Key Takeaways:

• There are two sides to everything: a strength can also be a weakness and vice versa; a threat can also be an opportunity and vice versa.

• Use PESTLE to help you think through the factors that can present opportunities and threats to your organization.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for an outside opinion on your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. The opinion may not be completely correct but there may be a nugget of truth that you can use to improve on your weaknesses. You may also be pleasantly surprised at what others think you do well!

• The people in your organization and the organization’s culture are often big factors in an organization’s success.

Transcript

Hi, church leaders! Welcome to the CEO Pastor podcast. My name is Cindy and I am your host for today's episode. My goal is to provide the management expertise every church leader needs to produce the ministry experience every church leader wants. We'll skip the jargon and cliches and focus on ideas that will help you accomplish the church's mission in your unique ministry context. Ready? Let's go!

How are you getting along on creating your strategy statements: your vision, mission values, themes and results? Hopefully you've had some time over the past week to think about that. If you find yourself getting stuck, then maybe today's episode will help. It's a pretty straightforward episode so I expect it will be a nice, short one, which will give you some more time to refine your strategy statements.

SWOT and PESTLE

Today we're going to be talking about SWOT and PESTLE. So SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And PESTLE is just another way to analyze the opportunities and threats since most people... they're not used to thinking in those terms. So PESTLE stands for political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors that may go into the opportunities and threats that your organization is presented with. So I've created a document that I'm going to upload onto ceopastor.com for you to download and have as a reference where I've included some questions under each of these categories, the SWOT categories, and I just want to go through the questions very briefly so you have an idea of what they are.

Strengths and Weaknesses

So for strengths and weaknesses, one of the questions is: What do you do better than others? And for weaknesses: What do others do better than you? Now, sometimes it's a lot easier for us to come up with things that other people do better than us. But I would like to encourage you for all of these, that there's often two sides to each. So let's say, for example, that you're a really small organization. You see that as a weakness. Well, depending on how you look at it, being a small organization can actually be a strength because you have more opportunities to get closer to your beneficiaries, your donors. There's not a whole lot of layers to your organization. You can create a better sense of community with your volunteers and your staff. You can also be more flexible because you can make changes on a dime whereas, if you have a big organization, it takes a lot longer and involves a lot more people to switch directions whereas, if you're smaller, you can just say, "Okay, we're not doing that anymore. We're going to do this." So for your strengths and weaknesses: What do you do better than others? What do others do better than you?

So, if you find yourself coming up with a lot of weaknesses, then try to flip them and make them into strengths and see how those weaknesses can also be strengths. If you have a lot of strengths and not so many weaknesses, try to flip those and see how those can become more of a problem than a benefit. There's always a good side and a bad side to everything.

And a really interesting question that I've included on this document is: What do others see as your strengths and what do others see as your weaknesses? So you may want to take some time to ask outside people what they think of your organization. Sometimes people from the outside can see things a lot more clearly than we can and we may think we're doing a great job in one area and people from the outside are thinking, "No, that's not doing it for me."

I remember when I came home from university and I was talking to my uncle, who was a pastor at the time, and he was saying, "Oh, the church is going great and we're growing so much." And I said to him, "Umm... I'm not sure that it's grown a whole lot since I was away from school. It seems that it's about the same size as it was before I left." And that kind of made him a little bit upset for a while but, then when he sat down and thought about it, he said, "You know what? We are kind of around the same size as we were over the last eight months. Maybe we need to step it up a bit." So sometimes it's not very nice to hear what other people see as your weaknesses especially and sometimes they'll surprise you by what they think your strengths are. But it's always good to ask and at least consider their opinion. They may not be right. But sometimes if people say something that you don't agree with and you take a moment and think about it, you might realize, "You know what? They don't get it completely right but, yeah, they... they have a few good points so I better check into that and see if I can make some improvements there."

And also under the strengths, I have a question here: What unique capabilities and resources do you have as an organization? And the key word in that is "unique". Let's say, for example, we're talking about a fish processing plant. Well, every fish processing plant has to have a quality management program in order to make sure that the food they're processing is going to be safe for the people who eat it. So everyone has that capability. That's not a unique capability. It's an important capability because you don't want to make people sick with the food that you're producing, but it's not a unique capability. So you need to look at your organization, your capabilities and resources, and say, "What's different about what we have here?"

And I'll give you a hint. One of the biggest ways that your organization is unique is the people who are working with you in that organization. People cannot be duplicated. They have unique experiences. They have unique perspectives. They have unique views on ideas. They may have unique education, depending on what you're working with for your organization. And it is almost impossible to find someone with the exact same knowledge, capabilities, education, etc., as the person you have right in front of you. So if you want a big hint as to what is unique about your organization, start with your people.

