Lecture

This is lecture 15, the leader as goal setter and goal achiever, lots of different terminology we could use here. I think all of it is obvious. Helpful, practical, and reasonably thorough, the third volume in the series Leadership Handbooks of Practical Theology hit the market in 1994. Its 524 pages focus on “leadership and administration,” but the words goal and objective appear neither in the extensive table of contents nor in the index. I’m one of the contributing authors to that and was astounded by that revelation. It’s astonishing in a very fine volume. I’m not reflecting critically on the book at all. It’s very useful, but it reflects the failure, I think, of so much modern evangelical leadership when it comes to setting, nurturing, and achieving goals. Somehow we have been unable to make MBO read “ministry by objectives,” instead of “management by objectives.” Of course, there’s nothing negative about the latter, but so many Christian leaders feel a sense of squeamishness in picking up what they call secular terminology. So this study deals with “ministry by objectives.”

We need to begin with a focus on mission and move right on through to note how all of this comes to effective conclusion. Let’s begin with three assumptions. In any church or Christian organization, you operate on the following premises. (1) The organization has goals. They may be unwritten, they may be fuzzy, and they may be forgotten by most people; but the existence of the organization implies some kind of goal orientation. (2) The organization has some structure to facilitate goal realization. In a small church, that structure might mean the pastor attempting to do everything, as the church’s only paid staff member. Or it might mean a large and complicated bureaucracy, in which goal achievement is impeded by multiple layers of supervisors and assistants. (3) The organization requires effective leadership if goals are to be reached. The achieving of goals does not just happen. There are specific procedures through which we move in order to look back comfortably on what God has allowed us to achieve in the service of the Savior.

Let’s start at the beginning, defining the mission. The word mission—identical, by the way, with the word purpose—simply describes what the ministry organization was designed to do. Goals, objectives, action steps, structure, and administrative process all flow from the mission statement. A confused mission statement, or a group of people confused about their mission statement, provides an immediate red flag in any organization. The mission is usually very briefly stated and not always vastly different from similar organizations. For example, the mission of one congregation in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, can be summarized in a simple sentence. That’s exactly the way they write it. “The purpose of Wooddale Church is to honor God by bringing lives into harmony with Him and one another through fellowship, discipleship, and evangelism.” Now, you say, “Boy, that’s really general.” That’s right. Probably a thousand churches could subscribe to that particular sentence. “The purpose of Wooddale Church is to honor God”—well, we all favor that—“by bringing lives into harmony with Him and one another”—that’s great—“through fellowship, discipleship, and evangelism.” And we’re all for all that stuff. But that’s the way a mission statement reads.

Mission, obviously, is a broad concept, but it narrows as we move into the setting of goals, objectives, and action steps. The most important singular word identifying this process is specification. The broad understanding of why God has created a ministry gives way to the breakdown of how we carry it out. That leads again to a distinction between mission and vision. I know this is at least the third time I’ve brought it up, but it’s a confusion quite common in our day. Mission describes why an organization exists. Vision describes what that organization will do about its mission in the future.

Aubrey Malphurs says: “I define an institutional vision as a clear and challenging picture of the future of the ministry as its leadership believes it can and must be.” We’ll get into this more in the next study, since vision has more to do with planning than developing and achieving goals, but they’re inseparable.

My friend Don Bubna of the Christian and Missionary Alliance agrees. He says:

Where church workers are saying the same thing, and often with the same words, I know they have leadership that is keeping the mission before them. They know what they are doing.

The process of arriving at a good mission statement is important. The leadership needs to work on it collectively. The congregation deserves input. Such involvement brings good ideas, and thereby people take ownership.

Bubna goes on to suggest five questions every congregation ought to ask with respect to its mission. And they all relate, as well, to other types of Christian organizations. (1) What is it God wants us to do? (2) Whom are we trying to reach? (3) How are we going to accomplish this? (4) Where is our geographic target? (5) What are the results we anticipate?

