by unSeminary: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re talking with Rick Raiford, the executive pastor at Daystar Church in North Carolina.

Daystar started as a small country church in Greensboro, North Carolina and over the past twenty years has grown to become one of the fastest growing churches in the country. They have two campuses and a very contemporary and casual environment.

After twenty years, a lot of churches have peaked and may start to plateau or decline unless they reinvent themselves. Today Rick is talking with us about how Daystar has accelerated to continue reaching people by bringing clarity to the vision and systems in the church.

Let them know how to connect. // One of the things Daystar has learned is that at the end of the day a large number of people would love to connect to the church. But they will only do it if they know who you are, it’s clear how to connect, and what they can expect. Bring clarity in your organization. // Daystar began to evaluate where they had an opportunity to bring clarity, both within the organization, and externally with the visitors to the church. With the staff it’s important to be clear with everyone about expectations in their roles and what it looks like for them to win in their area of expertise. For the visitors, clarity is important in helping them understand the church and how it will partner with them to grow their faith and connect them with the community. Visitors come away with one clear next step and Daystar does whatever it can to help visitors take it.Welcome and evaluate. // A way to move forward is to know whether or not people are engaging in the church. Daystar uses a simple process called Growth Track to welcome visitors and connect them within church. Tracking the numbers of first time guests who enter Growth Track and the percentage of people who take their next step helps the staff to understand where the system is failing and if an area needs corrective action.Clarify for staff and volunteers. // Daystar set time aside to dialog with staff and volunteers about their roles, asking them questions such as what they enjoyed most about their jobs, what they enjoyed least, what they envision their roles and responsibilities to look like over the next few years, and what their perception is of what they should accomplish and how do they know they are doing well hitting their goals. The leadership team discovered it was harder for people to answer these questions than they had expected. The answers that staff gave highlighted just how much clarity is needed, even for people who have worked deep in the organization for several years. Clarify your vision. // Much of the confusion in certain areas really boiled down to Daystar needing to clarify their vision for their people. How can you say in a more clear, impactful, succinct fashion what’s most critical to your organization? How does it influence everything in the church, from the language used in communications to the leadership descriptions for different roles?

You can learn more about Daystar Church at their website daystargso.com.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: INJOY Stewardship Solutions

Craft customized church capital campaigns to fund new facilities, up-fit existing facilities, buy land, and pay off debt.

Find out how much your church could raise in a capital campaign led by INJOY Stewardship Solutions.

Source: Help Gaining Clarity in a 20 Year Old Church with Rick Raiford

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Source: Vlog: 6 Effective Principles of Portability

The post Vlog: 6 Effective Principles of Portability appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Rich Birch: Are you an executive pastor wondering where you should focus your time and energy?

Are you wondering exactly how things are really going at your church?

Are you a bit mystified about how to evaluate what’s really happening under the hood of your church?

Executive pastors are an incredible gift to growing churches. The best executive pastors sit at the intersection of vision and reality. That is to say, they spend their time balancing the bright future of the church on one hand and the facts of where the church is today on the other. In order to move a church from where you are to where you believe God is leading you as a community, you need a series of robust systems. Systems are simply repeatable processes that “Save You Stress, Time, Energy, and Money”.

Executive pastors need to think about how these systems are performing across all areas of the church. In a very real way, the executive pastor is like a farmer cultivating a garden of systems by balancing each of the varying needs and requirements of the church against each other. An executive pastor should spend a considerable amount of time evaluating how well each of these systems performs and adjusting them accordingly when they don’t function the way they should.

This is a perfect time of year, the season of change, to build a plan for evaluation and adjust the systems required to help your church move forward. Here are six systems you should consider when leading as an executive pastor:

…

Source: 6 Systems Every Executive Pastor Needs to Evaluate This Year – unSeminary

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Source: How to Empower People in Ministry

The post How to Empower People in Ministry appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Rich Birch: I was struck by Tim Wu’s column in the New York Times called “The Tyranny of Convenience” a few months ago and it has stuck with me. Core to the thesis of this article is that convenience is at the center of what drives humans today. The author sites a lot of compelling arguments that organizations that are prevailing today are doing so because they are figuring out how to make life more convenient for people.

