Is Your Vision Stuck on One Strategy?

It’s highly likely, during these COVID-19 days, that your ministry’s mission and vision are being tested. Here are two book recommendations with insights on vision, mission, and strategy.

Is your vision statement or your mission statement stuck on just one strategy? Has COVID-19 decimated that strategy? In his 2020 book, The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business, Michael Hyatt writes. “A practical vision is specific enough to suggest strategy, but not so specific it commits you to one particular strategy.” Are you stuck on a sacred cow-type strategy? 

Hyatt asks 10 questions about vision—and his book (read my review) dramatically changed my thinking about the importance of vision. I was a mission statement zealot. Vision was important, yes, but it’s the mission that gets you from Point A to Point B—or so I thought. The vision is focused on “what, not how,” says Hyatt. Both are important, of course, but maybe it’s time your board takes a second look at your foundational assumptions on vision, mission, strategy, and core values?

How would your board and CEO answer Hyatt’s 10 questions?
   1. Are You a Leader or a Manager?
   2. What Difference Does Vision Make?
   3. What Do You Want?
   4. Is It Clear?
   5. Does It Inspire?
   6. Is It Practical?
   7. Can You Sell It?
   8. How Should You Face Resistance?
   9. Is It Too Late?
 10. Are You Ready?

The author lists four characteristics of a vision that inspires: 
   1) The vision focuses on what isn’t, not what is.
   2) The vision is exponential, not incremental.
   3) The vision is risky, not stupid.
   4) The vision is focused on what, not how.

In April, when COVID-19 sent us dashing to our bunkers, I posted a Pop Quiz here, “Top-5 Ways to Bless Your Ministry.” The second suggestion was to “Help Our CEO Discern ‘The One Thing.’” I suggested you call or email your CEO with this insight and offer to have a conversation about his or her “ONE Thing:”

"What's the ONE Thing you can do this week

such that by doing it

everything else would be easier or unnecessary?"

Perhaps, for the board, your ONE Thing, now in August, is to read Hyatt’s important book—and revisit your vision. And while you’re delegating your reading, let me recommend that at least one person on your board also reads The Longview: Lasting Strategies for Rising Leaders, by Roger Parrott. (Read my review here.)

With in-the-trenches insights as president of Belhaven College and broad experience with evangelicals, Parrott’s chapter, “Planning Will Drain the Life from Your Ministry,” is an insightful counter-balance to much of the vision/mission rhetoric. His prophetic book in 2009 speaks into 2020 when he notes that both the optimistic and the pessimistic view of the future (which is unknowable) can create havoc. Of the latter, he writes, “…or you raise fears instead of funds by basing your plans on less rosy assumptions that reflect the uncertainties of tomorrow.”

Parrott’s final chapter is another must-read, “Catching the Wind of God.” He begins, “I am convinced one of the core problems of evangelical leaders is that too often we’ve stopped trying to catch the wind of God in our sails because we’ve become fairly effective at creating our own independent power to get God’s work done.”

BOARD DISCUSSION: So…who will read and report on these two books at our next Zoom board meeting?

MORE RESOURCES: Click here to read David Schmidt’s guest blog on Lesson 37, “Don’t Stretch Credulity With BHAGs and Stretch Goals. The actual achievement of audacious goals is very uncommon.” This is one of 40 color commentaries from the book, Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom. Schmidt writes, “Always—we must test motives and drivers when setting goals. Pride and fear can easily disguise themselves as bold leadership.” Click here to read the chapter online.

Best Board Books #5 - Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask

Here’s a very, very practical book (in my continuing series on best board books)—with serious pokes-in-the-ribs for your board. Guaranteed!

Book #5: Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, by Ram Charan

Governance Guru Ram Charan wrote in 2010, “The financial crisis of 2008 laid bare a long buried truth: that many boards do not really own the strategy of their company.”  So rate your board on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 is high). “How strongly does our board own our strategy?"

That’s just one of 13 other pokes-in-the-ribs from the author of numerous other business and governance books including The Attacker’s Advantage and Boards That Lead.

The author says that “if you have no appetite for risk, you shouldn’t be on a board; it will inhibit the CEO from making bold and necessary moves and potentially company-saving bets.”
The “go-to adviser” for corporate boards and CEOs, Ram Charan, says that boards must “own up” to its accountability for the performance of the organization and reinvent the content of their work and modus operandi.  He preaches, “Governance now means leadership.” 

