Episode 010: Strategy Map — Learning and Growth Perspective

Key Takeaways:

• The learning and growth perspective aligns your human resources (staff and volunteers) and your physical and technological infrastructure with your strategy.

• Define your organization’s learning and growth needs to support the strategic objectives on your strategy map:

  • Technology and infrastructure requirements.

  • Organizational culture requirements (does your culture align with the core values on your strategy map?).

  • Core competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal attributes of your staff and volunteers).

• Consider the time, energy, attention, and finances that your staff and volunteers have available and whether they are serving internal “customers” (others working within the organization) or external “customers” (those your organization serves).

Resources:

• Michael D. Watkins, “What is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care?” (Harvard Business Review)

• Edward J. Cripe, 31 Core Competencies Explained (Workforce.com)

• CPA Canada, The Chartered Professional Accountant Competency Map

• Asian Efficiency, TEA: The 3 Pillars of Productivity You Need to Unlock Your Full Potential

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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!

Today we're going to discuss the learning and growth perspective of the strategy map. And the purpose of this particular perspective is to align your human resources and your technology infrastructure with the strategy and the objectives that you have already created in the previous layers of your strategy map. So the question you're going to be asking yourself as you think about this perspective is how will the objectives in learning and growth support the objectives that you've created before? You want to be sure that you're linking all the objectives together so that you see clearly if we do this, then this should happen. If this happens, this should happen. If this happens, then this should happen... all the way up through the different perspectives that we've talked about: learning and growth, internal processes, stewardship, and the beneficiary and stakeholder perspectives. You should be able to draw a clear line between what you're doing in one layer into another so that there's no orphan objectives out there that don't have any other things connected to it to help support the achievement of that particular objective.

So as I was researching for this particular episode, I realized that the topic is huge. So I'm going to be talking about a lot of these ideas on a very high level. And I think I'm going to do our next series about this perspective in particular, about how to measure and manage both individual performance and, as we will talk about on the next episode, organizational performance because our next episode is going to be talking about measures, targets, and initiatives that you're going to set in place in order to achieve the objectives we've been working through layer by layer.

Three Learning and Growth Perspective Elements

So when you're talking about the learning and growth perspective and thinking about how to align your human resources and your technology and your infrastructure with the strategy objectives that you've already created, there's three major things that you have to define.

Technology and Physical Infrastructure

The first one, and the easiest one, in my opinion, is to define the technologies and/or infrastructure -- like, physical infrastructure -- required to achieve the objectives that you've set earlier. If we want to start a YouTube channel, we're going to need to set up some technology. We're gonna have to have a camera and some decent sound equipment to record with. Like, those are things that are pretty easy to figure out depending on what your objectives are. It's fairly easy to determine, okay, if we want to do these things, we're gonna have to set these certain things in place.

Organizational Culture

The second one that you need to define in this learning and growth perspective is the organizational culture that's required in order to achieve the objectives that you've set out. Your organizational culture is going to be built on the core values that you've set out earlier in creating your strategy map. So whatever your core values are that you've determined are the foundation on which your organization sits, you then need to look at those core values and say, "How can these core values manifest themselves within our organization, not just as we approach people who are outside the organization, the people that we're serving?"

So, for example, if one of your core values is innovation, do you listen to ideas that your staff or volunteers bring to you? Or do you just dismiss them out of hand as, "Oh, that's not the way it's been done. We're not going to do that we're not going to try anything new"? Well, if your core value is innovation, you should be listening to every idea and considering every possibility and seeing if that's something that you can incorporate into the things that you're doing in your organization. Or let's say one of your core values is teamwork. Has your organization created an environment that encourages teamwork or have certain things taken place that have caused competition between people within teams or between different teams in your organization?

And something to consider, too, when you're thinking about your culture, is you may see your culture and think that the organization is following all the core values that you've set in place, but people who are lower down the totem pole, so to speak, they might see the culture very differently than you do because they don't have as much control over the culture as you do as a leader. So as a leader, you can't just assume that your corporate culture is healthy, that your corporate culture is the way that you believe it to be. It's important to ask for honest feedback from the people that you're working with, especially those who are on the front lines or who were lower down in the organization who don't have the same level of power and ability to influence the culture of the organization. Ask them what they think about your organization, if it in fact does follow the core values that you've set out.

Now, the problem with that, although it is very important, is you have to have a certain amount of trust with the people that you're asking that question to. If they don't trust that they're not going to get in trouble for voicing an opinion or if they don't think that you're going to take their opinion seriously or if you're just gonna dismiss it or say, "Oh, no, that's a great idea" and then just go on as if they never said anything, that's going to be a bit of a problem. You're not going to get honest feedback if that's the approach that gets taken. So you have to be very, very careful to foster that trust all along.

