Lecture

Okay, we’re talking here now in lecture six about the team leader as organizer. A fellow by the name of W. Edwards Deming shook the corporate world to its very board rooms a few years ago with his concept of Total Quality Management (TQM). Perhaps you’ve seen it. It’s a systematic approach to analyzing the functions of any organization. TQM emphasizes wide-angel thinking and decision-making, and Deming stressed that we must view systems as whole since a piecemeal approach will not be productive. The only way to change an organization is to view it is a whole and acknowledge the team leadership which collectively determines its future.

But what kind of administrative structure facilitates cross communication and interchange among very subsystems in an organization? One reason many new organizations grow quickly at first may lie in the sense of community that early participants build with each other. Take a look at Acts 2 and again at Acts 4. A new-born church spending time together, building a sense of unity, holding positions in common, meeting and eating together, enjoying corporate worship, taking care of each other in times of needs. These are wonderful things. As the body of Christ they were organism, but they were also organization.

Progressive administration depends upon effective organization. Let me say that again. Progressive administration depends upon effective organization. The organizing phase of the leader’s work usually precedes other administrative duties, such as staffing, supervising, and delegating. Properly organization facilitates all aspects of ministry; however, chaos and confusion have no place in Christian leadership, but without this crucial dimension of organization, chaos and confusion is all that we’re going to see.

Let’s look at some principles of organization. Effective leaders recognize certain principles of organization which seem to characterize good work process. Of course, they’re worded differently by different writers, and as you do reading, you’ll find them coming up with different terminologies. But they’ll look something like this. Organizations should never be viewed as an end in itself. Developing organizational charts and planning programs just to look professional distorts the role of this significant aspect of leadership. One of the stultifying diseases some leaders contract is stuck to the drawing board. We’ve all seen the symptoms. The patient spends a great deal of time in the office pouring over books, charts, plans, and programs which have marvelous aesthetic value, but never find their way into an actual ministry with people.

Organization should always grow out of a need. Both objectives and programs arise from our understanding needs of people. Since organizational development is inseparably related to those needs, ministry structure should be designed to accomplish established objectives. Organization should contain maximal participation. Ministry doesn’t belong to the pastor or the field director or the board. It is of the people and by the people and for the people. The wise Christian school principal, for example, will utilize department heads and curriculum directors by involving them in any planning sessions for the school. This philosophy of ministry, specifically effective team leadership, focuses on effective organization.

Organization should be flexible. Christian organization should not encourage spiritual robots. Leaders don’t lay down the mantle of creative thinking nor take off the shoes of an individual initiative, since most ministry programs set up even just ten years ago will probably not meet the needs of the post-modern world. We have to design organizational flexibility, flexibility that can handle changes, necessary changes to achieve the goals assigned them.

Organization should be participatory in procedure. All we have observed regarding leadership styles applies as well to the organizations participatory procedure. Autocracy hands down orders from the top and expects that they will be obeyed. Team leaders allow for open discussion of the issues and the genuine choice by people involved. Organization should develop creativity in individual workers. Far from stifling the individual initiative, proper organization finds ways and means to draw people out, get new ideas, challenge the process, and find better ways of doing things. When people really feel genuine ownership of a ministry, they’re much more likely to think through the best ways to do it.

Organization should include job analysis and description. Job analysis asks the how and the why and the what of all tasks in the organization. A good leader uses several methods of gathering information like that—interviews; sitting down with the person who’s doing the job. Questionnaires; the questions have to be designed, of course, to produce accurate information about how the job is carried out. Observation; just watching people work. A job diary; the worker keeps a daily time structured record of what goes on. External research sources; job descriptions are so important. You can find various resources to assist you in designing them. Bob Welch reminds us in a helpful article;

Job descriptions should be reviewed annually by the employee and by the church administration. Perhaps the church administrator, personnel committee or any other similar group. Any changes in job descriptions should be done mutually by the employee and the administration. It’s a good idea to make a notation with any changes to acknowledging that both parties agree to them. This will diminish the possibility of future confusion and disagreement. Clearly written, up-to-date, effective job descriptions tell an applicant your church is both organized and efficient. They provide confidence, stability, accountability related to employee actions. And, finally, they facilitate positive staff relationships, making time spent on job descriptions time well spent.

Well, hey, I like that. That’s from a very recent article by Bob Welch, Robert H. Welch in Your Church Magazine called “Job Descriptions that Work.”

