Gaining “Buy In”
It’s the start of the football season and if you follow it you’ve heard ongoing discussions about coaches beginning their first season with a new team. It seems that one of the most significant indicators of a new coach’s success is the “buy in” the players have in the new coach’s system.It’s the same with every organization that wants to fulfill its mission, to be effective or just plain wants to win, leaders must move their team from a posture of compliance to one of commitment. Great teams need people willing to sacrifice and passionately pursue its plans, priorities and direction.
The question is – how does a leader gain “buy in” and have committed staff, not just compliant staff? The answer’s too long for one short blog post but here are a few essentials that I’ve discovered over the years.
First, you need people who want to be committed to something bigger than themselves. People who just want a job will never move to “buy in” but will always just go through the motions to keep their job.
Second, when you have these kinds of people on your team you need to treat them as thoughtful, committed adults, as partners in your organization’s work. People willing to commit to something bigger than themselves expect nothing less.
Finally, your organization needs to be about something worthy of a person’s commitment and passion. Its mission, values, vision and its impact in the world needs to be great enough for employees, investors and other constituents to be willing to sacrifice to see the organization succeed.
So you see buy in isn’t just about great coaches, it is about the right players and effective leadership, all working together for a cause the entire team believes in.
The Tension in Strategic Planning
This month we’ve begun our annual work of updating the SpringHill strategic plan, or as we refer to it, our ministry plan. The process includes most of our staff and board at some level and culminates in our leadership team’s offsite annual planning meeting where we bring all the input and pieces together and update our plan.And every year, during our annual planning offsite, we find ourselves in this tension between detailed calculated planning verses faith driven, visionary planning. This tension is particularly strong in Christian organizations where we “want to leave room for God” in our plans because we know He can do more than “we could ever ask for or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).
But too often “leaving room for God” is an excuse for not doing the hard work of planning. We need to accept that planning clearly is a godly pursuit, the Scriptures are full of admonishment to “count the cost” and that “the noble man devises noble plans; and by noble deeds he stands” (Isaiah 32:8).
On the other hand, planning can quickly replace sensitivity to God’s leading and having the faith that can “move mountains”. This most often happens when we’ve create well thought out plans because we move our faith to our plans and away from the God who makes the plans a reality.
So how have we tried to reconcile this tension between planning and faith?
We’ve accept that we need both – it’s not an “either/or” proposition but a “both/and” (like many things of faith). We’re committed to prayerfully creating the very best plans we can, using the very best tools, knowledge, and insight available to us. Yet, at the same time, we prayerfully set long-term goals and vision that we can’t always calculate our way too, knowing we have to move forward in faith, trusting God will provide what we need when we need it.
T-shirts and Stretch Goals
I love summer camp and always hate when it’s over. I especially miss watching God transform the lives of campers and staff. But I also miss watching our team perform during these crazy weeks. They’re committed and talented people who create incredible experiences.One of my favorite moments from this summer was watching our team go after the goal of having 25% of our campers pre-register for 2013 summer camp. You see in the past we’d only open up registration months after summer camp ended. A couple of years ago we decided to test whether parents would sign their kids up for next year’s camp at the end of their camp session. We tried some things and had some success, but nowhere close to what we desired.
So instead of giving up we set a stretch goal of 25% pre-registration without a clear plan on how we’d achieve it. What we had were some t-shirts to give away to campers who signed up for the next year. So our Indiana overnight team created a plan that would generate excitement on the closing day of camp with the goal of moving parents to sign up for next year. The plan included having all professional staff wear one of these t-shirts, promote pre-registration during the closing rally, and have highly visible tables at key locations so parents could easily pre-register and receive a t-shirt before leaving camp.
So what was the result of our Indiana team’s Week 1 efforts? We pre-registered more kids than the total number of 2011 Indiana pre-registrations.
Word quickly spread throughout SpringHill and over the next few weeks our other team’s implemented similar plans with similar results. Today, at our two overnight camps, we’ve pre-registered close to 35% of our campers, easily exceeding our stretch goal of 25%.
And that’s why it’s one of my favorite summer camp moments. Because I love when teams set stretch goals, create simple yet effective plans, work the plans and then share their successes so that others can succeed as well.
It’s also one of the reasons why I’m already looking forward to next year’s summer camp.
How the Mighty Fall
In Jim Collins’ helpful book “How the Mighty Fall” he describes the following tell-tale signs of an organization in the first stage of decline from “greatness.”- “Success, entitlement, arrogance: Success is viewed as ‘deserved,’ rather than fortuitous, fleeting, or even hard-earned in the face of daunting odds; people begin to believe that success will continue almost no matter what the organization decides to do, or not to do.
- Neglect of the primary flywheel: Distracted by extraneous threats, adventures, and opportunities, leaders neglect a primary flywheel, failing to renew it with the same creative intensity that made it great in the first place.