And when people take the time to give you feedback on a question that you've asked especially, it's very important that you take that very seriously and do what you can to figure out why the person thinks that way, especially if you don't see it the same way as they do. They're not going to feel very good about giving you feedback if every time they try to tell you that this is how they see things, then you start rebutting it. Everything is a perspective. Just because you see things as going great or going poorly doesn't mean that everybody else sees things the same way. It's all about perspective and trying to understand the other person's point of view.

And another thing -- I've been in some really bad corporate cultures in my working life -- and the other thing that I have come to understand is that if people are giving you feedback, it's because they care. If they didn't care, they wouldn't bother telling you the things that are wrong or the things that they would like to see changed or improved. If they didn't care, they would just go along and say, "Whatever! I see that there's stuff going on that's not great but I'm just not gonna say a word because I know that nobody's gonna listen, nobody's gonna do anything about it even if I mentioned it." So that's the worst thing.

When your crew is apathetic and they're not bringing you suggestions or telling you things that need to be changed or improved, that's a warning signal. If you never hear anything "bad" (quote, unquote) about what's going on or if nobody comes and "complains", as a lot of people see it, or if they've been complaining and, after a while, they stop complaining and never come and talk to you about anything ever again, then you know you've made that person apathetic. They no longer really and truly care enough to voice what's going on, to, in some cases, sound alarm bells. You could be losing a lot of valuable feedback that might prevent something from failing or that might make a very valuable improvement to how things are going.

And you don't always have to agree with everything that's said. I remember one time we had a crew member at our company come in and ask if they could change how some of the information on the tags was laid out and was asking like, "Can we not bother putting this information on there? I don't think it's very valuable." And I told him, "I would love to be able to make that change. But, unfortunately, that's on there specifically because it's required by regulations for food safety."

So I was able to use that as a teaching moment to affirm, yes, I hear what you're saying and I acknowledge that that will be a great idea but, unfortunately, because of legislation, our hands are tied so that's one of those areas where we don't have the ability to make those changes. So by doing that, the person on our crew knew I had heard what he was saying and that I was willing to make the change if it was a change that we were able to make. But I was also able to teach him some of the rules and make him understand this is one of those areas that can't be changed. But by doing it like that, he knew that as long as it wasn't something that had a regulation surrounding it, we were willing to make those changes if they were reasonable changes to be made.

So you don't always have to go along with everything that somebody says that's a complaint. Sometimes your resources don't allow you to switch or sometimes there's constraints in your systems that don't allow you to make those changes. But sometimes there's a suggestion that you just never thought of or something where you're like, "Well, I wonder if we can do it a different way and get rid of that problem, make that situation better for them, make that resource available that they're asking for, see if we can shift some things around and make that work a little bit better."

But that's one of those things that you need to build into your corporate culture. If you want people to come to you with suggestions and to give you feedback, you need to make sure that they feel welcome to do that, and they're not gonna get in trouble for it or you're not going to just dismiss what they're saying.

So that's just one example of an aspect of organizational culture that you may want to cultivate. And if you haven't done a good job, whether knowingly or unknowingly, of doing that, you can always go and apologize if you have to, and say, "I'm going to do better from this day forward" and then make sure you act on it! It's essential that if you say that this change is going to get made in order to improve our corporate culture, it has to be acted on by the leaders and people who are not acting on it need to be told, "This is the value that we all hold as an organization and everyone who's here is expected to hold that value and to emulate that value in how they act."

Now, there's no need to be punishing people or anything like that. But it's just... make it very clear. Yes, this is the way we've done it before. We ignored people's ideas... or whatever thing that you're trying to change. But now we're not doing that anymore. And this is how we're making the changes so that we can be more inclusive of people's ideas or whatever it is that you're trying to change.

So I found an interesting article from the Harvard Business Review called "What is Organizational Culture and Why Should We Care?" It's very short article so I'll link it as a resource in the show notes.

Core Competencies

And, finally, the third thing that we need to define when we're talking about learning and growth is the core competencies and skills required to achieve the objectives that we've outlined before or even to achieve anything that's already going on in your organization.

So you might be wondering, “What are core competencies?” That's just a fancy way of saying the knowledge, abilities, personal attributes, and skills that the people who are your volunteers or your staff -- those people have certain knowledge, abilities, personal attributes and skills that they've either acquired or they're just natural tendencies to them or, if you're talking about a ministry context, the gifts that the Holy Spirit may have given them -- those are their core competencies. So you need to define the core competencies that are required in order to support the organizational objectives, the strategy objectives that you've already laid out in the previous layers of the strategy map.

So, for example, I'm a Chartered Professional Accountant in Canada, and they have a 160-page document laying out all of the competencies that an accountant is required to have in order to be certified as an accountant. They also have laid out different levels of proficiency. So depending on what your specialty is as an accountant, you have to have, like, top proficiency in a certain area, but you might not need top proficiency in another area. It all depends on what your specialty is.