Well, let’s move on. Organizations should emphasize the use of records and reports. Any violation of organizational charts or line/staff relationships or span of control can never produce ministry effectiveness. In order to utilize proper channels, all our people must be aware of the relationship, the crucial relationship, they sustain with each other and with everybody else in the organization. Organization should require records and reports. Leaders are always accountable for the actions of their subordinates, and each person should be responsible to only one boss, if that’s possible. It’s not always possible. Good leaders secure from followers a written report of their achievement and activities, and those reports better be regular and complete and specific and clearly related to the ministry mission.

Organization should include clear channels of communication, oral and written. When communications in an organization function properly, all personnel receive the information they need to get the jobs done. Effective communication provides not only for sending messages, but also for the reception of feedback. It’s very, very important to emphasize this kind of dimension of organization. In a book that’s been around for a while, Kolinsky and Wofford emphasize that church objectives must be accomplished through the various organizational bodies that make up the structure of the congregation. In other words, that’s the way things get done. These goals may be influenced in some degree by formal systematic approach—such as job descriptions and organizational charts—but most of the activities of a dynamic organization can’t be programmed. They occur informally. “Formal” means of building the organization are important; however, they must be viewed as only a first step which inclines a person to fall flat on his face unless other steps keep him in balance, and I agree.

Well, here’s something of great value and importance if you have not yet studied this aspect before; organizing the key resource—time. Every efficient leader has learned to invest time in order to save time. By organizing and planning our work, we give our goals much more chance at success than if we plunge ahead in haphazard fashion, taking whichever task happens to pop up first. Christian leaders know that their work is really never finished. We may have more or less productive days, but no day ever ends up with a job completely finished. Selecting and achieving priorities should be properly scheduled before other tasks in the administrative process.

I often ask myself, “Why does time seem to be so scarce in leadership?” One possibility certainly is that we try to do too much, or we may work in ways other than those God would have us work. We may lack both efficiency and effectiveness. We need to work smarter, not just harder. And never forget Parkinson’s Law, “Work expands to fill the time available.”

Well, here’s some steps in time management: Number one, understand how objectives and goals work. I just dealt with this, but it’s worth mentioning again. Unless we write achievable, realistic goals and identify how they fit the overall mission, time wasting will become a regular hobby with us. Number two, clarify your lifetime objectives. What has God called and gifted you to do? Certainly many Christian leaders change careers during their adult lives, but most do not. They simply change locations. Most pastors stay pastors. Most college teachers hold that profession until retirement. Most career missionaries remain on the field or in the mission organization somewhere, so a clear grasp of gifting and calling can alleviate the painful decisions we face every time somebody invites us to join a different organization or move to a different church.

Number three, analyze how you spend your time now. Some people recommend using fifteen-minute increments. I find that cumbersome. If you can study your time investment for one month in thirty-minute increments, you’ll have some respectable idea how you spend your time. Now this is not something you do all the time. You don’t do this every month; you don’t do it every year. You do it at least one good time and do it well, so you know where your time is going and how you’re spending it or investing it. You can’t really reorganize your time for the future until you know how you’re using it now.

Number four, eliminate time wasters that clutter up your life. Attend fewer meetings. Get rid of the junk mail. Stop micromanaging. Control your telephone. Just practicing those four leadership behaviors could change your life. Number five, analyze your activities to identify priorities. I have dealt with this at length in chapter four of my book Feeding and Leading and there’s an activity analysis grid in that book you may want to have a look at on this subject. It’s very, very important to identify priorities. It’s one thing to have goals. It’s another thing to know which goals are more important than others.

Number six, delegate whenever and wherever possible. I’ll come back to this in a future chapter. I think it’s twenty-three. We’ll talk about this in a future lecture, but the principle is basic. Effective leaders do not do everything they possibly can and delegate the rest. They delegate everything they can and do the rest. Number seven, practice effective discipline, particularly self-discipline. Notice how often church officers are called to self-controlled lives in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 2. That may be as simple as excusing yourself from a useless and seemingly endless conversation with a drop-in visitor or as complicated as forcing yourself to finish tasks you start if it has not been your habit to do so.

Number eight, centralize your calendar and appointment information. I struggled with this for years until I finally learned to delegate my calendars to my staff. Now I know you might not have a staff, but I’m talking in generalities and just explaining how it works for me. My secretary handles on campus appointments, meetings, consultations, and so on. My administrative assistant handles all off-campus meetings, speaking engagements, conferences, travel, and so on. I keep duplicate calendars with both of them, and for off campus ministry we have duplicate folders for all correspondence and pertinent information. I carry a pocket calendar in my briefcase, use desk calendars at my office and my home study; all of this to me is very, very important. Now if you’re totally mechanized, you probably don’t have a calendar in your pocket. You have some kind of computerized timekeeper. It doesn’t really matter. When it comes to time management, the question is what works for you.