- ‘What’ replaces ‘why’: The rhetoric of success (‘We’re successful because we do these specific things’) replaces understanding and insight (‘We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work’).
- Decline in learning orientation: Leaders lose the inquisitiveness and learning orientation that mark those truly great individuals who, no matter how successful they become, maintain a learning curve as steep as when they first began their careers.”
I consider making a regular and honest assessment of SpringHill (and myself) against these markers one of my top priorities. I have no doubt the moment I stop the self assessment, both I and SpringHill, have taken the first step towards decline.
The Lesson in Eclipsing 19,000 Summer Campers
“By the summer of 2019, 19,000 kids will attend one of six summer camps.” It was 1997 and the SpringHill board and leadership had just updated and approved the ministry’s strategic plan using Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’ book Built to Last as a guide.
Collins and Porras’ research revealed that enduring organizations had a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (BHAG). The “19 by 19” goal, as it was soon to be called, was SpringHill’s BHAGG (we added the first G – God – to our definition).
Now understand, in 1997 SpringHill’s board and leaders were people of talent and faith who wanted to do something significant for kids and Christ’s Kingdom. And the “19 by 19” goal reflected both this desire and the best information available to them at the time.
Yet today as I write, here in the summer of 2012, we just eclipsed this “19 by 19” goal. Please know I’m not sharing this with you so you can be impressed or congratulate us for handily beating our goal, but instead to demonstrate a point about goal setting that Collins and Porras doesn’t address.
In goal setting we tend to be overly optimistic about short-term goals and overly pessimistic about long-term goals. The main reason for this phenomenon is that we tend to think of the future only in the context of what we know in the present. For example, our staff and board knew and understood overnight camping but could not possibly have foreseen the dramatic demographic changes that would lead us to begin our Day Camp ministry nearly 10 years later (this ministry has played a significant role in our beating the 19 by 19 goal seven years early).
The lesson we learned, and then implemented in restating our BHAGG back in 2003 was that a visionary goal isn’t based on a “calculation”. It’s bigger than that, so big that we’d have no any idea how it would be achieved. The goal needed to be big enough “to leave room for God”, as one board member put it. Today our BHAGG is that, by 2025, we’ll have 260,000 people a year experience SpringHill.
Now, to be completely honest, only time will tell if we got this long-term goal setting thing right and whether the next generation of SpringHill leaders will judge us as fool hearted souls or Saturday morning sand baggers.
Being Wrong about Better Planning
I’ve always believed better planning would eliminate the last-minute scramble to accomplish work before a deadline. Over the past few years this is the theory we at SpringHill have believed to be true, especially in preparing for summer camp. We’ve believed if we planned well we’d coast smoothly into summer instead of scrambling and working nonstop in the weeks before camp.
Well, I’m now admitting my theory is wrong. Based on watching our team over the last few years continue to improve its planning for summer camp, I now realize I’ve misunderstood the true benefits of good planning. For one thing coasting into summer camp hasn’t happened; instead our better planning has created more capacity to do more things, and to do them with higher quality.
This, as I now think about it, makes total sense. It’s because our culture has never been a “coasting” culture. Instead it’s always been a “what more can we do to create better life-transforming experiences?” culture.
Our long history of using every last-minute of every last day before the start of summer camp to do as many of these things as possible to exceed our campers’ and parents’ expectations hasn’t changed. But now, with better planning, we just do more of these things and do them better.
So how do I feel about my theory being wrong? Well I have to admit, apart from continuing to improve our pacing before summer; I rather think increasing our capacity to do more things better is the right outcome for good planning.
Getting to “Running Smoothly”
Legend has it that the late, great coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, was nearly useless during games, at least from the player’s perspective. If this was actually true then the question is how can one of the greatest football coaches of all time, the man for whom the Super Bowl trophy’s named after, be of no use during the most important events in a team’s season – the football games?
The answer to that question also answers the question why the SpringHill summer camp teams have been able to describe the first two weeks of camp as “being remarkably smooth”. As I promised in my last post, below are the steps we expended an enormous amount of energy on to assure “running smoothly” this summer became a reality.
Warning – there’s no magic formula here, just common sense stuff written about and practiced by effective organizations, including the Green Bay Packers of the 1960’s, since the beginning of time:
First, we find the right people. At SpringHill we define the “right people” as being “mission driven and mission effective”. “Mission driven” describes people who committed to our mission, align with our values and fit our culture. “Mission effective” people have the skills, abilities and experiences to advance our mission (not just believe in it) and achieve our goals.
Second, we take these “right people” and make sure they clearly understand their jobs in terms of roles, responsibilities and outcomes.
Third, we train and equip “the right people” mentally, physically and spiritually so they will achieve their job outcomes and help SpringHill fulfill its mission.
