Objectives

Does your staff have objectives, or just hopes?

Most churches have a one-to-five-year vision. Fewer churches have enough small wins along the way to keep staff motivated and moving in the same direction.

Planning is not a substitute for dependence on God. Prayer and discernment determine the direction; objectives and key results help ensure the church is stewarding that direction faithfully.

Get S.M.A.R.T.

The most basic form of planning is wrapped up in this classic acronym. Here's how it breaks down:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Realistic
5. Time-bound

If the goals you are giving your staff fall outside of these, that's not necessarily bad, but has been proven to be less motivating.

Let's imagine that a goal of your church is to grow by 2x over the course of a year. That's an amazing goal! But it's not small enough to feel like there's something to do every day to achieve it.

There are 260 non-weekend days in the year. Assuming all of these are workdays (which isn't true, but humor me), that means that to increase the church by 100%, the staff need to do something to grow the church by 0.38% per day. That's not a lot of movement! It's hard to feel accomplished with that broad of a goal.

I would argue that this goal struggles with the “specific” and “actionable” aspects of SMART planning. While it is certainly measurable, it doesn’t provide enough clarity about what the staff should do this week to move the church toward that outcome.

The Key is Key Results

The modern form of project planning then separates Objectives from the Key Results required to achieve them. Objectives don't have to be SMART, but the Key Results do. This opens you up to broad goals and missions, but gives your teams enough detail to operate.

Pick a timescale for your KRs (Key Results), this is typically quarterly. Then, break down what each department needs to do in order to move closer to the objective by the end of that timescale.

If your objective is church growth, your Key Results should be connected to outreach, retention, discipleship, or guest engagement rather than simply being a list of activities:

• Objective: Grow the Church by 2x
• Q1 Key Result: Execute VBS with at least 40 students
• Q1 Key Result: Expand groups with at least 2 additional options
• Q1 Key Result: Have at least 2 guest sermons
• Q1 Key Result: Collect contact information from at least 25 first-time guests and complete follow-up within 7 days

Now all of these are time-bound by default, they each have a measurable aspect with numbers, and they are specific enough to not be argued about whether they were achieved or not.

Now the attainable and realistic parts are going to be up to the size of your church and the abilities of your team. If after your first quarter they were all done in the first two weeks, step them up next time. If every single one is failed, scale them down.

Ownership is Essential

Now comes the next step, with another cool model: RACI.

1. Responsible: Who is responsible for getting the work done?
2. Accountable: Who oversees the task?
3. Consulted: Who needs to assist in completion of the task with additional information or support?
4. Informed: Who needs to be kept up to date on the progress of the task?

Each of the KRs needs to be assigned to someone in the A slot. Who on staff is overseeing the task? They don't need to be the one doing the work, but they will be the one held accountable to the lead pastor or elders for failure to complete it.

In the corporate world, this role is often called an Executive Sponsor. In a church, it may simply be the staff member who owns the outcome.

The rest may be the same for most of your KRs. The rest of the staff and the lead pastor need to be Informed and Consulted. The Accountable owner may also be Responsible for the work, but responsibility can be delegated. Accountability cannot.

One common mistake is assigning the same KR to five different people. When everyone owns something, nobody owns it. Every Key Result should have exactly one Accountable owner, even if it crosses multiple departments. Someone has to be the end of the line, or you risk a Bystander Effect problem:

At any given moment, church leadership should be able to quickly identify who owns each Key Result and whether it is on track. A simple scorecard can accomplish this:

Not every Key Result should be binary. Some will be complete or incomplete, while others may be measured by percentage progress. The important thing is that leadership can quickly determine whether a KR is on track, at risk, or off track without needing a lengthy explanation.

Not Everything is a Church-Level KR

Only the big ticket items need to be tracked as a full staff or leadership team. Maybe there's a subtask that needs to be completed by a team in the same quarter. For example, the children's team wants to re-organize classrooms to better support VBS. The lead pastor shouldn't know or really care if that's done, but if the Children's Pastor wants to track it internally in his team meeting, he can. It just doesn't need to bubble up.

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

Many churches dislike meetings, and for good reason. Poorly run meetings waste time, drain energy, and create frustration. The solution, however, is not to eliminate meetings entirely. The solution is to make them purposeful.

If your church has objectives and Key Results, there must be a regular rhythm for reviewing them. Otherwise, goals become aspirations rather than commitments. A staff member should never be surprised at the end of a quarter that a Key Result was missed. Progress, risks, and obstacles should be discussed long before a deadline arrives.

This does not require hours of meetings every week. In fact, shorter and more focused meetings are often more effective.

A simple rhythm might look like this:

• Weekly Department Meetings: Review departmental tasks, identify obstacles, and assign next actions.
• Monthly Staff Meetings: Review church-wide Key Results and discuss areas that need additional support.
• Quarterly Planning Meetings: Evaluate completed Key Results, identify lessons learned, and establish the next quarter’s priorities.

The purpose of these meetings is not to create more work. The purpose is to ensure that everyone understands what success looks like and how their efforts contribute to the mission of the church.

Knowing what KRs to make requires a lot of listening by the staff. It might be your first reaction to meet with the leaders and volunteers and push information down. Churches are great at that, you probably don't need any help.

The issue within the church is staff letting information come back up. Your volunteers aren't there on your Monday morning meeting to break down the service. How do you know if an objective is on track? How do you know if a department needs resources?

Find ways to get the information out of those that make the church operate. You don't want to be greasing the wrong wheel and upset that your KRs keep going off the rails.

Objectives create focus. Key Results create action. Accountability creates ownership. Communication creates alignment.

This level of tracking is one of the first steps in getting enough benchmark data for a robust employee review process, which I'll discuss in a later post.