So here's an example. There are seven "enabling competency areas"... is what they call them. And this is what they're expecting every accountant to have. So the first one is acting ethically and demonstrating professional values, leading, collaborating, managing yourself -- and a lot of that has to do with professional development and being able to learn from others and mentor other people -- adding value (which is essentially being able to look at financial information and make decisions from that or to guide people in their financial decisions), solving problems and making decisions (so there's specific skills in that area), and the seventh and last enabling competency is communicating. So those seven things every accountant has to have.

So I'm not saying that you have to come up with a 160-page document in order to list all the competencies that you think that your crew needs in order to serve the customer ultimately, but you may want to consider what skills and knowledge and abilities that people need to have in order to play particular roles within your organization. You don't want somebody doing the books that doesn't know anything about money and especially if they can't even figure out how to do their own personal finances. They're going to have some difficulty doing an organization's financials because there's so much more complicated. The same as you don't want me going in and trying to fix the toilet. I don't have any talent or knowledge in that area. I can do your accounting but I'm not going to be the one that you want to ask to fix your toilet. You probably want somebody who has a little bit more training in that area than I do. So each person has their own skills and abilities and knowledge that they've accumulated over time or that they can learn if they don't have it yet. So you want to use those natural skills and plug people into those places where they've been particularly gifted or have certain knowledge that they've gathered over the years.

Other Considerations

Variety

Now, I was talking to my brother about this. And he was saying that sometimes people get asked to do certain jobs in organizations because they know that those people do the same thing when they're at work. He's thinking, "Yeah, I could do that. But I do that, like, every day at work. Like, maybe I want to do something else." He was saying, in the context of church, he's like, "Maybe I really, really like coffee. And I love making coffee. And I love serving coffee. And I love talking to people about coffee because that's, like, my hobby or something I'm really interested in. Maybe instead of asking me to go on yet another committee, which is the thing I've done all week long, maybe I would just love to make the coffee and serve the coffee at the meetings or in between church services or whatever." So don't necessarily assume that because somebody's doing it in their day-to-day work or somebody did it before they retired, that doesn't necessarily mean they want to do that in their spare time, especially if they're a volunteer.

Time, Energy, Attention, and Finances

Another thing to consider when you're talking about volunteers especially is that they may not have the time, energy, or attention to devote to a particular role that you're asking them to take on. I listened to a podcast by Asian Efficiency and they talk about the TEA framework, which is time, energy and attention. And I'll link that in the resources below so you can take a look into that further if you'd like. They talk about it specifically from a personal productivity standpoint. But it also applies to when you're asking people to do things, especially on a volunteer basis. But it also applies if it's somebody on your staff.

There may be people that are in a phase of life where they just don't have a whole lot of time. So they can't devote an extended period of time to a particular role. Or there might be somebody who just doesn't have the energy. Let's say, for example, a new parent. Anybody who's had a baby knows that they don't sleep very well at night. So sometimes you don't get as much sleep as you'd like. So maybe it's just not a good time for them to devote a lot of energy to a particular role. So maybe steering them into another role that doesn't require a whole lot of energy will be a better idea. Or let's say that you have somebody who's doing a whole lot of things, and they don't have the attention to be able to devote to a particular type of role that you'd like them to do. So if you think of your roles, especially for volunteers, in those three ways -- the time, energy and attention that's required to perform the role -- that might narrow down your options even further than the knowledge and abilities and skills that are needed for the role.

Now, sometimes there's really creative ways to get around these things. I've heard of situations where, for example, let's say you have an elderly person who doesn't have a lot of energy to be going downstairs and helping with the children's program -- they get pretty worn out with all the kids being all excited, especially if they're not around kids a lot themselves on the day... on a day to day basis -- but that elderly person may have a lot of time on their hands because they're retired and they're spending a lot of time alone. And they may have the time to be able to do the preparations for the children's ministry. So, for example, if a whole bunch of stuff needs to be cut out beforehand or if, like, baggies for crafts need to be made... like, so a certain number of popsicle sticks, or whatever the craft is, needs to be put into the baggies. So that might be a way that they can help out with the children's ministry. So sometimes it helps to think outside the box about people that you want to get into certain volunteer positions in your church and say, "What are the things that we need to have done and who has the time, energy and attention to focus on these particular roles?"