Board governance often has fuzzy boundaries and is never easy—but this excellent author/authority has 14 cringe-type questions. Charan doesn’t waste words—firing this question onto the board table in the first paragraph of Chapter 1/Question 1, “Is Our Board Composition Right for the Challenge?” 

He writes, “The role of the board has unmistakably transitioned from passive governance to active leadership with a delicate balance of avoiding micromanaging. It’s leadership as a group, not leadership by an appointed person.” He adds, “With the right composition, a board can create value; with the wrong or inappropriate composition, it can easily destroy value.”

He recommends that every board member and board prospect complete a “skill assessment matrix” to assess the board’s overall strengths and weaknesses. “The process is important because a board full of generalists is not good enough anymore,” he warns. Reference checking of board members (well beyond the basic level) is now an absolute necessity. The biggest red flag to avoid: a board nominee with a big ego.

The discussion of board member succession is worth the price of the book. Insights: 1) the process may take up to three years; 2) many CEOs are limiting their service on other boards to just two, or often just their own board; 3) to get the right mix of board members—for rapidly changing needs—many boards are encouraging incumbents to step down early. (Not easy—but critical.) Perhaps most critical: “Board service is always more attractive when the prospective director knows the board has its act together—that the board is thorough in covering its bases and functions well as a group.”

Effective boards will want to use this book at an annual board retreat—or address one or two questions per board meeting over the next year or more.  The book can also be read topically, based on your current hot issues. I started with Question 13, “How Do We Stop From Micromanaging?”  All 14 have zinger qualities to them. My favorites, based on my board consulting work, include:
   • Question 11: How Can Executive Sessions Help the Board Own Up?
   • Question 12: How Can Our Board Self-Evaluation Improve Our Functioning and Our Output?
   • Question 2: Are We Addressing the Risks That Could Send Our Company Over the Cliff?
   • Question 4: Are We Well Prepared to Name Our Next CEO?
   • Question 5: Does Our Board Really Own the Company’s Strategy?

The best practices for the strategy question are both brilliant and practical—but the CEO will need to dramatically increase face time with board members. But the pay-off could be huge. He notes, “Strategy should always be in the back of directors’ minds. It helps to have the strategy brief or a two-page sheet of bullet points in the binder for every meeting.”  

Then Charan cautions us, “If the board and the CEO have lasting substantive differences, they have a choice: stay with the strategy or replace the CEO. Consider that management has a shelf life too, just like the strategy.”

BOARD DISCUSSION: After reviewing Charan’s 14 questions, what is the most important question we need to address at our next meeting? Will answering that question require a spiritual discernment process--or are we just too timid about addressing it?

MORE RESOURCES: Follow the “40 Blogs. 40 Wednesdays.” color commentaries on Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom. Click here.

Called to Serve: Don’t Neglect Your CEO’s Growth

Note: This is No. 28 in a series of blogs featuring wisdom from the 91-page gem by Max De Pree, Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board.

Max De Pree: “In the rush of the day to day, a president often neglects his own growth; the board can issue a friendly reminder every once in a while.”

In wrapping up his succinct section on how boards create “space” for the men and women who serve as CEOs, I found this insight stunning: De Pree ties mission, strategy and a CEO’s personal growth all together.

He writes, “There are two further elements to providing space. It is wonderful for the organization’s future when the board takes a strong interest in opportunities given the president for personal growth and when the board makes it clear that it expects the president to hold the entire organization accountable for realizing its mission and strategy.”

So…would you agree that when the board cares about the CEO’s growth—and the CEO cares about the growth of team members—there will be a direct relationship between personal growth and organizational growth, especially when the mission and strategy are crystal clear?

Frequently, budget cuts begin by slashing opportunities for CEO and senior team enrichment—which is short sighted. It reminds me of this poignant comment traversing the Internet (if you know the original source, please contact me):

CFO to CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave us?

CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and then they stay?”

Christ-centered boards should have the same mindset: inspiring their CEOs to thrive by providing an adequate budget and time for personal and professional growth. Amen?

BOARD EXERCISE: If your CEO was regularly accountable for reporting progress on personal and professional growth SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-related), would the dashboard show red, yellow, or green?

To order from Amazon, click on the title for: Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board, by Max De Pree (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company).