Amazon is on a constant quest to make it easier to purchase items that we “need” all the time. The “Amazon Dash” buttons are a great example of putting physical buttons around people’s homes they just need to click when they want Amazon to send them replacement items. Need some more toilet paper? Just click the button and that item will be added to your cart and sent your way!

Remember Napster? The file sharing service that millions of people used to get free music that they loved. What killed this industry disruption? It wasn’t the cease and desist letters or a wave of moral outrage over “file sharing”. Ultimately, the iTunes music store killed Napster because Apple figured out how to make purchasing music more convenient than Napster. Easy beat free. People want things convenient more than they want their money.

What difference does this make for us in the church? So many church leaders are bemoaning the decline of church attendance and engagement. What if we looked at that issue as a convenience issue? What if we took it upon ourselves to make what we do easier to fit into people’s lives? What if we made the main thing, the plain thing? What if we went out of our way to make it more simple and more straightforward to connect with our churches? Here are 5 actions at our churches I think we need to make more convenient with some suggestions on first steps towards making them easier!

Make it Simpler to Volunteer

Growing churches move people out of their seats and into service. They do this because they know that when people get engaged in the life of the church they are more likely to invite their friends. Churches grow because people invite their friends. In a very real way, getting people to volunteer at your church is a key leading indicator of growth. However, in far too many churches it’s just too hard to volunteer. Rather than creating simple ways for people to get plugged in, we create roadblocks to service.

3 Ways to Simplify Volunteering at Your Church

“Shallow End of the Pool” Opportunities // You can’t have people you don’t know very well serve in every role at the church but there are roles you could plug almost anyone into. Think about roles on your teams that you could (almost) take a first-time guest and have them try out. Have a few of these roles ready to plug people quickly into if they are showing interest.
Short-Term Asks // Give people a “taste” of serving with a one-time 2-hour opportunity like a community service project. People can get their head around a one-time service opportunity rather than needing to serve every week at the church. Use these “short-term” opportunities as an “on-ramp” to other opportunities. But beware if people just want to keep serving in these short-term opportunities – don’t punish them!
Orientation & Form Filling Out // Avoid sending people home with forms to fill out. Instead, take time within your orientation or “new here class” to actually fill out the paperwork that is needed. If people leave the building with the paperwork not filled out they are less likely to return with it done another time. Build “fill out the forms” time into your orientation or exploration process.

Remove Donation Friction

Have you tried to donate to your church? You’d be surprised at how hard this can be. Lots of churches have outdated and painful donation processes that feel more like a gauntlet than a smooth transaction. When people choose to give to your church they are literally choosing God over the things of this world so let’s make sure that process is as smooth as possible! Let’s ensure we do everything we can to remove the friction in this process!

5 Friction Points to Look for in Your Donation Process

Limited Options // If people can only give in the “bucket” during the service you are missing out … obviously! But are you only accepting one form of credit card online? Do you allow people to do bank transfers? What about stocks or securities? Give more options!
Login Required // A pet peeve of mine is needing to log on in order to make a donation through church websites. This practice is fading but surprisingly still common!
To Make “Funds” // Don’t make your people choose between half a dozen different “buckets” to give to your church. Making people choose means people will opt out.
Mobile Friendly // People are used to doing financial transactions on their phones. Can they donate from their phone?
Ask People // Email everyone who has donated to your church in the last three months and ask them how you can make the process easier for them. You’ll be amazed at the simple ideas people will give you.