And another thing too, especially if you're in a, in an organization context, a ministry context, where the people who are volunteering are also likely donors, you might have somebody who doesn't have a lot of time, energy, attention, but they may have financial means. So if you have an initiative where you're trying to help people in the community who have food insecurity just to get them through the weekend, there might be people in your congregation who don't have the time to go out and buy the things that are needed to give to those people over the weekend but they would have the finances that they would be willing to donate in order to buy those things. And then on the other hand, you might have people who don't have the finances to go out and do those things, but they might have the time or they might just really love shopping and they're more than willing to go out and buy the things if they just had the money to do it. So you could pair those people up or give people the option to just donate and then have other people volunteer to go out and do the shopping. And that way you could execute that project and make sure that those people who don't have food over the weekend do have food. Because if you just have the person with the money, but without the time, and the person with the time, but without the money, it's not going to get done. But if you can pair those people up, then that means that you can do that project. And everybody wins!

Health and Physical Limitations

I also remember a situation of one of my professors. His wife was very sick. I can't remember exactly what she had but she was essentially housebound except for on rare occasions that she would be able to come out to a few events that we had at the university. And a lot of people, if they're housebound, they get very discouraged because they think they can't do anything. But what she used to do as a ministry is she would get the names of all of the divinity students and their spouses if they had spouses and their children if they had children and also the same for the staff and the professors at the divinity school, and she would spend her days praying for every person by name. Now, because she was homebound, she didn't really necessarily know us because she'd never been able to meet a lot of us before, but she still would pray for us by name every day. And that was how she did her ministry.

I remember when my grandparents were ailing and they weren't really able to go out as much as they would have liked because of their health, my grandmother, she would write letters and send cards and encourage people if she knew they were in the hospital or if they were away at university and she had their address, or even people who ended up in addiction facilities or mental health facilities, to write them letters to encourage them as they were going through their treatments.

So it's easy to look at your limitations, especially if you're not able to leave the house, and say, "Well, I can't do ministry or I can't volunteer." But there are ways to minister to people. It might not be visible way. It might not be in public. But there are ways to minister to people even if you can't get out there for whatever reason.

External vs. Internal Customers

And something else that is important to think about when you're thinking about how your crew does their roles and what skills and knowledge they need in order to do those roles is some of your crew may be serving the customer that your organization serves -- the outside person, the beneficiary of the organization, of your ministry -- but some of your people might actually be serving the needs of the people who are volunteering within your ministry.

So one of the concepts that we talked about a lot when I was going to school for business was the difference between internal customers and external customers. In industry, that's pretty easy to define. External customers are the people that you're selling your stuff to and internal customers is usually serving the people or the organization itself, the people within the organization. So in my role in the company that I own with my brother, a lot of what I do is serving internal customers. I'm not the one who's putting the oysters in the box. I'm also not the one making the phone calls and trying to persuade people to buy oysters. I'm the person in the background who's creating the invoices and billing the customers and making sure that the bills are paid and making sure that the crew gets paid and making sure that there's toilet paper and that there's soap and pallets. When the crew runs out of pallets, they let me know. I'm the one that places the order. So I'm more of a... an internal support. I'm serving the internal customer, the crew, the organization as a whole more than I'm dealing with the customers that buy our oysters.

So depending on whether you're serving your internal customers, or the people within your organization or the organization overall, or external customers -- the people that you're serving, the beneficiaries of what your organization is doing -- that may require completely different knowledge sets and skill sets and personal attributes and abilities. So that's another thing to consider when you're looking at the core competencies that you need in order to support the organizational objectives that you've been creating as we've gone through the strategy map.

Next Steps

So as we finish out this last perspective of the strategy map, the learning and growth perspective, I would encourage you to define the technologies or the physical infrastructure that you need in order to support the objectives that you've already outlined, how those things are going to get done, to define the organizational culture that's required in order to achieve those objectives and whether or not the organizational culture you have right now matches the core values that you say that you would like your organization to have. And, third, to define the core competencies, which are the knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal attributes that are necessary for the roles that your organization currently has and for achieving the objectives that you've already laid out. Do you need any new knowledge, new abilities? I had talked about technology. If you want to start a YouTube channel, yeah, you need cameras and audio equipment, but you also need to have somebody who knows how to operate those things. So that might be something that your people need to get trained on in order to do that kind of thing. So those are the three things I would say that you should define for your learning and growth perspective: the technology and infrastructure required, the organizational culture required, and the core competencies or skills and knowledge that are required in order to achieve the objectives that you've set out in your strategy.

Next Episode

So when you've got all those things down, our next episode is going to discuss the measures, targets, and initiatives that you're going to do. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you determine how you're going to measure whether or not you're making progress on your goals and objectives and where you're trying to go -- your targets -- and what initiatives or projects or new programs you're going to set in place in order to make sure that these measures and targets are met.

So keep working on nailing down all the aspects of the strategy map that we've discussed so far. And I look forward to going to the next step and setting measures, targets, and figuring out initiatives to really put flesh on the strategy that you've created. And I look forward to discussing that with 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.

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