You Can Grow or You Can Control but You Can't Do Both

A pastor friend of mine once taught this truth, that you can either grow, or you can control, but you can’t do both. A growing church or non-profit has a different set of characteristics at work than a controlling one. One of the big differences is found in the culture of the organization.
Getting away from the notion that a church grows because of the quality of its services, its a great facility, or its charismatic leader, and that a growing church is growing because its leaders are busy loving, caring for, investing in, equipping, and sending its people out into the mission field as a force to be reckoned with, now the church has to reckon with its culture. Will the church’s culture allow for or will it hinder growth?
In our Skiltegrity Essentials workshop, we breakdown the nuts and bolts of an empowering culture. An empowering culture is the necessary ether for a growing church.
Interestingly, an empowering culture is more than mere hospitality, friendliness, or even genuine care, though these critical features will be found in a church with an empowering culture. The opposite features obviously would be symptoms of a diminishing culture, but they also may be symptoms of unresolved conflict, deep divides, avoidance on the part of leadership to confront problems and problem people, or more. And an empowering culture is the most effective remedy to solve those negative features and the best defense to prevent any negative features from gaining any traction in the church.
Before working on building a truly empowering culture, if those negative features exist, leadership will have to address and work to remedy those problems with intentional conflict resolution skills.
Then you can begin building a culture of empowerment. There are three skills, the practice of which at every level of church management, will greatly enhance a culture of empowerment and confidence. Those are 1) making excellent decisions, 2) delegating authority well, and 3) engaging in healthy dialogue.
The decisions that leadership makes determine the direction for your church, especially decisions about people and strategy. The word ‘decisions’ – from to decide –is defined as, ‘to make a final choice or judgment, to determine a course of action.’ Understanding the threats there are to making good decisions help us to understand also what it takes to make excellent decisions. Some common threats are: impulsivity, risk avoidance, lack of data, made in isolation, no follow up, and no delegation. 
So, from looking at the list of threats, a great decision is: 

• One that is well informed by the available data. Nonprofits rely heavily on good data for strategy and especially for its funding. Surprisingly, except for simple communications purposes and financial records, churches gather and examine very little data. Some simple demographic data like from where, what ages, what careers, what schools, first time visit, some dates, and a few more items woven together into a simple report would give leaders incredible understanding for making better decisions.
• Well paced, that is, not suffering from either risk aversion or impulsivity. Leaders can get in to paralysis by analysis easily enough, but perhaps more often the bigger threat is when a visionary leader seizes onto an idea and feels fantastic, even blessed of God, about the idea, and wants to move immediately. All too often, though, that visionary leadership has blind spots in which lurk hazards, and if he had others who could see into and offer input about what hazards are in the blind spots, he or she could avoid easily avoid making a bad mistake
• Made in the context of healthy discussion and dialogue. Often visionary leaders don’t have the patience to bring the idea to others for dialogue, or he may feel that he’s losing control over his decision making power. To solve for that, the leader will want to learn when to and when not to discuss the topic, or, better, simply ask some, “what do you think about…” questions; listen, express gratitude, ask more questions, accumulate input, process and pray about the input. Give it some time, and the likelihood of a better decision increases dramatically.
• Can be measured in results. As stated earlier, decisions affect direction, especially people decisions and strategy decisions. People are to help, and strategy determines direction and the how – how to invest people and resources toward accomplishing some preferred end. Since that’s the case, it’s easy to establish some clear and measurable goals and objectives for the people that leadership hires. Example: our new children’s leader will develop a team of six or more team members who have a heart to help grow children’s ministry and who will help her grow the children’s ministry by 15 new families over the next year. It’s also easy to set some measurable goals and objectives for the strategic decisions that leadership makes. Example: our goal is to include 15 families with K-12 children over the next year, and we’ll do it by presenting three neighborhood events in the same time period, and each event will attract 5 or more new families. These examples set some measurable expectations. It’s a great discipline for every leader who wants to move quickly with an idea, to pause and ask himself, “How will I measure the results of my decision?” That simple half-hour exercise over coffee can save a lot of anguish down the line.  
• Not bottled up for fear of delegating the responsibilities of executing the decision to others. Most leaders come to recognize that they can’t do everything themselves, and that s/he needs to delegate some authority to others so they can execute the first decision. In the examples above, the leader will need to write job descriptions, set expectations, and hopefully identify with what authority the person receiving the delegated assignment has to make decisions on things like art, money, volunteers, communications, and more. So having made his people and strategy decisions, he needs to release the person to whom he has delegated the assignment with trust and confidence that he has been clear, and the others have understood and have expressed agreement, willingness and ability to perform the duties.

I’m grateful for the boards and supervisors who allowed me to make decisions for the organizations I led. And I’m especially grateful for those who took the extra time and thought to be clear with expectations, goals, and clear lines of authority for me to make those decisions. 
So, being mindful of the data being used to make the decision, the pace of the decision, the discussion around the decision, the expected results of the decision, and the level of trust one is using to delegate the execution of the decision. Follow these and the leader improves the likelihood of making better decisions.
In the final analysis making excellent decisions requires having opportunity to make them, some courage, and practice. In bicycling there is saddle time. The more time in the saddle, the better a bicyclist one becomes. So, the more decisions one makes – and learns from – the better decisions he’ll make, and the organization realizes the peace that comes from consistently excellent decisions
Next, we will examine the second skill required to build an empowering culture, and that second skill is delegation.