One further thought before we leave the concept of mission. The reality of purpose is just as important to individual leaders as to their organizations. It may seem a bit driven to talk about a lifetime mission, but a “life purpose statement” is a realistic and practical way to facilitate planning and decision making throughout your ministry. I’m going to give you the opportunity to do this, by the way, as one of the assignments for this course. So you’ll want to listen up now, because this fits.

Many years ago, I wrote a ten-page document describing what I thought God wanted me to accomplish during my adult life. I was roughly ten years into full-time ministry at that point, and I had some handle on where I had been, as well as a fair grasp of gifts and abilities and professional preparation. David once observed, “You have made known to me the path of life.” That’s Psalm 16:11. An author, Sybil Stanton, deals with this process in The 25-Hour Woman, published in 1986 by Revell. She says:

You can’t pull purpose out of a hat. You can’t force it, and you can’t fake it. You must find it deep within you, and that may require some hard soul searching. Your purpose may not seem unusual to others, but it will be unique to you. It is nothing to do with grandiose goals, lofty achievements, or universal fame. It is the quiet confidence that even if you never leave your neighborhood, you will have lived fully.

Stanton suggests preparing your life purpose by dividing a piece of paper into three sections labeled “past,” “future,” and “present.” The “past” deals with influences and understanding of God’s call, review of some of the dreams you once held and maybe still hold. The “future” requires that you identify yourself in ten years or even thirty years. It suggests several potential scenarios and asks a response and a perspective on the total package.

The “present” then deals precisely with what we’re dealing with in this study: What are the goals and objectives which can make possible the kind of future you have described?

That’s a good start. I would suggest also that you divide your life purpose preparation into various sections, so that you can identify goals, objectives, and action steps for key areas of life, such as spiritual, professional, social, domestic, physical, et cetera.

Let’s go to MBO, ministry by objectives. Leaders who practice this kind of MBO identify purpose, objectives, and goals and then establish a program for achieving those results and evaluating that achievement. These kind of people understand the old cliché really is correct when it says, If you aim at nothing, you are likely to hit it.

First of all, the process of ministry by objectives. For as long as I have been teaching this kind of material—and that’s a long, long time—students have been confused about the difference between goals and objectives. Part of the problem may very well be my inadequate explanation, but we all face the fact that different writers in the field of leadership and management, as well as in education, use the terms in different ways. Sometimes, for example, goals will be broader than objectives, and sometimes the reverse will apply. In Feeding and Leading, I identified purpose, objectives, goals, realization procedures. And that still makes a great deal of sense to me. But under pressure from some other leadership, and trying to conform so students will gain an easier understanding, I’ll revise the process a bit for the current study and talk about mission, goals, objectives, and action steps.

The process remains the same. All that changes are the terms. Ministry derives from the mission, moving to goals and objectives. What will do in this kind of crucial process? What is the process that we go through to get there? Well, first of all, you assess your environment. What is the current surrounding? What type of financial, theological, sociological climate surrounds you? What’s our parish—Wesley’s wonderful motto, “The world is my parish,” has a beautiful missiological ring, but of course it wasn’t true. Likewise, a small Christian college facing the twenty-firstt century may have to acknowledge that it is distinctly a regional school with little appeal to forty-five of the fifty states and perhaps no more than one or two provinces.

Second, identify strengths and weaknesses. Every organization does some things well and other things at a lower level of quality. In order to develop the vision based on a solid mission, we have to know what those things are. Not only that, but we have to know whether the things we do well are the things we ought to be doing. Remember effectiveness and efficiency? Because if that is not the case, some kind of major overhaul has to be brought about. Like a mission statement, the identifying of strengths and weaknesses serves individual progress, as well as corporate. You have certain leadership strengths, certain leadership weaknesses in yourself. So again the old maxim rings true: Lead to your strength, staff to your weakness. Do those things that you do well, and hire people to fill in your gaps with their strengths. It’s a complementary team leadership concept.

Number three: Assume reasonable trends. Trend analysis is no longer sanctified guesswork. The science of demographics has made it very possible to get a hold of data which enable us to project foundational statistics as they relate to the future of our organizations. Sometimes this has to do with the ethnic changing of a neighborhood or even a city. Often it projects age-group shiftings, such as the current trend toward older adults throughout all of North America.

