Archives For leadership

How Do You Make Decisions?

Rodlie Ortiz —  February 24, 2009 — 2 Comments


How does it happen where you work? What is the filter that you use to determine if a decision is the right one or not. Here’s a great quote that exemplifies a great filter for making decisions. It’s taken from the book Made to Stick (p. 29):

Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.
“Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?”
The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’”
I probably wouldn’t have used his language, but I think his response offers some powerful lessons on how to make decisions. For one, the CEO was clear about the core mission of the company. This allowed him to make concrete decisions easily and quickly. 
Many think, though, that simply having a mission statement will become that filter, but it’s not true. I thought that by adopting our current purpose statement (to lead our Carrollwood community to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ) my ails would subside, and everything would become crystal clear. It didn’t happen.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then.
As a church pastor, there are numerous questions that I could possibly have to deal with. Everyone of those possible projects and ministry opportunities could multiply my work load and stress. In our church, though, I’m attempting to move to a model of ministry that vastly eliminates difficult questions. Here’s the question- “will it bless and help the weekend worship servive, or will it bless and help the small group system?” If the answer is no, I don’t want to do it. If the answer is yes, I want to try it. 
This is based upon an administrative and small-group paradigm as presented in the book Activate. The book Simple Church was a huge step forward in helping churches align their method to their mission. So in a typical “Simple Church” they would have a purpose statement like “Love God, Love People, Serve the World.” Loving God would correlate with the weekend worship service. Loving people would connect people to small groups. And serving the world would usher people to get connected to a service ministry. This sounds pretty simple, but it basically just makes a church reshuffle it’s ministries to point to a particular area of purpose. I believe the Activate method is better and is much more simple. In this paradigm a church only does two things: a weekend worship service and small groups. Any ministries are run through the small group system.
I’m not there yet, but I look forward to the day when my decision making process has been made exponentially more simple.
What about you? What filter do you use for making decisions? How has it worked? Where are you trying to go?
In leadership
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Leadership, Small Groups, and Coaching: You Asked For It!

Rodlie Ortiz —  February 17, 2009 — Leave a comment


Today I’m beginning a new feature I announced a few weeks ago called “You Asked For It!” where I do my best to try to answer a question that you’ve submitted on the blog through the Skribit tool. To see the original post where I announced some ideas for Skribit click here. 

There are two questions and I’m going to answer both of them in this post.
Here’s the first question:
“How leadership will change technology and vice-versa.”
Here’s what I think: principles never change, but methods always do. In this case technology is the changing method, but the principles behind leadership will never change. I think what technology does is increase the reach of what you’re doing. Decades ago, the early adopters of technology began using radio as the means to reach more people. Instead of speaking to hundreds they could now communicate with hundreds of thousands. To quote someone I heard recently, “technology is soul-less.” It’s a thing. It’s an it. By itself it can’t do much. But in the hands of a wise leaders, it can increase his reach.
Now I’m  not making a political statement, but I believe Barack Obama was wise in how he used technology. With it, he was able to reach and speak directly to groups of people that may not have paid too much attention before. He would send out text and YouTube video messages. Their volunteers would invite you to join their Facebook pages. He spoke the language (principle) in a way that made people listen (method).
I’m no expert in the field, but I don’t think that leadership has changed that much throughout time. Leaders have always been those that have been able to describe reality as it is, give a picture of how the future could be, and then lead the people to get there. Those fundamentals have always and always will be there. So I don’t think that we should make technology the thing. The message and principle is always the thing, and should never be eclipsed by the use technology.
Here’s the second question:
“New ideas, resources about small groups, specifically Nelson Searcy’s view.”
For those of you that don’ t know, Nelson Searcy is the founding pastor of the Journey Church in New York City. He also does coaching through an organization called Church Leader Insights. His organization coaches senior pastors, worship leaders, church planters, and small group pastors through different live coaching events as well as through telephone coaching. If there’s more interest I can give some more information on the benefits of coaching, which I highly recommend. I’m involved in his tele-coaching network for pastors and it has been a huge blessing.
Concerning small groups, there seem to be endless varieties. Nelson Searcy pioneers a semester-based free market group system. He has an excellent book on the subject called Activate. I highly recommend it and believe it to be one of the most thorough and helpful books on small groups I’ve ever read. Let me give you the gist of the system:
First of all, they are based upon a free market philosophy. That means that the groups can be of varied topics such as biblical finance, a group for men, or a running group. The only common denominator is that in every group there must be prayer and they must discuss biblical principles. So the biblical finance group might study through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University materials. The men’s group might study Experiencing God. Or the running group might study some other book, and then go for a run together.
Secondly, they are semester-based. Each year is divided into three 8-12 week semesters. So there is a winter, spring, and summer semester. After every semester there is a one month break. So there is three months on and one month off. The month off, called a promotion month, serves several purposes. For one, it gives the leaders and attenders a break. Nelson Searcy calls this the “stress and release” principle. During that month off they also heavily promote the next series of small groups and encourage people to sign up. 
So if I went to church on a typical promotion month, I would have a list in the church bulletin of the upcoming groups, and I could check off which group I wanted to join. There would also be group leaders in the lobby that I could speak to and get more information from or I’d be able to sign up on the church website.
In my opinion, this seems to be the superior model out there. I did cell groups for almost three years, and it completely wore out my leaders. This system is decentralized like a cell group, but it has the added advantage that it can reach and minister to a greater spectrum of people. In fact, within the Seventh-day Adventist church, there was a pastor (Dave Livermore) that was using a very similar method of semester-based small groups, and experienced very good growth. His was one of the fastest growing Adventist churches in North America. 
Concerning resources  for small groups Nelson Searcy offers the book, Activate, as well as various recorded workshops that can be purchased from the Church Leader Insights website.
I hope that answers your questions. If not let me know and I can get you more information. Remember to use the Skribit tool on the blog to add questions you’d like to see addressed in a future post of You Asked For It!
So what do you think? How do you think technology will change leadership, and what are some systems of small groups that you’ve used and can recommend?
In leadership, technology
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From Church Bored to Full Boar

