I have a love/hate relationship with wakeup calls. You know, when you are reminded by someone that you’re not doing what you know you should be doing. Have you ever had that kind of a wakeup call? I love the fact that someone comes along and says “hello!” and points out the obvious. But, I really hate how it feels most of the time.

We wrapped our annual strategic planning session yesterday (early). That’s right; we got done in one day! Why? Well, early in the session right after we reflected as a team on what went well the past year and what didn’t go so well, our senior pastor communicated some “basics.” He said, “The bottom line is we’re not focused on the right things and we have no accountability mechanism for this to be seen … plain as day. That’s it. There’s not ’skin’ on much of the critical stuff that needs to be done.”

I must admit, it felt like I had been “thrown under the bus.” My first feeling was defensive. In my mind I went through all the great reasons why things had not gotten done along these lines over my 5 years of being on staff. I didn’t verbalize them, however, because to me at least they just sounded like excuses. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done a bunch of good stuff together as a team, but somehow I had missed the boat on a very basic idea. The concept has many names, but one I like to use is “management by objectives.” Many years ago, when I was a middle level manager in corporate, we referred to them as MBOs.

The basic concept is this: every member of the team should know what the highest priority initiatives are for the organization and how they, as an individual (leader or otherwise), contribute to helping the organization accomplish the goals. Each individual has clear (written) objectives that have measures associated with them. The measures are reviewed on a regular basis and the individual is held accountable for their “results.” Simple!

What we have done over the past 5 years is to implement a structured approach to developing and executing a plan, including measuring results. We call it the Performance Cycle and the measures are called KPMs (Key Performance Measures). It has worked well, but it has lacked what I’ll call the last, most important element which is, “what am I supposed to do (as an individual) and how do I know how I’m doing?” The measures are very “corporate” and do a good job of telling us how we’re doing overall. They are not granular enough, however, to help us determine how each of our leaders is doing with their own piece of the plan. You know, “What business are you in and how’s business?”

It’s not like I didn’t know this already. It’s more like I got distracted and took my eye off the ball.

So, the planning session was a HUGE success! It succeeded in helping us to make a few course corrections. What else can you hope for? Now the real work begins … which is nice.