Let me give you a really specific example here. Churches and schools should not have been surprised by the huge number of kindergarten children enrolling in the fall of 1995. Now many were. Where did all these kids come from? But, of course, we had known for five or six years that this was coming. The so-called Echo Boom, which formed the largest entering class in elementary school since 1960, the height of the Baby Boomer era. This was demographically projected and has been for years. Nobody should have been caught sleeping on this one. That’s what we’re talking about here. In that kind of pattern, we still struggle with a shortage of teenagers. We know that demographically. We don’t have to wonder where teenagers are not. We just look at demographics and know that they are not, period; and that may account for why they are not in your church. We can anticipate that reality of lack of kids in the teen years for about another eight or ten years. Then all of a sudden there will be teenagers everywhere.

Number four: Write specific and measurable goals and objectives. Goals and objectives hold value insofar as we can identify whether they have been achieved or not. A goal which cannot be evaluated is not really a goal at all.

A Christian teacher who says, regarding a given day, “I want to be a blessing to my class” may articulate a sincere prayer but is not speaking in the language of objectives and goals.

My own suggestion here is to use the prepositions “to,” “through,” and “by.” And you will see this to some extent on the assignment. Those three prepositions will distinguish among goals, objectives, and action steps. For example: “Our congregation aims to grow to an attendance of three hundred through engaging in active community evangelism by conducting an outreach program to every home in our community by the end of 1996.” What you have there are a goal, an objective, and an action step. That’s a rough generalization, of course, but it gives a hint of the increasing specification that the prepositions can afford as we nail down what we are trying to do.

Number five: Strategizing those action steps. As important as the mission is, the action steps form the key to achieving goals. Unless we can create statements to which we answer yes or no, we do not have specific action steps. In the illustration above, action steps might read something like this: by conducting an outreach program; by forming an evangelism committee by November 1, 1996; by segmenting the community into quadrants and developing a strategy to reach each quadrant during one quarter of 1997; by designing, preparing, and distributing an attractive brochure that will both present the gospel and explain the ministries of our church. Now you see every one of those is a yes or no. Did we do it, or didn’t we? Did we form an evangelism committee by November 1, 1996, or didn’t we? Simple answer, yes or no. If you can’t answer it yes or no, you do not have an action step. That’s very important to remember.

Number six: Provide for evaluation and reinforcement and reward. Goal achievement moves forward step by step. Its progress must be monitored. For example, timeframes are critical. Notice above in the items that I just read the references to months and years in which things will be finished. People involved in the process must not only see the progress but also participate in reinforcement and reward as we move toward goals and objectives we have set. Evaluation deals with both process and product. Product describes the outcome, the actual goal-achievement dimension. Progress, however, describes how we went about it and asks about our ethics, the satisfaction of the people involved, and the general reputation we have developed in the community by the way we handle our evangelism project.

Principles of ministry by objectives. Van Auken states it well:

When managed effectively, goal setting can be strong motivating force within the Christian organization. This is because goals give people a sense of united purpose, channeling their energy in productive directions. Goals serve as performance standards, providing ministry team members with a rudder to guide daily job activities. Goals also let people know which ends and means will be endorsed and sanctioned by the organization. In the absence of strategic goals, ministries must pay the price of slackened motivation, wasted energy, and inferior productivity. To say the least, goals are one of the most important items in any manager’s toolkit.

By what guidelines do good leaders handle goal setting and achievement? Doubtless they are numerous and greatly varied, but let’s try eight that seem to keep reappearing in the work of both secular and Christian organizations.