Billy Gager —  February 14, 2009 — 2 Comments

Do you or your members find being on church board a boring experience? Or perhaps, as a leader, you have found church board to be a bottleneck of bureaucracy? 

If the pastor, or any one leader, is leading a church board and is (by design or default) the primary decision-maker and evaluator of all the ministries of the church, then the church becomes too pastor-dependent. In other cases, perhaps without strong central leadership, some churches develop many ministries that fragment the limited time and resources of too few members. Just because the church manual has a “slot” for a certain ministry, does not mean every church everywhere HAS to do that ministry. Church members become busy, but the overall mission of the church is not coordinated. My philosophy is that I would rather do less, but do it very well.
Since I entered ministry, I have found the week to week and month to month challenges of administration and leadership to be an on-the-job learning experience! And while praying for the Holy Spirit, living true to Christ’s example, and even preaching powerful, Biblical sermons is vital, it is not enough to sustain the growth of the Kingdom of God in our churches. Take for example Jesus’ comment about wine and wineskins. New wine requires new wineskins. Fresh spirituality and empowerment needs functional and effective church structures to keep alive. 
One of my churches is currently brainstorming a new way to organize itself for more fruitfulness. We have simply defined our mission around three core priorities: love God (worship), love each other (fellowship), and serve our community (outreach). We want everything we do to be held to at least one of these core purposes. And furthermore, being a smaller church with busy families, we realize there is only energy and talent to do one or two major things in each of these areas.
Our idea is to form three ministry leadership teams around each of these three areas. We will shorten our board meeting time, and then allow each of these ministry leadership teams to meet simultaneously. We did not want to have three different teams meeting at all different times, because then communication, consistency, and burnout (for church-workaholics) will become a problem. This way, instead of one board under one person’s leadership trying to do everything, we make room for people to discover a specific area of passion and work together on a team for that area. There are no extra layers of administration required, just a different structure that decentralizes ministry planning and evaluation. As pastor, I work closely with the leaders and co-leaders of each ministry leadership team, but even I can’t be on all of them!
We hope this strategy will unleash the team-work model of local church leadership that the early church experienced (Ephesians 4). What do you think? 
In leadership
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How Do You Spend Your Time?

Rodlie Ortiz —  February 8, 2009 — 9 Comments

I’ve become increasingly inspired lately in one main front: reading. It began about two months ago when I heard a podcast from Nelson Searcy and Bob Franquiz based on this article, in which they compiled a list of their favorite books of the year. Nelson Searcy had read over 200 books and Bob Franquiz has read over 90 books in 2008!

And then some powerful quotes started hitting me-”Leaders are readers,” and other such quotes.
A few days ago I read this powerful post that really impacted me from Bob Franquiz. Allow me to share it with you:
“I was sitting in Barnes and Noble the other night and as I look at the people around me, one guy was reading a comic book and the other guy was reading a book on coloring (I’m not kidding).

I’m at my orthodontist’s office yesterday and one person is reading a magazine and two others are texting their friends.