You may also have unique capabilities and resources depending on where you're located. If you have a building that's in kind of a special area, somewhere that's close to the people that you're trying to serve or close to, you know, a certain population pocket that's an especially needy population pocket, that may be a unique capability or resource that you have. So try to think outside the box on that one. It's not just about, you know, your knowledge and skills and money. It's everything that makes up what your organization is able to do.

And then on the weaknesses side, I've also included the obvious question: What do you need to improve? Now I've put in some examples: knowledge, skills, resources (and, remember, resources are not just money; they're also non-monetary things) and also your organizational culture. I have found... I've been in a lot of different organizations, if you have a bad organizational culture, you have a big-time weakness. If your organizational culture is that everybody says, "Well, that's not my job. I'm not going to do that", that's not really helpful when somebody decides, "You know what? I don't want to come to work today" or someone gets sick and everybody just washes their hands of whatever that person's tasks are and says, "That's not my job." Or if you have an organizational culture of overspending because people are used to an older way of doing things where there once was a lot of financial resources, now there's no longer as many -- that can be an issue, too!

So think about your organizational culture as well because that can drive a lot of your direction. And if you have a poor organizational culture or an unhelpful organizational culture for the direction that you want to go, that can be a major weakness and a major barrier to getting you to that goal.

Opportunities and Threats (and Including PESTLE)

Now we'll move down into the opportunities and threats and for this particular analysis, we want to remember the PESTLE factors: the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors that make up the environment that your organization finds itself in.

So a couple of the questions in the opportunities and threats are: What trends or conditions may positively affect you? and What trends or conditions may negatively impact you? And, again, there's always two sides to something. Something that you think is bad might actually be an opportunity. Well, there's a saying (I can't remember exactly what it is), but, like, your pain points tend to be opportunities. So sometimes the things that you think are negative, you can actually turn into a positive.

So let's say that you see that there's a trend, younger people who are not as interested in spirituality, or at least so it looks. It might be, in fact, that they're not so much uninterested in spirituality as uninterested in religion. Unfortunately, there's been a lot of circumstances over the past few decades that have turned a lot of people off to religion, but they're not turned off to spirituality a lot of the times. There's a lot of people that consider themselves to be spiritual and to have a spiritual practice. They may not do it in a church setting, or an official religion setting, but they do have a spiritual practice that they try to cultivate in one form or another. So just because they're not interested in religion doesn't mean they're not interested in spirituality. You just need to come at it from a different angle and not be quite as insistent on the religion aspect of it and introduce them to the relationship that you have with Jesus and how that has changed your life and cultivate that relationship with them.

Jesus says that, "When I am lifted up, I will draw everyone to me." So if we lift up Jesus, he's an attractive person. Most people... they respect Jesus, even people of other religions that don't believe in Jesus in the same way that we do. They all think that Jesus was good man and a great teacher and a wise person. So people aren't necessarily against Jesus. They're just against the religion that some of us have created surrounding Jesus and made it more difficult for people to see who Jesus actually is.

Another trend, of course, that we're all experiencing right now is the pandemic. Depending on your situation with the pandemic, people may not be able to attend church services in person, and sometimes that might scare us into thinking that people will forget about going to church or that people will become disinterested because they will find something else to do and then just not bother to come back. But history has also shown that anytime a large disaster happens, it makes people more engaged in spirituality, more interested in the big questions of life that they haven't had a chance to ponder. And that a bit of a shake up makes them sit back and think, "Oh, I haven't thought about that for a while. What is the meaning of life? What happens if I get sick and die of COVID? What will my family do when I leave? How do I get support for the issues that I'm experiencing?"

Everybody's struggling to deal with all the changes that we encounter from day to day as we deal with COVID and they may be having difficulties with mental illness. And they might be thinking, "Wow, I didn't realize that these thoughts were things that could come up for me! How do I deal with this? Because I've never had to deal with this stuff before." So that's a condition that can positively affect organizations.

People are looking for people to help and people who aren't struggling as much, they're more willing to help others. So how can you create an opportunity out of a condition that may, at first blush, look like a negative thing? How can you create an opportunity out of that?