1. All staff know and understand the objectives for the ministry. Let’s again think about what we’re doing. We’re talking about guidelines that are, in effect, principles of ministry by objectives. All staff know and understand the objectives for the ministry. In a church one could hardly argue that every member or attender could clearly articulate the congregation’s goals and objectives. That hardly ever happens. However, if there are four pastors on the staff, they should certainly speak with one voice on what the church is attempting to accomplish in its community.
2. Members of the leadership team mutually exchange goals on a regular basis. I don’t mean they give them to one another. They communicate them openly, frequently, so that all members of the management team know what the other members are doing. This helps prevent overlap of effort and, even worse, some kind of bifurcation of goals, which finds members of the leadership team going off in different directions.
3. Each leader’s goals flow from the mission statement. If your organization has a person whose activities can’t be justified by the mission statement, I think you have cause to wonder whether that person should continue in that position. Too often Christian organizations allow individuals to follow their own agendas. We do it to keep peace, to avoid conflict, but the more common result is chaos or maybe stagnation.
4. You must keep the main thing the main thing. This battered old line retains its central truth. People and organizations have a tendency to stray from priorities, but if we have not prioritized our goals and objectives, we stand in danger of achieving the wrong things. We may be efficient (do things right), without being effective (do the right things). A college is an educational enterprise in which public relations, fundraising, bookstores, radio stations are secondary enterprises. A church should not own and operate any kind of business—profit or non-profit—which does not directly relate to its mission. And a lot of churches could save themselves a lot of headaches and get rid of a lot of suspicions if they follow that simple line.
5. People have to claim goals. We can’t talk about visions and dreams in a vague sense. We certainly can’t place them on the shoulders of a singular leader. Objectives must be capable of conversion into specific targets and assignments, which key people in the organization take on as their responsibility and really make them happen.
6. Sound goals and objectives make possible concentration of resources and efforts. Concentration is the key word here. In a time of tight budgeting, something has to go in order for something else to stay. Those kinds of decisions are not made on the basis of who squawks the loudest, or if it is best to achieve budgetary balance, in my opinion, by cutting across the board. When we do that, I hope you see the fallacy involved there. When you cut a budget across the board, you are assuming that everything you do has equal importance. I can’t imagine that is true. I’ve worked in seminary and college administration for years. It’s very difficult for me to conceive of the idea that some auxiliary enterprise, let’s say public relations—and public relations is extremely important. Don’t read me wrong here. But say public relations, and the public relations budget has the same priority in a time of fiscal restraint and fiscal difficulty as does the educational activity itself, the retention of faculty, the ongoing of the program, the building of the library, so on and so forth.

   I could go on and on about this. Obviously, this is an
   emotional point with me. I think good leaders face the difficulty of essential choices of determining where resources will be allocated—and we do that by understanding the mission and the goals and the objectives of the ministry.

7. Both goals and objectives are multiple, never singular. The mission is singular, and it’s very general, as we have said; but each goal gives way to multiple objectives. Each objective gives way to multiple action steps.
8. Goals and objectives relate to all areas of our ministry. We cannot afford to neglect an area just because it does not have a spokesperson on the board. We cannot afford to pay less attention to areas in which we have less interest. A group of elders, for example, may have intense concern for evangelism, or maybe worship, and prepare very specific goal patterns in those areas. But they are less interested in church finance, so they don’t set clear-cut goals, objectives, and action steps with respect to budgetary matters. And they soon discover that they can’t pay for the worship and evangelism strategies that they developed. There’s no money to make them work.

Kouzes and Posner write passionately about developing cooperative goals, and you may remember this again. They claim, “In the more than 500 cases that we studied, we did not encounter a single example of extraordinary achievement that was accomplished without the active effort and support of many people.” That sentence describes their analysis of the Amdahl Corporation from which they developed several general principles, chief among which is that management alone cannot make things happen.

Teamwork is essential for a productive organization. Collaboration is needed to develop the commitment and skills of employees, solve problems, and respond to environmental pressures. Fostering collaboration is not just a nice idea, it is the key that leaders use to unlock the energies and talents available in their organizations.

Wow! Good stuff!

The power of purpose. Clearly defined mission, goals, objectives, and action steps can do amazing things for any organization. Groups of any size floundering in a morass of confusion or lack of direction can immediately begin to move down the field if they understand how to get there. What can you expect if you make this process work for you?

