For the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about the people that serve on the Middle School Ministry Staff at NewSpring. We have a quite diverse group of young people. John Flowers, David Hall, and Lindsay Owens do an incredible job of serving our students. Each one of them have a passion for Jesus, for middle school students, and or the local church. I consider it a privilege to be able to lead, but more importantly serve alongside them.
For sometime now, I have had the feeling that we were not structured in the most effective way for us to continue to grow. As most leaders can say, “We need more staff!” Although, I agree that we could all use more staff, the bigger question for me became “Are we structured to continue to grow with the staff that we currently have?” My answer was no!
Marcus Buckingham stated, “Great managers find out what is unique about a person and capitalizes on that.” In an effort to be the most effective manager/leader, that was an evaluation that I needed to make of my staff. Needless to say, when I took a concentrated look at the unique qualities and passions of my staff, I knew that changes must be made.
First, I was trying to pigeon hole two different people into one job description/role. John and David are totally different in personalities and passion. How could I get them in a role/situation that would give them the best opportunity to succeed? That meant for me that I needed to put them in a role that they were excited and passionate about.
John’s strengths lie in creative thinking, brainstorming, creating videos, creating skits, acting, random thoughts, and creating creative environments/sets. David’s strengths lie in loving students, creating relationships with those students, being about to get into the student’s worlds, know what is going on in their lives, and a desire to push them deeper in their relationship with Jesus. How could I capitalize on those and still be effective and grow in the ministry? How do I make sure that every area they were responsible for continues to be covered as well.
The answer: CHANGE…MOVE OUT OF COMFORT…GET HELP! Now, David and John are both serving in their strong areas. David is in charge of campus visits (coordinating visits with volunteers leaders, schools, and making sure that they have permission and any information they need to visit students), follow-up, and assisting me create the best discipleship program for our students. John is in charge of our creative sets, skits, videos, and execution of the night at IGNITE.
John and David used to be over all of our volunteers. Now the volunteer leaders report to volunteer Team Leaders. These Team Leaders report to me. See I had to pull stuff off of my staff and take on some responsibility, but minimize that responsibility by recruiting people who wanted to love on small group leaders. This meant giving away responsibility to VOLUNTEERS. I was really nervous about this, but each Team Leader is stoked about it. They have arose to the occasion and taking on the care and ministering of the small group leaders. It has been great so far.
Also, the neat thing about it is that David and John are both recruiting leaders to assist them in these roles. they are are GIVING away opportunities to ENABLE others to serve Jesus. John has a team that meets with him each Saturday morning to discuss creative sets, design, games, etc. David is in the process of getting a group together to assist in visiting schools (we have over 10 represented in our ministry)and doing follow-up. That is so cool.
Lindsay, continues to do an AWESOME job of assisting me, keeping organized, scheduling appointments, and making sure my brain does not get fried. She has also taken on other responsibilities in accordance with her passion. She now takes care of all of our potential volunteers and walks them through the process of getting involved, volunteer training, volunteer appreciation, and much more. This is something she is passionate about and does a whole lot better than me!
These decisions and changes made me get out of my comfort place and JUMP into a place that is much better! Thank God for doing this and making it work! You are awesome!