Number nine, and here it is, design work schedules and patterns that work for you. I use a computer in my office. I’m not totally illiterate on the cyberspace, although I’m sort of stuck in a cul-de-sac on the information highway. But I do use a computer, mainly for communication with other offices across campus: snap mail, email, snap talk, and so on. I basically don’t get involved in word processing. Now I have been scoffed at, questioned, denigrated, written off as a dinosaur by my Mac and PC friends. But a handheld audio dictation machine is infinitely faster for my purposes, since all of my staff are completely computer literate. But don’t miss the point here; you have to find a system that works for you. I’m simply describing what system work for me. The arrangement of your office, the makeup of your staff, the way you control your days and week—all of this has an enormous significance on the effectiveness of your leadership. You have to make right choices in these areas.

And number ten, make all research do double or triple duty. I’m amazed how pastors and professors and other Christian leaders can spend twenty or thirty hours preparing a sermon or speech or lesson for a class and yet use less than fifty percent of what they learned in that time. They allow the rest to lie on the cutting room floor or drift silently into cyberspace. So when you study, try to think in advance of all the possible ways you can learn things that can be put into practice in your ministry. For me it’s simple. Everything ultimately has three uses—pulpit, radio, and manuscript in some order, but you have to identify your own outlets.

What about developing an organizational chart? That’s always useful and helpful. A perusal of books on leadership will uncover a variety of approaches to charting any organization, but the familiar pyramid of lines and boxes in ascending or descending order of importance is the standard format of an organizational chart. Some Christian leaders think the cold and empirical boxes represent an unspiritual approach to spiritual issues; but order and proper function characterize the omnipotent God and I think ought to mark His work and His people.

Winks writes,

The true purpose of the org chart today is a reversal of the Bauhaus obiter dictum that form follows function; it is designed and distributed to induce function to follow form, being, in itself, and instrument of change. If this were not so, it would be no more worthy of study than the corporate telephone directory.

That’s a really very important observation, that the “form following function” aspect is not correct when it comes to the org chart, but that function can follow form. If the org chart is properly written and properly changed with some regularity—we look at ours at the seminary here annually—we look at it every year to see if the org chart needs to be changed. And if it needs to be changed, we change it, so that function for that following year can follow form. And that’s what Winks is trying to say here.

Now there are a number of different kinds of org charts. You’ll have some of them in your syllabus. It’s worthy of your study. And you need to understand what they teach and how to read them and how to use them in leadership. Two major steps are important in the process of developing an organizational chart. The first charts the organization as it presently exists, and on the basis of this information knowledge can be brought to bear upon change. This is where Winks is going when he’s talking about the whole aspect of form following function or function following form. When you look at org charts, you can see exactly what we’re talking about there.

Woodrow Wilson once said that “efficiency in organization results from the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.” The American Management Association clearly identifies the relationship of people to organizational planning in what they call “Ten Commandments of Good Organization.” Let me mention those for you: 1. Definite and clear-cut responsibilities assigned to each executive. 2. Responsibility should always be coupled with corresponding authority.

3. No change should be made in the scope or the responsibilities of a position without a definite understanding to that effect on the part of all persons concerned. 4. No executive or employee occupying a single position in the organization should be subject to definite orders from more than one source. 5. Orders should never be given to subordinates over the head of a responsible executive. 6. Criticisms of subordinates should, whenever possible, be made privately and in no case should a subordinate be criticized in the presence of executives or employees of equal or lower rank.

All of that’s useful, and we can talk about that kind of thing and emphasize it over and over again. But the ideas that follow here are crucial, and we want to move on to deal with them. This business about informal organization is very important. Everything we talked about in this chapter deals with formal organization. That’s what I’ve emphasized throughout this lecture and in the materials that you have. Its importance can’t be over-estimated, but every business and educational institution, every church, every industry includes informal organization. A term describes ways of doing things that have grown up through the years and yet cannot be found described in formal documents like job descriptions or bylaws or organizational charts.

To function effectively as a leader in any organization, you have to understand these informal processes. Since the very nature of informal organization makes it unique to each enterprise, perhaps the best help I can afford is to suggest how to study it. Try asking the following questions for informal organization: 1. How are decisions made and communicated? 2. How are people hired? 3. How are funds distributed for various projects? 4. How is information spread throughout the organization? Now let me just illustrate that last point because it’s my favorite. In a college or seminary, for example, formal organization calls for boards to inform presidents who inform vice presidents who inform deans, who inform faculty, who inform staff. And sometimes it even happens that way, but after over thirty-five years in Christian higher education, I can assure you that the secretarial network on any campus is considerably more informed than the vice presidents. If a dean wants to get an urgent message to faculty—one that they will actually receive and read—he arranges for his secretary to contact their secretaries. Forget putting something on the bulletin board in the faculty lounge.

