What is your keystone organizational goal?
Perhaps you’d say the mission and vision. Or maybe it’s the strategic initiatives you and your team generated at a recent planning session (I conduct a fair amount of these sessions for churches – let me know if I can help you and your team). Or maybe you’re in a season of struggle and your goal feels more like survival.
Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of helping dozens of churches (and some businesses) identify their keystone goal – and they are all the same.
The EXACT same.
There are specific nuances in ideation and implementation, but each goal is identical. For instance, each church was unique. They were in different denominations and perceived church differently. They exist in various communities. But their goal was identical.
What is this one goal that should be your goal, too?
Maximizing Potential
Maximizing potential is the ideal target for any church, business, or organization (and this is true for you, as well). Maximizing the potential of your church is what moves the mission the furthest. Fully realized potential is the path to realizing your vision. Potential helps support the achievement of your organizational initiatives.
Working Against the Goal of Greatest Potential
So why don’t we all achieve our potential? If it’s this important and clear, what’s the problem? It’s simple, really.
Maximizing potential means fighting against the path of least resistance. Everything in our systems wants to journey down the road of least resistance. Our brains are wired to conserve calories by reducing challenges, and our organizations are group versions of our brains. Friction causes us to work harder and smarter. That’s not what we desire. Our default is to do neither.
Think about it. Reaching our potential takes work, transformations, and change. Realizing potential isn’t easy because potential brings resistance. Potential demands a willingness to critique and be critiqued. It’s hard work, and we don’t naturally like hard work. If we did, we’d all be bathing suit models rather than googling “miracle overnight diet pills.”
Achieving Your Organizations Potential
Every church, company, and organization should strive to become the best version of itself. That’s the goal. I love this goal. It allows for uniqueness in culture and approach. It keeps churches from becoming homogenous, which is vital as every community is diverse.
The critical question is, how can you achieve maximum potential?
This is not a mission or vision question. Of course, if you don’t have a clear mission and vision, start there.
This is a strategy question. And ultimately, it’s a transformation question.
The assumption being if you’re still working to achieve your potential, you’ll need to make some minor adjustments, incremental changes, or potentially significant transformations to get there. This is where we face the most significant resistance, and hence how we begin answering our core question.
Every organization is perfectly designed to achieve the results it’s currently experiencing. If your current experience is less than your potential, there is work to do. And this work will require some changes.
Prepare to maximize potential by recognizing these emotional obstacles:
Recognize the power of comfort.
Organizations (and their people) cannot remain comfortable and engage in change. Change is discomforting. Continuing to do what we’ve been doing is comfortable, but if what we’ve been doing isn’t maximizing our potential, something much change.
Yet comfort is a powerful force in our human condition. As mentioned previously, we desire to conserve energy. We like to be comfortable. When we jog or exercise, our body is able, but our mind pushes back. Exercise is uncomfortable. And so is changing anything within your organization or church model.
If you hope to maximize potential, comfort cannot be a priority.
Recognize the necessity of grief.
People don’t resist change, but they do resist loss. Introducing change means something that has been must give way to what will become. People want to hold on to what was. What was is comfortable. Change will bring something new, and we’ll lose what was.
Perhaps we’ll lose a portion of our job. Maybe the organizational chart will change, requiring we report to someone new. We may lose some influence. Or we may gain some, which is still a change that might make our job more difficult.
You get the point. Change introduces loss, and loss must be grieved for a person to move forward.
If you hope to maximize potential, plan to grieve some loss and lead those around you through the process.
Recognize the benefit of confusion.
As things change, clarity is temporarily lost. Change introduces new systems and circumstances that are unfamiliar and initially vague. As a leader, you will question the process in this emotional space as you’ve always heard that leaders should know where they are going and know all the details along the way.
That’s ridiculous.
Leadership isn’t about knowing every step. Leadership is about knowing where you need to go and leading the effort to get there. This means there will be some elements of confusion. And that’s a good thing.
Confusion occurs as people let go of what they’ve known. Confusion is proof that you are making progress. Also, confusion is where innovation often appears. As we move away from the past, we can better envision the future and the innovations required to get us there.
Don’t misinterpret confusion as a negative if you hope to maximize potential. Prepare to provide clarity about the destination, even if there are a few clouds to navigate along the way.
Recognize the time necessary for acclimation.
The final emotional step is acclimation. Acclimation occurs when we fully embrace the new way of life and embed it into our values and culture.
Acclimation doesn’t happen overnight. As you maximize potential, you’ll need to adjust the culture. Culture doesn’t change easily or quickly. This is why we must make time for the process to evolve.
As confusion begins to wane, incremental wins will accumulate. This accumulation will point toward the vision you’ve held out front throughout the process. The more these incremental wins are celebrated, the more they will be repeated, and the faster the values and culture will adjust.
If you hope to maximize potential, allow the culture to embed systemically and intentionally over time into your organization.
Conclusion
No genuine leader is satisfied with mediocrity. If there is a gap between where we are and where we know we could be, we want to close that gap. That gap represents our unachieved potential. Close it by implementing a change process, but don’t forget to lead the people on your staff through the emotional obstacles.
How can I help?
Most of my clients consider me their CSO (Chief Strategy Officer). Partnering with ministry and marketplace leaders from innovation through implementation is why I created Transformation Solutions. I’m dedicating my time to helping leaders like you discover potential problems, design strategic solutions, and deliver the preferable future. That includes you.