And then under the opportunities section, it says: What opportunities are available to you? Now sometimes we sit here and scratch our heads and start wondering, "Well, I don't know. I don't see any opportunities around." I think a good place to start when you're trying to figure out what the opportunities are, especially in ministry, is to ask people that are serving the public on a daily basis. So it might be good idea to check in with your local school or to check in with your local police detachment or to check in with your local government representatives. They're dealing with the public all the time and they're seeing a lot of the difficulties that people are experiencing and they may be able to suggest ways that you can help as a ministry organization.

Now, they may be a little hesitant because they don't know... like, a lot of ministry organizations have gone in and kind of run roughshod over everything and put a lot of conditions on their service. So they may be a little hesitant about that. (Remember what I said earlier about people not really liking religion because they've had poor experiences with religious people.) But if you go in and just assure them, "We're here to help. If you have anything that you think that we might be able to help with...."

Or even another organization that might be near you. I know that, around here, if you ask any of the seniors home administrators, they have a list all ready of things that you can do to volunteer at the seniors home. If you ask at palliative care, for example, they may have a whole bunch of needs that they need done -- not just people to come in and hang out with people as they take their last moments on earth, but they may need people to come in and do maintenance work. Most other organizations... when you say, "I'm willing to help", they're pretty quick to say, "This is what we need help with." They've got a pretty good idea of their needs. That might be a good place to start to figure out what the opportunities are.

And then once you find out what the opportunities are, you can also consider what impact your strengths might have on those opportunities. So if the opportunity... one of the opportunities that you've uncovered is a building needs its plumbing fixed and nobody in your organization knows how to do plumbing, that's probably not a good opportunity for you... although, if you know somebody who's good at plumbing, you might pass that need on to them so they can help. But just because an opportunity gets uncovered doesn't necessarily mean that your strengths feed into fulfilling that opportunity in the best way. So that will help you navigate your opportunities so you're not as overwhelmed with all of the needs. There's needs everywhere. You won't be nearly as overwhelmed with all the needs because you'll be able to use the strengths and weaknesses that you've already listed out to say, "Okay, this is where we best fit."

Then on the threats side, another question you can ask is: What are others doing that may negatively impact you? And this is not necessarily antagonistic. It might be that, for example, your building is in a place that is starting to become an industrial section of your city or town. In that case, you may need to consider moving locations because, if you're looking to serve people and most people won't be living in that area anymore because it's becoming increasingly industrialized, you may need to consider switching your locations. Or, on the other hand, you could see it as an opportunity and minister to the people working in that industrial area during the day -- different ways of looking at things. It may not be that people are trying to purposely negatively impact you. But there may be things that just happen to be going on around you and decisions that are being made around you that do have an effect on you. And you may need to find ways to get around those things.

And here's a big one for not-for-profits and ministries: Do you have solid financial support? I'm sure that's the question that everyone just dreads hearing because it always seems to feel like we don't have enough financial support sometimes because we can't do everything. But it's an important question nonetheless. Any business person will tell you that cash is king. And it's not that it's the most important thing you're trying to do as a ministry organization is to bring the cash in, but you cannot operate if you don't have cash. You can't serve the people that you're trying to serve if you don't have some kind of financial resources. So it's important to look at this question, even though it may be a little intimidating, and ask yourself, do you have solid financial support? And if not, figure out some ways to get around that to mitigate that issue.

And finally, a similar question as for the opportunities: What impact might your weaknesses have on these threats? If you come up with a list of threats -- how trends, conditions, or other people may be negatively impacting you -- and you find that your weaknesses are feeding into those threats and making them worse, that may be a clue that those are the things that you need to work on first if you're trying to improve on your weaknesses.

Next Steps

So I would encourage you as you think about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that you remember that there's often two sides to each one. So something that's a strength could be a weakness, too; something that's a weakness could actually be a strength in a different way, depending on how you look at it. So I encourage you to try to broaden the box and try to see things as widely as possible because, when you look at things in different ways, sometimes it will improve your focus and improve how you're going to move forward as an organization. So I would encourage you if you haven't had a chance to finalize your strategic statements from last week that you continue to finalize them. Hopefully going through your SWOT -- your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats -- will help you refine those further.

Our Next Episode

And it will also come in handy for the next episode, which is going to be talking about the beneficiary and stakeholder perspectives of the strategic map. So I look forward to discussing that and we'll see you next week.

Thank-you for joining me for today's episode of CEO Pastor podcast. I hope you discovered an idea that you can apply in your unique ministry context. Head over to ceopastor.com for more resources and meet up with me and other church leaders on social media for further discussion. Any questions or suggestions? Email me at podcast (at) ceopastor.com. And don't forget to share, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to help spread the word that managing ministry better makes ministry better.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai