Issue No. 283 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights the amazing wisdom from the dean of church consultants, Lyle Schaller, along with his pithy rules for church leadership. Plus, this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Lyle Schaller Sifted
Over two million copies of books authored by the father of church leadership, Lyle Schaller, have been published since 1965. “The dean of church consultants” has authored or edited 96 books to help pastors, church and denominational leaders, and church board members. (That's not a typo: 96 books!)
Good news! You don't have to read all 96 books to benefit from this storied thinker. Warren Bird, editor and compiler of this jam-packed toolbox, has sifted Schaller's wisdom into just 159 page-turning insights (plus appendices). My job today: sifting the sifter! Yikes.
Bird is the Director of Research and Intellectual Capital for Leadership Network and has collaboratively authored or co-authored 25 books, including this gem: Wisdom from Lyle E. Schaller: The Elder Statesman of Church Leadership. When I saw the title and the author, I salivated and—trust me—it's a leadership feast you'll devour.
Warren Bird says that there are 10 ways Lyle Schaller will change your ministry. Here are just three:
--“Give you hope that you can be an effective leader and that the best is yet to come for your congregation.”
--“Help you shift your focus from teaching to learning.”
--“Expose you to multiple choices for various decisions where you think you have only one or two options.”
One leader called Schaller a “precursor to Twitter.” He added, “Schaller could always deliver profound ideas and predictions in 140 characters or less.”
Example: On the question (one of 25 big issue chapters) of “How Do I Build on the Strengths of a Large Church?” Schaller tweets:
--“The day of the generalist has been replaced by the demand for specialists.”
--“To grow beyond 700 in average worship attendance usually requires a new rule book for a new staff configuration.”
--“One facet is the shift from 'doing it' to 'making it happen.'”
“More important is the shift from
staffing to perpetuate yesterday to
staffing to create new tomorrows.”
The book has two parts. Part One introduces “America's best-known parish consultant,” with insights from Fred Smith, Bob Buford, Carl George, Chuck Smith Jr., Carol Childress, Mark Sweeney and others.
Most readers will jump immediately into the tempting second section that spotlights 25 tough questions, sifted from Schaller's three million words. Most chapters run about five pages and begin with an in-the-trenches story from a pastor helped by Schaller's books or consultations. Example:
Chapter 5: How Should I Approach My First Year in a Pastorate?
Chapter 6: How Do I Follow a Long-Term Pastor?
Chapter 7: What Are the Most Important Staffing Mistakes to Avoid?
Chapter 12: How Do I Build on the Strengths of a Very Large Church? (story from Rick Warren)
Chapter 16: What Are the Land Mines to Avoid in a Merger?
Chapter 19: What Are the Most Important Strategies for Change?
Chapter 21: How Can Leaders Create Dissatisfaction With the Status Quo?
Chapter 24: What's the Biggest Issue When a Church Thinks About Relocating (story from Randy Pope)
Chapter 25: Should Our Church Become Multisite?
Chapter 29: When Do I Know It's Time to Resign?
Schaller has been called “George Gallup without the numbers.” Others compare him to Peter Drucker. Thankfully, Warren Bird has done the hard work for us—sifting Schaller's wisdom:
--When changes are made when following a long-term leader, “A common result of this changing of the guard is the creating of the AAOEL group. ...The initials of this informal, ad hoc, unrecognized group stand for alienated, angry, older ex-leaders.”
--“The first trait you're looking for in staff is character above skill.”
--“As a general rule, the part-time specialist is more productive and requires less supervision than the full-time generalist.”
--Make “a distinction between hiring staff to do ministry and choosing staff who focus on challenging, motivating, enlisting, training, placing, nurturing and supporting volunteers.”
In my recent review of Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life, I mentioned that Donald Rumsfeld listed over 400 rules in his 30-page appendix. By my count, Schaller's work exceeds that number. Here are some of his rules—and they're not just for church leaders. All leaders and managers will learn from his pithy wisdom:
--“The person who is discontented with the status quo in any institution or organization has five choices.” His fifth option: “Go out and create the new.”
--“Whoever frames the issues influences how people will respond.”
--“Planned change always begins with discontent with the status quo.”
“One of the most difficult tasks in this world
is to enlist support for change
when everyone is contented
with the status quo.”
--“Today few pastors can depend on ordination, title, and office as sources of authority. Today authority must be earned . . . by vision, competence, performance, skill, character, knowledge, creativity, hard work, wisdom, productivity, initiative, and verbal skills.”
Bird's easy-reading short chapters feature four succinct sections: The Story, The Sayings, The Summary, The Sources.
Warning! “The Sources” notes prompted me to buy another Schaller book. The summaries are short and sweet: "Wanted: The most serious shortage in our society is for skilled transformational leaders who possess the capability to initiate planned change from within an organization.”
On my Top Books Scale of one to five (5 = most pages underlined), this is a five. Schaller's phraseology is still fresh:
--“the awkward-size church”
--churches that are “too large for the grapevine to be a reliable communication channel”
--and for his frequent reminder to churches that “no two are exactly alike,” he adds,
“Act your size!”
In my first out-of-seminary job with a regional denomination, I savored the first and every issue of The Parish Paper, then written by Schaller. I read his early books. Now, with a growing number of local church clients, I'm revisiting Schaller's wisdom again.
I have 50 to 100 more underlined insights from this book—but it's closing time. So here are two options:
1) Read and learn from this book yourself.
2) And/or give it to your pastor or church board members. (They will thank you profusely!)
To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for: Wisdom from Lyle E. Schaller: The Elder Statesman of Church Leadership, by Warren Bird.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Schaller notes the behaviors of different-sized churches, “likening them to a cat, collie, garden, house, mansion, and ranch.” How would you describe your church—or your organization?
2) SMART Goal Plus: Schaller says that an ideal goal is “specific, attainable, measurable, visible, unifying, and satisfying, with a terminal date and with the opportunity for a celebration of accomplishment at the end.” (That's brilliant—and I've already changed my “SMART Goals” PowerPoints to include the addition of hoopla!) Do your goals meet this criteria?
Burn the Fuzz Off Your Thinking (and Spelling)!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in Chapter 19, The Printing Bucket, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to create a foolproof proofing system for spell-checking your organization's written documents, newsletters, website (and now your tweets and Facebook postings). Why? Look around—there's a epidemic of misspelled words (New York Times, TV news scrolls, and yes...your eNewsletters). Got typos? Then you've got credibility issues.
Example: In the widely distributed “Dear Workforce” weekly newsletter (August 1), the word “transitioning” was misspelled both in the email subject line and in the lead headline. Worse: the website (as of today) still carries the typo! Ironically, one of the newsletter articles was titled, “Creating a Smarter Workforce.” (I collect these examples—and my typo file folder is bulging.)
“I learned to write to burn the fuzz off my thinking,” commented Fred Smith in his pithy book, Breakfast With Fred. To learn how to leverage print deadlines to enhance your communications (and proofreading), check out the forms, resources and 10 book recommendations on my Printing Bucket webpage.
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