One of the best things you can do with your kids is teach them how to work. The kicker is teaching your kids how to work is far more work than actually doing the work yourself. You have to slow down, involve them in the process and explain why the work you are doing matters. If your kids don’t understand why work matters to you and why it matters to God, they will see work as meaningless and will try to do work by themselves so they can get it done and move on. It’s important that kids learn from the process of work as much as just to accomplish the task before them. Helping your team set goals is much like this.
Setting goals for other people is a tricky business. As someone who leads others, it is very easy to set goals for the team, then to hit and whip them into compliance, constantly reminding them about what goals YOU set for them. Can you accomplish things by setting goals for others? Yes and no. Yes, people will do some things out of fear or because of relationship. If you do not involve your team in the creation of the goals you are trying to accomplish, what you create is an unhealthy focus on results without regard for the process. They (and you) will see the trees but miss the forest. It’s much like teaching your kids how to work. Kids can understand work gives me money without understanding that work glorifies God. As leaders, we must be careful that we don’t get the results we want at a cost to our team and organization that will ultimately not bring glory to God.
Goals are achieved through a series of practical steps. Your team needs to buy into the goal but not necessarily the steps. If your team buys into the goal, they will trust you with the steps. There are actually three types of leadership: the command and control leader who says these are our goals do them, the consensus leader who says what goals should we have, and the collaborative leader who says what goals should we have, then says, “Here is what I think we need to do together and this is what you need to do.”
I favor collaboration because that’s how I believe you have to lead when leading volunteers for the long haul. Do you have to be command and control sometimes? Yes. Consensus sometimes? Yes. But I believe both command/control and consensus leadership should be the exception to the rule, especially when it comes to setting goals.
Practical Suggestions:
1. Goals should be agreed upon; how they are carried out should be dictated. Creativity and collaboration needs guidelines and riverbanks.
2. Personal goals are as important as team goals. Personal goals help you see your fellow team members as humans and not goal-production machines. Knowing the personal goals of your team reveals a side of them you don’t see when you are so focused on your ministry silo.
3. Goals help us focus as individuals and as teams. You see through the unimportant to the most important. We all crave security. Security is achieved through clarity; clarity is achieved through specificity.
