Lessons From the Church Boardroom

Issue No. 402 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting is a tad self-promotional, but only 50 percent (learn why). Read the new book, Lessons From the Church Boardroom, by Dan Busby and yours truly. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and visit Issue No. 397 for my 2018 Book-of-the-Year and my Top-10 books of 2018.

Church Boardroom Bloopers

News Flash! There’s way too much confusion in the trenches on the appropriate roles and responsibilities of church board members.
   • New church board members are often overwhelmed. (“No one told me!”)
   • Veteran board members have turned micro-managing into an art form.
   • Senior pastors often use the mushroom management approach (Google it!).
   • Senior staffers plead for more face time with the church board, then with missionary zeal, often convert board meetings into staff meetings.

STOP THE MADNESS!

Here’s one solution to these and many other obstacles to God-honoring governance: Lessons From the Church Boardroom: 40 Insights for Exceptional Governance, by Dan Busby and John Pearson.

When ECFA President Dan Busby invited me to co-author a series of governance books with him, I jumped at the opportunity. We’re both passionate about good governance so we wrote 40 very short chapters in 10 irresistible categories:

Part 1: The Powerful Impact of Highly Engaged Boards
• Would you trust a surgeon who stopped learning? How about a church board member who stopped learning? (Lesson 1)
• What’s the “Gold Standard Question” to ask after every board meeting? (Lesson 2)
• Andrew Murray: “Humility is the only soil in which the graces take root; the lack of humility is the sufficient explanation of every defect and failure.” (Lesson 3: Guarding Your Pastor’s Soul—a must-read chapter)

Part 2: Boardroom Tools and Templates
• “A BPM (board policies manual) will help your church board negotiate an emergency leadership transition, frame the strategic planning process, and give direction and boundaries in dozens of other important policy issues.” (Lesson 5)
• True or False: Our church board is crystal clear on the role of the board versus the role of the staff. (Use Lesson 7’s one-page Prime Responsibility Chart to eliminate fuzziness between board and staff roles.)

Part 3: Nominees for the Church Board Member Hall of Fame
• Yikes! “Pastor Carlos said he didn’t have the spiritual gift of church board meetings!” (Lesson 8: Thrive With Four Kingdom Values)
• Attn: All Pastors! “Don’t ask board members to vote against God!” (Lesson 9)

Part 4: Epiphanies in the Boardroom
• To inspire your board to go deeper into spiritual discernment, “…consider how St. Ignatius identified three distinct times when faced with making Spirit-filled choices.” (See Lesson 11 to learn more about a revelatory time, a discerning time, and a waiting time.)
• “It is only with the help of the Lord—and often the Lord uses fresh faces on the board—that a church will begin the important process of governance improvement. God can move mountains, so you can also trust Him to move pendulums!” (Lesson 13: Caution! Understand the Governance Pendulum Principle)

Part 5: Boardroom Bloopers
• On listening: “Leave space for anyone who may want to speak a first time before speaking a second time.” (Just one of 10 pokes-in-the-ribs on effective boardroom listening from Ruth Haley Barton in Lesson 15.)

Part 6: Boardroom Time-Wasters, Trouble-Makers, and Truth Tellers
• “Without adequate advance preparation to fully address an issue, boards tend to function as a committee of the whole, often resorting to painfully circuitous discussion.” (See Lesson 18, “Never Throw Red Meat on the Board Table.”)

Part 7: Boardroom Best Practices
• How do you address Absentee Board Member Syndrome?
   --Option 1: Ho Hum.
   --Option 2: Hint.
   --Option 3: Harass.
(Read Lesson 25 for seven insights, including “Affirm. Affirm. Affirm. When board colleagues affirm each other, then engagement will heighten and board service satisfaction will soar.”)

Part 8: Boardroom Worst Practices
• Read “Where Two or Three Are Gathered on Social Media…” to learn why conflicts of interest always sound more questionable on the internet and social media. (Lesson 28)

Part 9: Building a 24/7 Board Culture
• Honest! Lesson 36 begins with Billy Crystal’s stunning performance, “15 Rounds”—honoring boxing great Muhammad Ali—in front of 20,000 of Ali’s “closest friends” in 1979. Watch it here on YouTube. Learn why the “goal of every board should be continuous improvement to make the board better than it was before.”



Part 10: Boards That Lead
• “As we’ve observed in hundreds of churches over the years, the numbers reveal the reality. Successfully achieving stretch goals is very uncommon, and thus reaching for the moon (and beyond!) should generally be avoided.” (Lesson 39: Don’t Stretch Credulity with BHAGs and Stretch Goals)

RESOURCES:

[  ] 40 BLOGS. 40 WEDNESDAYS. Dan Busby and the ECFA team are featuring 40 guest bloggers with their color commentaries to all 40 lessons. Click here for Lessons From the Church Boardroom—The Blog. (Subscribe on the blog to receive a new lesson every Wednesday.)

[  ] READ the first chapter online, “Lesson 1 – Wanted: Lifelong Learners,” visit the ECFA Knowledge Center here.

[  ] GUESS! And by the way, Dan wrote about half the lessons and I wrote the others. I’ll send a Starbucks gift card (or a Chick-fil-A gift card) to the first reader who correctly guesses which 20 lessons I wrote. (Hint: Dan’s are better!) 

[  ] VISIT the book’s website here for more resources.

[  ] ORDER from Amazon, click on the title for Lessons From the Church Boardroom: 40 Insights for Exceptional Governance, by Dan Busby and John Pearson.



[  ] BULK ORDERS: For special pricing on multiple copies for your church board and senior team, visit ECFAPress here.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Lesson 29 asks, “Are too many staff causing the boardroom to capsize?” Is there a “right number” of board members versus staff in your board meetings? Read “Keeping the Boardroom Afloat.”
2) Lesson 30 gives seven ways to avoid a financial train wreck in your church. A graphic, “The Transparency Continuum,” urges boards to discern what “appropriate transparency” looks like—a delicate balance between two extremes: no transparency and absolute transparency (neither appropriate). Where is your board on the continuum?
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Eliminate Fuzziness
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

True or False? Our church board is crystal clear on the role of the board versus the role of the staff.

If not clear, visit the Operations Buckets webpage and download the Prime Responsibility Chart template—and then customize it to eliminate fuzziness between board and staff roles. (It’s also a helpful one-pager for any project where the approval process is a tad fuzzy.)

For more resources from the workbook, visit “The Operations Bucket,” webpage here.
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⇒JASON AND JOHN PEARSON quote Zig Ziglar in the intro to the Operations Bucket chapter of Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.” So if it’s been a very long time since you’ve coached and mentored your team in the Operations Bucket, here’s a reminder that last year’s coaching wasn’t enough. Click on the graphic below to order the workbook from Amazon.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Delegate your reading—and ask a team member to read Duct Tape Marketing, the classic from John Jantsch. Jump to page 32 and craft your “Talking Logo.” Then align that with innovative ideas from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).  Click here.

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Comments

[Kevin Edwards]

It is important for individuals who are asked to sit on the board, only accept the position if they actually feel called by God. To many times board members join because they like the idea and positional power that may come from it. I appreciate the topic on: To inspire your board to go deeper into spiritual discernment. This is vital for all church board members to lean on.