Finally, we coach, communicate, encourage, inspire, and provide positive accolades and helpful critique about how the “right people” are doing on the job and how SpringHill’s doing overall.
When we take these four steps the odds are very good that, like this summer, camp will “run remarkably smoothly”.
“It’s Been Remarkably Smooth”
Our Tri-State Day Camp Team – Steven, Tim, Naomi, and Julie – making it run smooth. After two weeks of summer camp, and visiting 4 of our 9 camp teams/locations, there’s one word that I’ve heard over and over when I’ve asked people (staff, parents, and board members) how the first two weeks of camp have gone, and that word is “smooth”. I’ve heard things like “it’s going remarkably smooth, maybe the best week one ever” or “the smoothest first opening day we’ve ever had”.
Now granted, because of my position within SpringHill, you might be thinking that our team could be tempted to say camp’s going great because they know that’s what I want to hear. But a leader must always avoid being tempted to rely only on what’s being said without also experiencing it firsthand. That’s why I spend so much of my summer visiting our SpringHill teams and seeing the SpringHill Experience in action.
So what’s my assessment of our first two weeks of camp? Well our team’s spot on when they’ve said things have gone remarkably smooth. So how do I make such an assessment? When I’m “out and about” I look for a few key indicators which provide clues into how things are going.
First, I look at the demeanor of our staff, beginning with our leaders. Are they calm or do they seem frazzled? Are they focused on people (each other, parents, partners and especially campers) or scrambling to get tasks down?
Second, I observe the cleanliness and orderliness of our camps, activity areas, offices, etc. It’s hard for things to go smoothly when behind the scenes it’s chaotic and the small things aren’t taken care of.
Third, I watch campers and their parents. Are they genuinely excited, warmly embraced, actively engaged, and completely safe and confident in the camp experience? Or do they look lost, confused or plain unhappy?
Finally, I combine the testimony of our staff and leaders, my own observations, and our weekly key indicators to arrive at my assessment of “how camp is going.”
In my next post I’ll share some of the essential elements that have led to our “smooth start to our summer.”
A Case for More (and better) Meetings
In honor of today’s SpringHill Leadership Team’s monthly strategy meeting, I found Patrick Lencioni’s perspective on meetings in his new book The Advantage – Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, both helpful and hopeful.
“No action, activity, or process is more central to a healthy organization than the meeting. As dreaded as the ‘m’ word is, as maligned as it has become, there is no better way to have a fundamental impact on an organization than by changing the way it does meetings.
In fact, if someone were to offer me one single piece of evidence to evaluate the health of an organization, I would not ask to see its financial statements, review its product line, or even talk to is employees or customers; I would want to observe the leadership team during a meeting. This is where the values are established, discussed, and lived and where decisions around strategy and tactics vetted, made and reviewed. Bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations, and good meetings are the origin of cohesion, clarity and communication.
So why in the world do we hate meetings? Probably because they are usually awful. More often than not they are boring, unfocused, wasteful, and frustrating. Somehow we’ve come to accept this – to believe that there is just something inherently wrong with the whole idea of meetings. It’s almost as though we see them as a form of corporate penance, something that is inevitable and must be endured.
Well, I am utterly convinced that there is nothing inherently bad about meetings, nothing that can’t be fixed if we confront the problems we’ve allowed to calcify over the years.”
Check out Lencioni’s books The Advantage and Death by Meetings for practical ways to have better, more effective meetings.
Propulsion into the Future
With the rollout of our new vision, and with SpringHill staff and board being the people they are, I’m expecting over the next year a lot of new ideas for programs and ministries we could embark on. Thus our challenge will be in screening and prioritizing these ideas, with the goal of only doing what will propel us towards fulfilling our vision and BHAGG.
So as I’ve thought about this opportunity it’s become apparent that there will three groups of ideas we’ll be evaluating.
Humility Ideas:
Humility ideas are all the possibilities that result from seeing a need or an opportunity in the world and wanting to do something about it. Most will be great ideas, ideas that can and should become reality. But they won’t align with our mission, vision, core values and philosophy of ministry, thus we shouldn’t do them. They’re humility ideas, because it’ll require us to remember – we can’t do all things and be all things to all people.
One off Ideas:
These are ideas that do align with who we are and direction we’re going but do not propel us forward or give energy to our envision future. Though they may align, they don’t integrate well with SpringHill and the direction it’s going, thus they provide little momentum forward, and so, as a result, they will be lower priority ideas.
Propelling Ideas:
Propelling ideas will be our top priority. These are ideas that are both aligned and have the potential to propel us forward in fulfilling our future goals. These ideas will give energy to SpringHill because they’ll integrate with other initiatives, with our ministry allies, with our staff, and with our supporters.
So over this next year we’ll need wisdom and humility as we work to take on only what will lead SpringHill be all that God’s called it to be, and to do only what God’s called it to do.
