Key Takeaways:

• Your internal processes can support relationships your organization has with:

  • New ways to serve those you’re currently serving or new people you could be serving (or a combination of the two).

  • Deeper relationships with those you’re currently serving.

  • Effective relationships with external stakeholders.

• Your internal processes can create opportunities for operational excellence:

  • Improve your current processes by reducing costs and increasing speed and quality results.

  • Fully use your assets.

  • Manage capacity.

• Remember that internal processes are the foundation required to support and achieve the objectives you’ve set in the beneficiary/stakeholder and stewardship perspectives of the strategy map.

Resources

• The Organized Money: How to Start Getting Organized for the New Year

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!

I expect today's episode is going to be pretty short one because, as we get deeper into the different perspectives of the strategy map, a lot of the work that needs to be done I can't totally explain to you because it's completely based on what you've already decided to do in your previous layers of the strategy map. So it'll depend on your beneficiary and stakeholder perspectives and your stewardship perspective. So I can't go into great detail but I can give you a few things to think through when you're trying to figure out how to integrate the internal process perspective into your strategy map and link those objectives in that perspective into the objectives you've already created in the beneficiary and stakeholder and stewardship perspectives that we've spoken about the last couple of weeks.

Internal Processes Supporting New and Current Relationships

So, for today, I'm going to give you a few things to think through when you're choosing your internal process perspective objectives. And the first thing you want to think through when you're trying to figure out how to make your internal processes support the objectives that you've already created and link those up with the objectives you've already created, one thing is to consider any new ways that you can serve the people that you're currently serving or any new people that you can serve or a combination of the two. Sometimes as we go through doing our thing, we find that some of the things that we're doing are no longer serving the people that we're working with as well as it used to so sometimes we need to change course and come up with new ways to serve them or to find new people to serve.

For example, it's always great if you've been working with a group of people for a long time, and now they no longer need your help. So that means you need to find new people to work with and new people to serve. Or if you find that the way you are serving people right now is not as helpful as it used to be, then it's always good to have things that you're considering bringing into the pipeline, the next thing that you're going to be doing instead of, you know, getting to the end of the life of something and realizing you don't have the next thing to move on to. So that's one thing to keep in mind when you're coming up with your internal processes, how you're going to think through the next phase of how you're serving your current people or how you are going to bring on new people to serve.

The second thing to consider is how you can create deeper relationships with the people that you're currently serving. I talked about this a lot in the customer/beneficiary/stakeholder perspective, about how most of the time in ministry the thing that you're going to focus on... the strategy you're going to focus on most in that area is customer intimacy: how well you know the people that you're working with, how well you know what they need, how well you know the things that will help them the best. So the second thing to consider when you're coming up with your internal processes is what do you need to do on a day to day basis or what systems do you need to put in place in order to create deeper relationships with the people that you're currently serving?

Another thing to consider that kind of goes along with that when you're talking about your beneficiary and stakeholder perspective is, are there any processes that you can put in place that will help you establish effective relationships with external stakeholders, ie. being a good citizen in your community? How you can work with outside organizations or other outside people that you're not serving directly but work with other organizations or people to help to serve to come alongside what they're already doing or ask them to come alongside what you're already doing and help them and help yourself serve them better with your combined resources and how you can maintain effective relationships with people that you're not serving so that you can mutually benefit each other?

So, for example, how can you maintain a good relationship with your local governments in order to have them understand that you want to help the community, that you want to improve people's lives? So that, let's say, for example, they have an initiative that they think that you would fit in well, they would approach you and ask you to help with that. Or perhaps your local school or your school board. Or maybe there are businesses in your area and you have a particular initiative that you think they could add their input into. Something like a service they may be able to provide or maybe they have a product that will be especially helpful for the people that you're serving. Or perhaps it's a learning organization, that they have skills that they're teaching to people already that some of the people that you're serving may also benefit from. So those three things -- the new services or your new beneficiaries, the deeper relationships with your current beneficiaries, and establishing effective relationships with external stakeholders -- are kind of tied in together.

Internal Processes Supporting Operational Excellence

And the other thing to think about is how your organization can achieve operational excellence. So how the processes that you currently go through can be improved. So some things to think about when you're trying to achieve operational excellence internally with your internal processes is: how much do your internal processes cost? How well do they get the job done? How quickly can you turn around the results of what you're trying to come up with? When you're doing the things internally that you do from day to day, if there's a way that you can reduce the cost without affecting quality or, even better, every once in a while, you hit on a great idea that reduces costs and improves quality at the same time and speeds up how fast you can get things done, that's a really great win!

