Becoming Willowback

— 2 minute read

I've had this post in draft form for a couple weeks now but keep leaving it, so I'm just going to throw it up here and see what you think. The point from this article boils down to how churches - no, let me just talk about my church because I haven't been to your church - work with their volunteers and/or paid staff.

Here's the deal... You do not become WillowBack overnight, and the way you learn to execute well is not by creating a culture of tyranny. The secret is standards. Standards are the greatest tool for training your team and they are, for the most part, missing in the church today. Why? I think we feel so grateful for Bob (the guy who volunteers to do the PowerPoint), that on his first day, we do our best to make sure we do not upset him. After all, what if he stops coming? Then what are we going to do? No, what we will do is give him the least amount of information about his duty we can (as we do not have time to really train him) and then we will put up with him not doing it perfectly since he is so faithful (of course he has no real idea what perfection to us is), until one day we get fed up and fire him from his post and crush his spirit by telling how he "never" does it right, when we never trained him what right is.

And this quote:

There's an old adage: Set your expectations, then inspect what you expect.

I've written and rewritten a bunch of things in response but none feel right and/or appropriate. Maybe just read the article yourself if you're interested in these thoughts.