Kevin Stone

Introduction

Developing infrastructure is the single most significant role of the leader of a growing organization.  But with all the demands on the leader, how does it have a chance of actually happening?  The Performance Cycle is a leadership model that provides the leader with the framework from which to develop a strong, stakeholder focused, infrastructure.  And, it’s simple enough to be easily understood by everyone.  It can also be used at any level in the organization, regardless of the challenge.

It’s all about scalability!  How can an organization leverage its knowledge and leadership?  There are only so many leadership people to go around and good leaders are extremely difficult to find.  So … building a world-class organization depends on the leader’s ability to develop good systems, processes, and methods and to make them known (easy to access, learn about, use, and change as needed) to the entire organization.  Unfortunately, this is a foreign concept to many leaders!

In short, The Performance Cycle is a model (below) for developing organizational infrastructure.Alignment is the goal. Is the Strategy aligned with the Stakeholder Needs? Are the Systems, Processes, and Methods aligned with the Strategy?

Stakeholder Needs

How does it work? It starts with working to understand Stakeholder Needs. The question is “Who are the stakeholders and what are their needs?” You might be wondering at this point what is meant by the term stakeholder. A stakeholder is the group of people with a stake (interest, benefit, concern, etc.) in the organization or endeavor.  In the church the obvious most important stakeholder is Jesus. In addition to Jesus, the community at large, the target group, attendees, volunteers, members, elders, and church staff are also stakeholders. Prayer, Bible study, demographic studies, surveys, and staff team experiences are all important tools in developing a thorough understanding of the needs of the stakeholders.

Strategy

Once an understanding of Stakeholder Needs is achieved, it’s time to develop a Strategy to meet the needs. What is the church going to do to meet the needs of the stakeholders? It’s pretty simple. Jesus told us that we must Go, Baptize, and Teach (Matt 28:18-20). Another example would be determining and understanding the “felt needs” of the target group and designing “experiences” that are designed to address those needs.

The Strategy is made up of a mission, vision, and a set of critical strategies the church will implement/accomplish to satisfy the stakeholders.

Systems, Processes, and Methods

Now that a Strategy has been developed and documented, leadership must create and implement systems, processes, and methods that accomplish the Strategy. Systems, processes, and methods are most often implemented via a Management System or some similar structured approach. The Management System is the backbone of the Performance Cycle. It’s the vehicle for ensuring that systems, processes, and methods are consistent, compatible with one another, and known by everyone in the church … especially new people. The Management System is a topic unto itself.

Results

How is leadership going to know how well the church is meeting its Stakeholder Needs? The answer is simple … through measuring results. It’s critical that the leaders in the church create measures that provide “at a glance” visibility of results (performance). If you’re not measuring it, you probably aren’t managing it. A great method for measuring results is to establish Key Performance Measures (KPMs) that are updated and reviewed by everyone on the team on a regular basis. For example, a graph showing “average weekly attendance” over time would be a good KPM.

Corrective Action (Diagnosis)

What happens when a measure shows that something isn’t working … isn’t meeting a Stakeholder Need? It’s pretty simple. Leaders must go into diagnosis mode, reversing the arrows on the Performance Cycle.

The first place to go is the Systems, Processes, and Methods box. Is there something that the church is doing (or not doing) that is causing a measure to go in the wrong direction? If the problem can’t be found in that box, the team must continue up to the Strategy box. Does the Strategy truly address the Stakeholder Need? What should be changed or tweaked? And if that’s not it, does the church really understand its stakeholders and their needs?