Called to Serve: What the Board Owes the CEO

Note: This is No. 25 in a series of blogs featuring wisdom from the 91-page gem by Max De Pree, Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board.

Wow! I must apologize now to blog readers—because in a few years, should I venture backwards and read these 25 or more blogs, I’ll grimace with angst. “Yikes! What possessed me to think that Max De Pree’s succinct 91 pages needed any more color commentary? Yikes, again.”

Case in point: his brilliant summary (pages 82 and 83) on “Mandate”—one of four categories of things the board owes the president (“or the conductor, or the pastor, or the manager”): Mandate, Trust, Space, and Care.

On Mandate, he writes, “Remember, we are committed to communicate lavishly.” And then this:
   • “Our mandate should always include a mission statement and a strategy, both of which derive clearly from who we intend to be.”
   • “Some folks like the idea of a job outline. For leaders, I much prefer a statement of expectations. A job outline can become a kind of box that tends to limit the leader’s imagination. We surely don’t want that.”

De Pree cautions that there be no ambiguity between “the statement of expectations to the promise of what will be measured.” You’ll recall from the last blog, that De Pree warns, “It’s so easy to fall into the trap of measuring only what’s easy to measure.”  

In working with nonprofit ministries and churches, I find that mission statements are often noble, sometimes breath-taking, even enduring and endearing. Yet…strategy? Shoddily articulated. Often written and quickly filed away. Rarely—derived from a fork-in-the-road holy moment on our knees.

If I could rewind the videotape for my own leadership and my consulting work with clients, I would invest less time on the mission statement—and more time on the strategy.

In their important book, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, co-authors A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin write, “Every industry has tools and practices that become widespread and generic. Some organizations define strategy as benchmarking against competition and then doing the same set of activities but more effectively. Sameness isn’t strategy. It is a recipe for mediocrity.”

So…to Max De Pree’s wisdom urging leaders to connect mission with strategy, I would humbly add “and sameness isn’t strategy.” My opinion—“sameness” is one of the Top-5 Sins of Strategy Development in ministry organizations—which is strange, because God has designed leaders and team members with very unique spiritual gifts, strengths, social styles and passion. Thus, it would lead us to discern that our unique organizations and unique people would also have unique strategies. Amen?

BOARD EXERCISE: Take out a blank piece of paper. Question 1: What is our ministry’s strategy? Question 2: Is our strategy crystal clear to our CEO (Yes or No)? You have five minutes. Go.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for: Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board, by Max De Pree (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company).

The Board in the Boat, Part 2

In my last blog (Part 1), I began a series on strategy alignment with “The Board in the Boat.”

I asked, “Imagine—if your board had the elegance, the unity, and the team harmony of a precision rowing crew, the world’s finest!”

This month in a professional publication for CEOs and board members in the credit union profession, Joel Trammel’s addressed this question in his article, “Align Your ‘Rowers’ With Your Strategy.” While he focused on staff members—the same issues relate to board members. He writes:

“Do any of these sound familiar?
• The guy who’s doing really powerful, fast strokes—in the opposite direction of everyone else.
• The gal toward the back of the boat who’s barely pulling on her oars (and thereby demoralizing the people sitting behind her).
• The guy who appears to be rowing along with everyone else, but is covertly pulling the left oar a bit harder to move the boat in the direction he feels is best.
• The gal who’s so utterly concentrated on perfecting the minutiae of her own form that she can’t see she’s out of sync with everyone else.”

What is the cost in ministry impact when your board members are not all pulling in the same direction?  

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ve seen this next quotation before. (Maybe you’ve memorized it!)  It’s worth repeating at every board meeting:

Ram Charan preaches:
“There is nothing more important for a CEO than having the right strategy and right choice of goals, and for the board, the right strategy is second only to having the right CEO.”

This assumes one foundational principle: there is a strategy!

In his book, Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, the fifth question is simply,  “Does Our Board Really Own the Company’s Strategy?” Charan recommends that at every board meeting, every board member has the organization's two-page strategy document on the board table. (Is your strategy summarized in just two pages?)

Discussion should always then flow back to the question: “Does this new idea or change in our programs, products, or services align with our board-approved strategy?”

Charan again: “Boards need to understand basic strategy, but it’s not their job to create it.”

QUESTION: As you pray to discern God’s strategic direction for your ministry, is everyone rowing in the same direction, based on your written strategy?