So don’t think of informal organization as evil or distorted; it’s a fact of life. Why? Leaders learn to function where God places them and they learn to function within the system. But you can’t function in any system if you don’t understand it, so watch out for that informal organization.

A word about job control. Participatory leaders, team leaders, don’t control people, but they must learn to control their own jobs. The terminology job control indicates a level of confidence in managing a major leadership post. That’s a happy condition one should not expect for at least a year in any new leadership role. But what does it take to attain job control?

First of all, you must have adequate time to do the job. Some ministry posts seem designed to drive good men and women to an early grave. A leader trying to carry out a ministry which consumes more time than is possible to gain is simply destined never to enjoy job control. Secondly, you must have adequate staff. I’ve talked about this already, and for me this is first place, this is number one, because without adequate staff I know I’ll never have adequate time. Whereas, without adequate time, I may very well be able to get adequate staff, which will help me get adequate time, but that’s another matter. I would put staff in first place. I mention it second here because many of you will not have staff, and others hopelessly lost in the time problem never get around to considering the role of staff. I’ve often said I live and die by my staff, and that’s really no exaggeration. I select them carefully. I train them vigorously. I depend on them completely. The best image I can offer is the biblical picture of Moses holding up his hands over the battle at Rephidim, sustained in that posture by Aaron and Hur without whose assistance that battle would have been immediately lost. You’ll find that record in Exodus 17.

Adequate time. Adequate staff. Third, adequate resources. Now, quite frankly, money heads the list here, but other resources such as space must be considered also. One of the most frustrating experiences leaders face is knowing how to direct the life of an organization, but having inadequate resources to do it. The fourth item is adequate equipment. Time, staff, resources, equipment. Now this could be as massive as a quarter of a million-dollar office building or a two-million-dollar office building or a five-million-dollar office building, or it could be as simple as $5,000 worth of computer equipment to keep your office online and get things moving.

Now number five is extremely important. You must have an adequate grasp of objectives. Job control can’t be uncoupled from what you’re expected to do as a leader. If you have fuzzy perceptions of what the board or your leadership group requires or what the Lord wants, job control will always seem somewhere beyond your grasp. And organization is very, very much a part of this whole process of gaining job control. I would say job control and proper organizational behavior are just plain inseparable. There’s no way that you can pull them apart and still have effective operation.

The key word in all of these items is adequate. You may never enjoy all of the time, all of the money, all of the staff, all of the equipment, all of the resources you would like to have, but that’s not the point. The question is whether you can do your job to a point at which you feel confident that you are doing it well. That’s really what job control means. Job control is really confidence that you know what your job is, you know what people expect of you, and you know how to do it and you can and will deliver. So my advice to new leaders or leaders changing ministry positions is to concentrate immediately on job control by lining up these crucial items as quickly as possible. And remember, don’t expect job control in any major leadership post in less than a year. It may talk longer than that.

This is all a very important aspect of what we’re trying to do in organizational behavior. And let’s remember too, although we’ll have a separate section on decision-making, let’s remember that part of organization is making appropriate decisions. Every decision has significant consequences. Effective leaders pay very careful attention to every choice that they make, recognizing that present choices limit future actions. To procrastinate the performance of a certain task or to procrastinate a decision about a certain task may lead to a chain of events which will injure your effectiveness and render you useless and cause you to appear disorganized—perhaps because you are disorganized in a given situation. I can’t generalize a set of criteria here, but it is important for leaders to apply an adequate set of criteria to decision-making. So they select priorities intelligently and logically.

Let’s conclude by saying organization means progress toward a goal. Organization is not an end in itself. Its activities do not function in a vacuum. Teachers must have specific objectives to be achieved as the result of the teaching/learning situation in any classroom. So leaders select for themselves and for their organizations definite goals toward which they move. One concludes safely, therefore, I would think, that a large part of organization is given over to planning—which we’ll deal with before this course finishes—which when properly carried out produces the realization of goals for the organization and its people.

So what is organization? Well, perhaps we ought to think of it as an ongoing verb, organizing, because one never gets to the end of this. It’s sort of like planning. It’s not correct to say you have a plan. It’s correct to say you are planning because you are planning all the time. So we say here that organizing is a part of the behavior in which leaders engage on a regular basis. It is an aspect or a dimension of administrative leadership which cannot be negated, and it cannot be diminished and it cannot be demeaned. If you can’t organize your life, then you can’t organize your work, and if you can’t organize your work, then you can’t achieve your goals. And if you can’t achieve your goals, then you are not a competent leader.