And other way to achieve operational excellence is to maximize the utilization of your assets. How can you use the things that you already have, the systems you already have to the maximum benefit? We discussed this already in the stewardship perspective: how to use your assets to the fullest -- if you need to rearrange how you're set up or if you need to completely switch up where you work out of. a

And another thing to consider when you're thinking about achieving operational excellence with your internal processes is capacity management. You can say that you want to do all these amazing things but if you only have, like, three or four volunteers and you want to help 100,000 people, you don't have the capacity to help that many people. You may have to scale that down. Or, for example, you want to... to do something that you know a lot of people will want to take advantage of but you have a very small facility, you might have to consider that you don't have the capacity to hold the amount of people that you anticipate will want to come. So you'll need to rent a space or find a space that you can use temporarily in order to have that. So to think about the limitations of either your physical capacity or your capacity for your volunteers or, like, even the capacity for your current processes that you have set in place.

Here's an example that's not directly related, but I remember listening to the news when COVID started and a lot of people, unfortunately, were out of work because of the pandemic and all of a sudden the employment insurance applications couldn't get through because there wasn't enough capacity. They didn't have enough people to process all those applications. If they were doing it online, a lot of jurisdictions found that they needed to increase their server capacity all of a sudden because there were so many people trying to apply for employment insurance all at the same time that their current system, which was set up for normal times, wouldn't work under this added strain of the additional needs caused by a surge of people all of a sudden needing to apply for employment insurance.

So these are things that need to be considered when you're looking at your internal processes: how much can all of these things handle if we decide to change this up or invite more people or serve different people or serve differently than we're already serving, can the processes that we're currently using, will those processes be able to support those changes or those additions to what we're doing? And, if not, and if that's the goal, if your goal is to achieve certain things when you're serving people... or even when you're trying to take in additional donations, if you don't have the systems and the processes in place in order to be able to support additional donations, then you need to make sure that those processes are changed and tweaked so that you can achieve the goals that you have in your stewardship perspective and your customer perspective because that's a stepping stone in order to be able to achieve those goals. You need to have your internal processes set first and those are the things that are there to support the ability to achieve your stewardship goals and your beneficiary goals, how you're going to serve the people that you're serving.

Next Steps and an Example

So I hope this gave you a few ideas on how to think about your internal processes when you are trying to support the objectives that you've already created in the stewardship and in the beneficiary and stakeholder perspectives that we've spoken about already. Think through what you need to have in place internally, what systems you need to have in order to be able to support the things that you're trying to achieve. You know the old saying, "Don't put the cart before the horse." If you're trying to achieve great things with the people that you're trying to serve, which is wonderful, you need to be able to ensure that you're going to be able to do that well with the processes that you're using to support that additional service that you're trying to put forward or the additional donors that you're trying to bring in or the new ways that you're trying to bring in donations are the new ways that you're trying to reduce your costs. Do you have systems in place in order to make sure that that continues?

I was watching a YouTuber today. Her channel's called The Organized Money. And she was talking about how she had a resolution one year that she was going to stay within her budget and she set her budget for the week and said, "Okay, this is how much money I'm going to be able to spend for the week so I'm going to stay within that." And the first day she woke up late, which meant she rushed out the door in order to get to work and realized partway there that she had forgotten her lunch, which meant she then had to spend money on lunch because she forgot her lunch. And then when she went out to get her lunch, she realized that she hadn't checked the forecast and it was pouring rain so she had to buy an umbrella so that she wouldn't come back looking like a drowned rat to the office! Nobody wants to look terrible coming back to the office. So not only did she have to go buy her lunch, she also had to buy an umbrella. So between those two things, she pretty much blew the amount that she had set aside for the whole week just in the first day.

And that's when she realized she could have this goal of sticking to a budget but she didn't have the systems in place in order to support that goal. She needed to check the weather every day in order to be properly dressed or to have the right accessories like an umbrella. She needed to make sure she woke up early enough that she wouldn't feel rushed so she wouldn't forget her lunch. Or, even better, if you can do this, to put your lunch by the door. If it doesn't need to be refrigerated, just put it right there by the door so you can just grab it and go. And have all that stuff set up in advance so that you can achieve the goal that you've set for yourself.

Sometimes I think we forget that systems need to be put in place, or habits or routines, in order to achieve the goals that we've set. We just can't run out and start achieving these things without setting the foundations first. These internal processes are the foundation of the stewardship and beneficiary and stakeholder perspectives that we've already discussed and that you've already set out as objectives. These internal processes are the foundation of those, so make sure those are solid so that you can actually achieve the objectives that you've set in the previous two.

On Our Next Episode

So on our next episode, we're going to be discussing the learning and growth perspective. And I'm pretty excited to discuss this because I've already mentioned my potentially controversial or different way of looking at things in the beneficiary perspective when I said your congregation is not the people that you're serving. This is where the congregation comes in: in the learning and growth perspective. The congregation that you're working with is your crew and, in our next episode, we're going to discuss the things that you need to set in place in order for your crew to be able to do the work of your organization, the skills and training you may need to put in place in order to get them set up for success in achieving the objectives that you're setting out in this strategy. So I look forward to discussing that with you then.

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