Watch these videos to see smooth online giving processes: 36 Lessons We Learned from Donating Online to 10 Churches

Download this PDF as a discussion for your team: 5 Lessons from Amazon for Your Church’s Digital Giving Strategy

Help People Get Connected

People who stick and stay at your church will have friends at your church. They might come for the great teaching or great music or even fantastic kids programming but they will stay because they know some people. For people to stick long term they need to move church out of the category of a place they go to and into the category of the group of people they know. They need to transfer from thinking about the “leaders” of the church as the primary reason for attending and to the list of other “normal” people who are a part of the church. We all know this truth but we often stand in the way of making our church relational.

3 Things You Can Do THIS WEEKEND To Make Your Church More Relational

Name Tags // Seriously. Buy a bulk pack of those “Hello! My Name Is” name tags and have fun with it. Enlist a group of friendly people to ask people what name they’d like on their name tag. Slowing people down and asking them this simple question is the first step towards more relationships in your church.
Coffee // If your church isn’t serving coffee before or after the service you’re probably missing out on a simple way to build relationships. There is something about a cup of java in people’s hands to help them connect!
Groups & Teams Onboarding //  This weekend, ask 10 volunteers this question: “If someone wanted to get plugged into a group or onto a team, how would they do that?” If you don’t get the same (and simple) answer from people then your onboarding process is simply too complex.

Ease the Inviting Process

Only 2% of people who attend church will invite a friend to church this year. [ref] This is a problem because your church grows when people invite their friends. In my latest book, Church Growth Flywheel, we explore lots of ways to encourage your people to start talking to their friends about the church. I’m convinced that a key part of the reason that people don’t invite friends more is that we don’t make it convenient enough. It’s up to us to make it super easy for people to talk with their friends about the great things going on in our churches.

5 Ways to Make Inviting Easier at Your Church

Straightforward Series Titles // Put the cookies on the bottom shelf! If your people have to guess what the series is about then they won’t be inviting their friends. Stop trying to be so creative! A simple tip is to think about what people would be searching online to find the content that you’re talking about. Make it easy to understand at face value.
Invite Cards // These simple tools continue to be an effective way to help your people invite their friends. A blurb about what’s coming up at your church with some compelling graphics and all the “dates & times” details and you’re ready to go! People use these cards to pass along to people that might be interested in coming to their church plus they serve as a physical reminder to people when they take them home.
What to Expect // A best practice for inviting is to ensure that prominently on your website is a “what to expect” section where your potential guests can get a sense of what coming to your church is going to be like. We take for granted when we attend church all the time how anxious this experience can be. Imagine you were going to attend a synagogue or mosque and think about the questions you’d have about that experience. Pictures and videos are particularly great for these parts of your website.
Invite to Invite! // Don’t forget to ask people to invite their friends. Your people will need reminders of how important this aspect of their faith is. Ask them directly to invite friends and family to various things at the church. Model to your people who you are connecting with to come to church. Share stories of how people have invited friends and when people have been inviting and impacted by the church! Turn up the inviting culture in your teams and groups by having these smaller groups of people pray for people that they’re inviting.
Compelling Content // Generate great social media content that people will want to share with their friends. In fact, the content needs to start with what will be shared and be about the church as a secondary goal. Generate helpful content that answers the questions people are asking. (Hint: Ask your people what question they or their friends have that you should be answering!) Aim to be consistent and compelling in your social content and it will make it easier for people to invite their friends.

Show People a Leadership Pathway

How do people move from serving at your church to leading at your church? What’s the pathway they need to follow in order to grow in their leadership with the church?

One of the ironies of too many churches is that we complain that we don’t have enough leaders but at the same time the pathway to how people become leaders isn’t clear. Rather than being an obvious and clear process, it’s often shrouded in mystery and wonder. Make it easier for people to take their next steps in leadership and you’d be amazed at how many leaders will step up to lead!

3 Key Ways to Clarify Your Leadership Pathway

Make it Visual // A simple drawing helping people understand the visual framework of the process that someone follows is an important tool in your clarification tool belt. LifeWay Leadership has been doing some great work with their Leadership Pipeline to develop great language and understanding in this area. Find a compelling framework and continue to communicate it over and over until it sticks. (Or until your people start making fun of you for talking about it so much!)
Everyone Has An Apprentice // One of the simplest ways to drive leadership development is to ensure that every leader has an apprentice serving with them. This natural mentoring relationship is a big step towards passing leadership to the next level of people. Requiring that people have an apprentice if they want to lead is a great step towards developing a leadership development system. If people are interested in leading, their first step is to apprentice under someone else. A part of that conversation is who they can bring on to apprentice under them before they step up to lead.
Training … Training … Training // Churches that prevail in this area are finding ways to train at every phase of the leadership experience. They are taking it upon themselves to ensure that people are growing in their leadership regardless of where they are. Growing churches don’t leave this training piece up to “happenstance” but are looking for places to infuse it into everything they’re doing. From weekly huddles when people arrive to serve to full-on leadership conferences, prevailing churches are getting leadership development resources in front of their people. They’re not waiting for people to come to them looking for development, but going to them instead!

Source: 5 Actions Your Church Needs to Make Way More Convenient – unSeminary

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by Rich Birch: There is no doubt that the multisite church movement has blossomed, and has a massive impact on the church today. In fact, today in North America one in six people attend a multisite church campus. That fact astonishes me! Each one of those campuses has had a group of volunteers at the core of the opening process that we’re calling a launch team. This is a group of people who have committed to be a part of starting up the new location and ensuring that it’s healthy and ready to impact its community.

Since the early 2000s, I’ve had the honor of being at the forefront of fourteen campus launches. We’ve seen around 1,500 volunteers join our launch teams. Today, over 9,000 people attend the campuses that sprung from the combined efforts of all those people. It has been a privilege to have a front row seat to this amazing approach to reaching new people with the message of Jesus. Seeing the multisite revolution from the inside has given me a perspective that is second to no other! As I reflect on what I’ve seen in all those teams, I’ve attempted to boil down some common lessons about these critically important teams, which I have discussed below.

Stop trying to find people like you.

At the core of the challenge of recruiting healthy launch teams is a sociological fact that we tend to attract people like ourselves. We need to consciously push against this reality. You don’t want to find people like you because most people leading these endeavors are innovators and early adopters, which is a minority number among people in the world. While being an innovator is great for leading the launch of campuses, they don’t make great volunteers long term because those “early adopters” tend to get bored after the initial launch phase and just want to move onto something new.

5 Categories of the Adoption Curve:

Innovators // Eager to try new ideas, products, and services, almost as an obsession.
Early Adopters // Rely more on group norms and values, as opposed to Innovators who rely on their own values.
Early Majority // Collect more information about products and services to weigh the pros and cons before they make a decision.
Late Majority // Adopt the new mainly because their friends have all adopted it and they feel the need to conform.
Laggards // Do not rely on group norms and values, just like Innovators. Their past heavily influences their current decision process.

Your approach to finding volunteers needs to tread slowly with people and ideally be built around finding “early majority” people who will take some time convincing them to get plugged in. However, when these people make a decision to be a part of the campus they will be more likely to stick and stay. It’s only when this group starts to pile in en masse that the late majority will decide to be a part of the team!

You need more. A lot more.

Stop trying to find the minimum number of volunteers needed. There is evidence across the movement that campuses with larger launch teams have better initial campus launch sizes but then also tend to reach more people over time. Figure out how many people you “need” to make the launch happen and then stretch. Push to get more people lined up on the team than you need to make things better long term.

5 Benefits of Larger Multisite Launch Teams:

Trajectory Setting // Studies show that the first five years of a campus is when the majority of its growth happens. [ref] A larger launch team means the campus is set up to maximize its potential of reaching people because there are more social connections to people outside the campus.
Healthier Teams // One of the paradoxes of volunteer recruitment is that the more volunteers you have the easier it is to get volunteers. People want to feel like they are needed but they don’t want to feel like the whole thing rides on them. More team members mean it’s easier to get more team members.
Critical Mass // Typically, when you’re launching a new campus you are attempting to replicate the “look and feel” of a larger campus in a smaller setting. These approaches to doing ministry are usually robust and require a lot of volunteers.
More Friends // We need people to do work at the campus but our volunteers are looking for relational connections. When more people are serving on teams, it means there is a greater potential for people to make new relationships.
Expanded Donor Base // Usually, people who are volunteering at a church are more likely to be giving to the mission of the church as well. Starting a campus is a financially stretching experience and more volunteers mean more people to connect with regularly about the financial needs of the launch.

The best time to get volunteers is before you launch.

It becomes so much harder to get team members once the campus is up and running. There is the pressure of actually running the campus, and that means the team doesn’t have as much time. However, there is also the reality that sometimes it’s easier to ask people to commit to an idea rather than the reality. I would suggest building a process that doesn’t assume that you’ll recruit any volunteers in the first three months after the launch but work to try to do it because you’ll need people!

If your team is “banking” on volunteers signing up in droves once the campus launches, they are setting themselves up for some disappointment. There is a funny thing that happens in the human mind… we think things will be easier down the road than they are today. We are overly confident in our abilities to acquire volunteers after the launch when in reality it’s actually easier before the launch. This is also the case because typically the leaders involved in the leadership of the new campus haven’t been through a launch before and so they can only picture recruiting people when the campus is open. Their own personal process is reliant on tapping people on the shoulder in the foyer or catching people’s eyes across the main auditorium and the idea of building a system that doesn’t rely on that seems foreign.

Think long-term campus health.

Don’t make volunteer decisions in the first year that will hinder the longer term health of the campus. When thinking through how you’re going to build teams, think through a process from the point of view of what is best after 3-5 years of the campus development. Too many church leaders make short-term volunteer team decisions only to regret those decisions down the road. This is particularly fatal in a multisite church because you are actually multiplying these problems and instead of moving onto the next campus you will end up needing to loop back and solve unhealthy campus dynamics rather than launching new locations. Take your time to build healthy and strong long-term volunteer teams.

3 Short-term Team Building Decisions to Avoid in Campus Development:

“Missionary” Volunteers // Asking people to come from another region “just for a few months” when your launch is a short sighted strategy because those volunteers will step out after a few months and hinder the new campus’ ability to function. Take longer and find people who are within the region you are launching in.
Going Against Policies // There are good and sound reasons why your church has set up best practices and policies in place around volunteer engagement. Don’t skip the line on background checks and documentation just to get someone placed. The risks associated with this behavior aren’t worth the potential long term damage that could be done to the church.
Paying Volunteer Roles // There can be a temptation to pay certain roles in the new campus… even those roles that are volunteer roles in others (e.g. set up teams, audio/visual teams, etc.). Resist this temptation! It is nearly impossible to back out of this long term and tends to spread to other roles within the campus.

Face to face is the best, but …

Anyone who has done a lot of volunteer recruitment knows that the best way to do it is to sit across the table from someone and ask them. It’s a powerful strategy to get to know people personally and then match the perfect role to them. This would be the preferred approach to building up a launch team for the next campus but there typically isn’t the time to have that many one-on-one conversations during the launch process, so you need to build a process that approximates the relationship building process as closely as possible, but does it at scale.

5 Ways to Scale Relationships in a Launch Process:

Social Connection Events // It is important to take time to ensure that people from the region that you are launching are getting to know each other. More than “information meetings” these events need to drive people to talk with each other and make friends.
Home Meetings // There is something incredibly personal about meeting with a group of 15-25 people in someone’s home with great snacks and talking about the vision of the church. This scales up nicely because over a month or weeks, with 2-3 meetings you can end up getting hundreds of people connected.
Lots of Communication // It’s been said that leadership is 10% making decisions and 90% communicating about those decisions. Building a communication process that drips down information about the launch, and ensures that everyone feels like they are getting the most up–to-date information, draws in a community.
Do for One What You Wish You Could Do for All // Don’t be afraid to have a healthy dose of face-to-face interactions with people. Sprinkle this throughout your launch process and you will get a chance to talk with a lot of people.
Office Hours // Make it a point to keep a regular schedule in the new community that you are launching in and let people drop in on you in that location. I would often pick an afternoon every week and just work out of a coffee shop in town and let people know about it. People would either book time with me there or just drop in to connect.

The perfect time to join the team!

Typically we have formal times during a launch process when we are looking to “intake” volunteer onto the launch team (like Sunday services, house parties, information events, etc.). If you restrict people from joining the team just when you are ready to receive them you will miss out on lots of potential volunteers. Your team and process needs to be built around a concept of “this is a perfect time to join the team” because the reality is that the moment someone puts their hand up to say they are interested, is the perfect time … for them.

5 Times When You Need to Be Ready to Plug in Volunteers Even When You Are Not Prepared:

Announcement Sunday // The day you make the big vision pitch about the launch of the campus, there will be people who are so excited to jump onboard and help. They don’t want to wait for your process to begin but want something to do right away.
Random Tuesday Afternoon // You’ll bump into someone as you’re going about life and they will express a keen interest to move from just learning about the launch to actually helping.
Right after Your Sign Ups // There are people that will hold back and see how many people sign up to be a part of this thing. They will only be ready to jump onboard once they see some sort of critical mass. Communicate that people are signing up and you’ll see more people jump onboard.
The Week before Launch // It never fails … I always get a call the week we’re launching that basically says “Hey, do you still need volunteers for that new campus?” I want to ask them where they’ve been all this time but alas I attempt to get them plugged in.
Launch Sunday // People will be excited and amazed that your team pulled it off. They’ll drop in and ask one of those volunteers if they still need any help. (The answer is always yes!)

Always Be Launching!

Alec Baldwin’s sales guru character named Blake in the classic 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross has a famous speech where he implores the sales trainees to be “ABC – Always Be Closing!” If I have to give one piece of advice that I would leave with you, it would be “ABL – Always Be Launching!” Build your approach to finding and releasing a core team around the concept that you are going to be moving onto another campus after this location. Don’t find a launch team but build a system for finding launch teams. Pull together a repeatable process that will reinforce itself and point you toward finding more people to end up on more launch teams to send out more campuses!

I experienced this best when we had our launches just 12 months apart from each other. We would be starting the very early process of building the launch team for the next campus just as the current campus was opening. In fact, many times I had core team members together at the launch Sunday of a campus and got to cast vision by getting them to imagine what would happen if in just a year we were having a “grand opening” in their community. The energy was palpable in those meetings! It was like rocket fuel that got our launch team recruiting off in the right direction because a core part of that team got to see the vision being lived out first hand.

Source: 7 Realities of Recruiting Multisite Church Launch Teams – unSeminary

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by Carey Nieuwhof: You’ve probably fallen into the trap of thinking that the only way you can attract and keep great people is to pay them.

It’s a natural way to think when you’re in leadership.

First of all, that’s not true. And second, if you lead a church, there’s no way that will ever happen.

Every church and almost every non-profit runs off volunteers.

Connexus, the church in which I serve, relies on hundreds of volunteers each week to do some incredibly demanding roles. How do you keep great people engaged?

Whether it’s staff or volunteers, you want to keep people engaged, motivated and committed to a common cause. While there are a variety of ways to do that, there’s one truth underneath it all that often gets missed.

Here’s how I believe people behave:

People gravitate to where they are valued most.

If you want to attract and keep great people, value them.

People gravitate to where they are valued most.Click To Tweet

Think about it. You behave this way.