1. Present and future awareness. Ever notice how many people in some churches live in the past? We’ve already talked about this. They can quickly tell you about the effectiveness of former pastors, how large and worshipful the choir was ten years ago. Some people live in the future. They talk about vision, dreams of how things might be someday. Now the latter is preferable to the former. If you’re going to live somewhere other than the present, then live in the future, not the past. But people in our organizations need to live now. Goals and objectives provide the wherewithal, the stepping stones by which we move from where we are now to where we would like to be in the future. Without them, all we have is the dream.
2. Enthusiasm. If the goals are achievable and not ridiculously exaggerated, people can get excited about where their church or their mission is headed. But, again, the map is more crucial than the destination. We can say “Our church will have an attendance of one thousand by the year 2000,” and we can make catchy mottos about that sort of thing, but if our current attendance is five hundred, exactly how do we propose to systematically double that attendance in less than five years? Remember, there are few things more demoralizing in any organization than a history of unfulfilled goals.

   We need a basis for evaluation. I have repeatedly said that goals must be measurable, because if they are not, we have no way to assess our progress. This is best exemplified, I think, in the classroom in which a teacher has taught through a unit of study with general and fuzzy goals and then discovers that making a test is difficult. She had no target in the first place. We talk about things like knowing the material. That’s a very poor substitute for carefully designed lesson plans which identify for students in advance what they will be expected to know or do at the end of that unit of study.

   Another thing here is forced planning. We can’t move ahead now into what comes up in the next study, but these two studies are together for a very good reason, because a goal needs a plan to make it work. Even if we don’t talk about long-range planning, once we get serious about the setting of goals and objectives, we are actually in the planning process.

3. It will also give you emphasis on productivity. Effective leaders focus on output rather than motion. Busy people do not necessarily affirm the significance of any ministry organization. Goal-achieving people do. Activity becomes a very poor substitute for productivity.
4. Reduction in conflict. This is the cooperation that Kouzes and Posner talk about. When people move in concert toward the same goals and the same objectives, there is a lot less threat of conflict than when everybody marches to his or her own drum. One more time to the book with which you are now very familiar, The Leadership Challenge; Kouzes and Posner write:

   Shared visions and values bind employees together in collaborative pursuits. Group tasks, complementary roles, shared rewards also play a role. Tasks that require people to exchange ideas and resources reinforce the notion that participants have cooperative goals. As individuals jointly work together, seeing that they need information from each other in order to be successful, they become convinced that everyone should contribute and that by cooperating they can all accomplish the task successfully.

Hear it again: Team leadership—not one dominant personality roaring around making all the decisions, deciding everything and carrying everything through. That’s autocracy. Napoleon is dead. Team leadership.

In his article, “Go for the Goal,” Robert Witty wonders in print: “Does the football coach have a message for the pastor in the church?” So consider this imaginary conversation:

Reporter: Coach, what is your goal for the big game?

Coach: To win the game.

Reporter: How will you attain your goal?

Coach: By making one touchdown after another. We’ll make touchdowns by making yards. We’ll make yardage by line drives, end runs, completed passes. And if one play doesn’t work, we’ll try another until we find the right combination. We won’t change our goal, just our methods.

“Even so,” says Witty, “the church has an ultimate mission to do the will of God. And to fulfill that mission, the church must adopt varied and adequate goals.” That’s a narrow way of saying everything that we’ve covered in this study, but it is important for us to remember the issues that are involved and the four specific component parts in order.

First, the mission—singular, broad, comprehensive. Second, goals—a little more specific, identifying what we want to achieve in order to fulfill our mission. Then objectives—more specific yet, multiple, as goals were multiple. Multiple goals for the mission, multiple objectives for each goal, multiple action steps for each objective. And remember that an action step is not an action step until you can look at it and say, “We can answer this yes or no.” And after the date has passed at which you said we will do this, you need to be able to look back and say, “We did it,” or “We didn’t do it.” When you can do that, then you have an action step, and you can become a leader who is a goal achiever.