photo by Moyan_Brenn
“A river without banks is a large puddle.” –Ken Blanchard
Recently, I wrote about how we have been trying to measure our success in ministry. This was all spawned one day when I asked my team this question: how do you know that you have been successful in your ministry?
The answers were interesting, but lacked depth. This was my fault.
For the last few years that I have been in ministry, I have not adequately helped my team know what it meant to be successful in our ministry. We had great ideas and well thought out initiatives to minister to the youth and young adult community, but we had no way of knowing if we were doing well.
At the same time, I was reading a book called EntreLeadership. One of the chapters spoke about setting your team up for success by giving them clear targets to hit. They called these “key results area,” or KRA’s. At the beginning of the year, they set up the KRA’s for each team member. At the end of the year, they measure the team members performance based on how well they did meeting their KRA’s.
The banks of a river allow the water to flow in a targeted direction towards its final destination. Without the banks, the river cannot stay focused and flow in one direction. It becomes a large puddle.
When I don’t give my team the “banks of the river,” I cannot expect them to move the ministry forward in the right direction. They will wander aimlessly, not knowing if they are moving forward in a way that is right or wrong.
I knew what I had to do. As difficult as it can be to measure success in ministry, we set clear targets for our ministry. We clearly laid out our KRA’s for the next two years. This makes it easy to know when we are on target and when we are not meeting our goals.
For the first time in a couple years, my team and I feel a clear sense of direction. We know what we want to accomplish, when we want to accomplish it by, and whether we’ve had the impact that we are hoping to have.
My team needs KRA’s. Whether they are staff or volunteers, everyone likes to measure their progress.
What are the KRA’s, or key results area, for your ministry?
We’ve been wrestling with the same thing in our department, and across our division in the diocese. John, would you mind sharing some of your KRAs with me to give me a more specific sense of what you have come up with. Obviously, our KRAs would be different, but seeing some samples or knowing more about the process you used to determine them might be very helpful for us. Thanks!
Hi Kathy, for us, it was as simple as putting some metrics to what we are doing. We’ve created intentional measurable goals around the events and formation that we do. For instance, for the launch of one of our new young adult initiatives, we’ve said that we would have 100 people regularly attending after the first complete year. This means that we really have to track who’s coming and how often they are coming. By the end of the first year, we know whether we have been successful or not. But, to get to the 100 mark, we know that our programming effort needs to be spectacular, our hospitality needs to be wonderful, and people need to feel a sense of community after they leave the program. So, in the end, to get to the 100 regularly attending mark, many pieces have to come into place and we have to do it well. The number of people coming measures all those things.
We still recognize how hard it is to measure faith. So we have to find things to measure that indicate faith. We think building a strong community of believers is one of the ways to measure faith (inspired by the research from Growing an Engaged Church).