you have a heart for something, you are going to be committed to it.  What is that heart passion for you?

 

Paul talked about his ‘one thing’.  “I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.”  Paul was a church planter and reached out in evangelism to the gentiles and those who knew nothing of the gospel.  He laid a foundation for the gospel in the major cities and established churches and elders and took them through basic discipleship.  In his later life, his ‘one thing’ became his writing and passing on teaching and wisdom to the churches he had planted.  Two thousand years later, we still benefit from those writings.  He would have had no idea how influential he was going to be throughout history.

 

King David is seen even as a young boy writing songs and loving to worship his God.  He is musical and expressive in his words.  We may be impressed with his victory over Goliath and the many battles he won and how he united Israel, but actually we benefit the greatest from his psalms and his heart after God in worship.  He writes, “The one thing I ask of the Lord — the thing I seek most— is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord ’s perfections and meditating in his Temple.”  His passion was to worship and inspire others to do so and multitudes have been drawn into God’s presence through his writing.  From his passion for music, he commissioned singers and musicians to write and play music for the Lord.  He has inspired generations since then, to worship God from the heart and be free to express themselves, just as he did personally as he danced before the Lord as the ark of the Lord was brought into Jerusalem.

 

Target statement: We all need something to look forward to in the coming months, something to focus our attention on that will motivate us and keep us on track.  A target is a goal, a mile stone, a marker on the journey towards our passion.  Our targets will change and grow, whereas our passion remains constant. But without a target we can lose heart.

 

Paul’s primary target was to see churches established in the major cities around the Mediterranean.  Another target was to keep in touch with the leaders he was discipling and the churches he had planted, in order to see them grow and develop.  We don’t have access to any specific goals that Paul had, but I am sure he had some, being a high task visionary leader.

 

Once David had united Israel, he had a target to establish what was called ‘David’s tabernacle’ – a tent of meeting, a tent of worship where musicians, worship leaders and writers were worshipping the Lord day and night – the first 24/7 movement.  Another target was to build a temple for the people of Israel to worship God.  Having had the go ahead from the prophet, he began drawing up the plans and gathering resources.  However, the prophet Nathan came back to him with the news that the Lord wanted David’s son to be the builder and so David’s job became one of preparation for the building rather than build it himself.

 

Strategy statement: How are we going to see our passion realised, and our targets or goals reached?  What methods, activities, ministries, approaches will we use?   Strategies will change but the passion will remain.  There are many ways of getting from A to B.  Some will be better than others and often it’s a matter of trial and error to find out the best strategies to employ.

 

Paul began with a strategy of missionary journeys.  He and Barnabas teamed up and worked together very well, until they had the disagreement over John Mark.  The outcome though was multiplication and more journeys were the result.  He often seemed to start in a city with miracle workshops which drew crowds and enabled him to preach to large audiences.  His personality was such that he made a grand entrance, preached with the power of God being evident and everyone watched, listened and responded.  Some with a heart to believe, others with anger and persecution.  Another strategy  was to leave team members in the newly planted churches to bring stability and teaching.  At times he established training schools like the DTS to create strong foundations in the believers.  A strategy that emerged  was writing letters that could be re-read many times over to remind them of foundational truths and basic doctrine.

 

David’s strategy was to create a worship ministry.  He set up auditions for leadership roles in worship leading, song writing and playing all kinds of instruments. I am sure they began a music academy to have musicians learning and training to take their place in the tabernacle schedule.

He also established the priesthood and solidified the calendar of events, celebrations and sacrifices that brought the Israelites together as a nation.

 

We are used to the idea of strategizing for ministry development but somehow don’t connect strategy with developing relationally.  We have desires for growth in our relationships and personal development but for some reason don’t work this through using the tools we use for ministry.  So for example, in my relational roles of father, husband or friend, I may want to be grow in these roles but somehow just hope that I will grow by default.  If we have plateaued in these roles it is going to take energy and motivation to renew a fresh passion and some clear goals and  strategies to move forward.

 

So just as we can have our ‘one thing’, or our passion for ministry, we can also have our ‘one thing’ or passion for our relationships.  For instance, I will be a father all my life – it’s an important role I fulfil.  So I can ask myself – 1. What is my passion as a father?  Who do I want to be as a father?  What purpose do I want to see fulfilled as a father?

2. What is a target that I can work towards over the next season of time (1-2-5 years)? What is something I really want to see happen? Some change that will impact the lives of our family?  A rhythm of life and communication?  An intimacy of relationship?
3. What strategies will I apply? How will I get to accomplish my desires? What can I do to see development take place?  In what ways can I reach my goals?

 

Take some time to pray about the direction of your life in ministry and your relationships and find a fresh focus and anointing from the Lord as you do.

 

Until next month

 

Stephe

 

 

 

P.S. Stephe’s examples of ministry and relational direction statements:

Passion (since 1993):

• Develop leaders worldwide who will live, love and lead like Jesus

 

Target

• Establish LDC’s in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe over the next two years.
• Pioneer b2b’s in 5 regions over the next 5 years.

 

Strategies

• Develop leaders for LDC’s & b2b’s through staff training
• Encourage the development of leader learning communities in every region of the world