Your best friends are the people who make you feel valued.

The family members you talk to most regularly are the ones who make you feel most valued.

You’ve left jobs because you didn’t feel like you were valued.

You willingly give your time to organizations or causes where you feel like you are appreciated and making a contribution.

If you do this, why would your team be any different?

So, as a leader, how can you make sure you are adequately valuing people, especially if you can’t pay them?

Even for paid employees, once you reach a certain salary level, money alone is not a motivator. If your entire strategy is based on compensation, you will not make people feel valued. Many well-paid people hate their jobs. And it’s of zero help when dealing with volunteers.

You might think the key is to say thanks a lot.

That’s a great start, especially in a world in which most people feel underappreciated. Gratitude is the currency of every great leader.

Never underestimate the power of a hand-written thank you note or the power of looking someone in the eye and commending them for something specific they’ve done. Do it daily.

Yet people still walk away from their jobs and roles after being thanked for what they’ve done. So thank people, but don’t stop there.

How do you really value people?

I think there are at least five things leaders can do to help people feel like they are valued. And they’re free. All they require is your attitude and heart as a leader.

Gratitude is the currency of every great leader.Click To Tweet

Here are five non-financial keys to attracting and keeping great leaders:

5 Non-Financial Ways To Value Leaders

1. Listen 

Everyone wants to be heard. One of the best ways you can value people is to listen.

Ask them questions. Don’t jump to conclusions. Look them in the eye. Maintain undistracted focus. Take notes. Use your ears far more than you use your mouth.

This can be a behavior you learn. I know because I’m a natural talker (plus, I have convinced myself I can solve anyone’s problem in 20 seconds).

Practice the skill of listening. People will feel valued because you actually are valuing them.

Leaders, use your ear far more than you use your mouth.Click To Tweet

2. Trust

Trust people. Sure, I know you’ve been burned before. Join the line.

I’m not talking about blind trust, but I am talking about trusting people when they’ve shown even an inkling of character, skill, and aptitude. Most people want to be believed in. You do.

And when you trust leaders, the best ones will rise to the occasion. They might even rise beyond it. And the others, well, you can deal with that when it happens. In the meantime, don’t punish the good people because you’ve run into a few bad ones.

Make trust, not suspicion, your default.

Make trust, not suspicion, your default.Click To Tweet

3. Respect 

When your talent or contribution is not respected or valued, it’s hard to want to stay. So respect the leaders you lead.

Give them your time, your attention, your ear, your heart and your gratitude. Men, in particular, crave respect.

You show respect by thanking people, listening to them, letting them make decisions and holding them accountable.

4. Challenge

This one’s a bit counter-intuitive, but make sure you have high expectations of the people you lead.

Challenge them! High standards motivate high capacity people. It calls out their best.

Very few high capacity leaders want to give their lives to something uninspiring or insignificant. High expectations usually yield higher returns.

High standards motivate high capacity people and high expectations yield higher returns.Click To Tweet

5. Empower

Give them something significant to do. As my friend Reggie Joiner says, people will not believe they are significant until you give them something significant to do.

Empower them. Give them something real. If you only have small tasks, you will attract small leaders.

Many leaders fear empowering the team because they’re afraid of leaders going rogue.

But if you really want to see your ministry grow, you need to have an empowered and aligned church. In my Breaking 200 course, I teach an entire session on how to align and empower your team, based on this simple formula: Clarity + Simplicity + Alignment = Scalability. You can learn more about the Breaking 200 course and get access for you and your team here.

When you start to give away significant tasks and authority, you will attract the best and brightest leaders.

People won’t believe they’re significant until you give them something significant to do.Click To Tweet

What Would You Add?

These are five meaningful ways to value people.

If you value them, guess where they’ll likely hang out? (With you.)

What would you add to this list? Scroll down and leave a comment!

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Source: How to Attract and Keep Amazing Volunteers You Can’t Afford to Pay

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