The Four Stages of Organizational Focus

Every church and organization will move through different focuses throughout its lifespan. From the inception of a churchplant or new company, the particular areas that the organization needs to pay attention to shifts as it matures. In this Fastbreak episode, Dave Workman identifies and unpacks four unique stages of focus for an organization as it grows into a healthy, effective, and sustaining church or company: 1) Personality-focus, 2) Mission-focus, 2) Systems-focus, and 3) Franchise-focus.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Fast Break Podcast, a quick download to jumpstart your leadership. Visit us at ElementalGroup.org for more resources and free downloads. 

Hey friends, this is Dave Workman with the Elemental Group. Many of the churches we work with struggle with systems. The leaders may be passionate about the mission, but how that work gets done may be sloppy or ineffective. If that's the case, it eventually leads to staff and volunteer burnout. Therefore, thinking smartly about developing healthy systems is a critical component for the life of the organization, but with one caveat. If you're in the front end of church planting or leading a fairly new and small church, it shouldn't be your primary focus. After all, you're mostly centered on gathering people and sheer survival. Your systemic needs are much simpler at this point. Just like people, your church will go through changes in focus as well. 

There are four typical stages of focus a church or any organization goes through. They are a personality focus, a mission focus, a systems focus, and what we call a franchise focus. Let's quickly unpack these. 

When a church is first planted, it's primarily personality centered. It's all about the church planner, his or her ability to gather the force of their personality, the sense of "this is a person I want to follow," and so forth. It means a lot of lunch, breakfast, and dinner meetings with potential followers who are probing the leader's competency calling in character. Is this someone I would want to follow? 

Next, the church must move toward becoming mission centered. A driving, compelling purpose for existence has got to become paramount. This is critical. The organization has to grow beyond the planter's personality, and the mission must become bigger than the leader. And please don't get attendance necessarily mixed up with this. This is not numbers oriented. There are huge churches that are personality centered and in deep danger, as well as small personality cult churches. 

Third, as the church or organization gets more complex and multi-layered, systems and processes become even more critical. Systems are simply the vehicles that get the mission done. Considerable effort must be made to ensure effective communication, productivity, or fruitfulness in biblical terms, and departmental interdependency and engagement actually happen in healthy, systemic ways. 

The last stage is franchising. For a church, this could mean launching a new church plant, a satellite, an entrepreneurial ministry, a non-profit, a food pantry, or whatever. At this point, an organization has had enough experience and gone through enough growth stages to launch more holistic and reproducible endeavors. At this stage, it's absolutely necessary to start new enterprises or even hive off some efforts for the sake of organizational health. 

So think for a moment. What focused stage is your church in today? And is it the right one for where you are? 

Thanks for listening to this Fast Break podcast. Visit us at ElementalGroup.org for more resources and free downloads.