The bottom line is this: it’s not that we don’t have enough time to do the important things. It’s that we waste a lot of time. It’s one of the reasons I stopped Twittering. I began to see it as a waste of time for me. It made me less productive and distracted me from the things I’m actually trying to accomplish.”

And then last night I saw the movie based on the story of Dr. Ben Carson, renowned neuro-surgeon, and I was impacted by one of the simple tools that led to his success. His mother turned off the television! He had been quite a bad student, and his mother feared that he wouldn’t amount to much, so she allowed him and his brother to choose 2-3 shows to watch for the entire week. She also sent them off to the library to check out books and made them do reports based on the books they were reading. The discipline of reading is what helped to catapult him into his next levels of learning and excellence.

So I set a goal a few weeks back of reading one book per week. I don’t always make it, but I certainly try. The world has lots of mediocrity. And I don’t want to sit in that lot.

So how are you spending your time? What impact has reading made in your life? What have you been inspired by lately?
In leadership
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The Difference Your Form of Advertising Makes

Rodlie Ortiz —  January 28, 2009 — Leave a comment


A few days ago a church member handed me a folded up piece of newspaper.

“Look, there are most of the churches in our community, but ours is not advertised in there,” she said in a stern voice , implying that it was my responsibility to make sure it was.
As I examined the newspaper, I realized that it was an edition that went out to an area completely populated by retirement communities. In fact, this area (which I will allow to remain nameless) is billed as “America’s premier retirement community.”
“Well, I think we could probably advertise online,” I responded, hoping that she’d give up her crusade. But that’s when she made a very telling statement-”But none of us are online!”
If you advertise in mediums that retirement age people use frequently, guess what kind of people you’ll get? If you advertise in mediums that younger people use…well, you guessed it.
So here’s the principle: how you advertise determines the kind of people you reach.

I know this sounds very obvious, but in that moment, this principle took on new life to me. If I were to advertise in that newspaper, it would be very clear the kind of demographic I would be reaching. We all need the gospel, but churches need to focus on who they can best reach in their own area.
If someone is looking for a church to attend, and happens to be in a younger demographic, Google is generally the first place that will be checked. Ten years ago, the first place someone would check would be the yellow pages or the newspaper. I think the last time I actually opened one of those bulky yellow pages was at least two years ago. So instead of advertising in that newspaper, I decided to jump on the Google Adwords bandwagon and give it a whirl. Here’s a great podcast that describes in detail how to advertise using Google Adwords. The podcast is called “God Bless Google.”
We’ve been using it for two weeks now, so allow me to share with you some of our preliminary findings:
Look: This is what the advertisement ends up looking like. When someone does a search for churches in tampa, they will see our ad on the right side of the page. **If you do a search for our church please don’t click on the ad. Every time you click on the ad it takes money out of our account. I want to reserve those ads for people that are truly making original searches. Thanks!
Cost: How much it costs depends on you. We currently put in $25 a month into the system. The more money you put in, the higher your ad will be on the page, and the more it will be shown throughout the day when someone makes a search.
Result: After two weeks of being on there, it’s been shown 1,912 times. Of those, 27 people actually clicked on our site, costing us a total $9.88. This puts us at .37 cents per click. 
We’ve found Google Adwords to be very relevant, inexpensive, and interactive. What more could you ask for?
Have you tried Google Adwords? What results have you seen? How else are you advertising?
In Evangelism, leadership
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What You’re Rarely Told About Leadership

Rodlie Ortiz —  January 23, 2009 — 3 Comments

Most people are fascinated by leadership. Especially the kind of leadership that is advertised as:

  • casting the big vision
  • cheer-leading the people
  • speaking in eloquent melodies that make people go “ahh”
  • being the person who walks down the hall and says the right thing to encourage a member of the team
  • being a person of influence (whatever that means)

This painting of leadership is usually attractive to most people. This is the part of leadership that is most often talked about by leadership gurus. This is also the part of leadership that has come quite easily to me.

What you’re usually never told about the subject is that leadership without effective management is dead. It’s easy to rally the troops, give them the pep talk, point them in the direction, and then fire the gun. What’s more difficult is to follow up with the troops. To set specific goals with them. To see how the progress is going, keep them motivated along the way, and be able to hold them accountable if they don’t reach the goals.

Leadership sets the direction. Management makes sure that you get there. You can be a great speaker and motivator, but if you are not a good manager, ultimately things will not get done.

After three years of being a leader and painfully realizing how much has slipped through my fingers, this lesson has finally sunk in.

So here’s the biggest recommendation I can make to myself and other leaders:

A system must be set up to ensure the timely progress and development of projects. I’m not talking about a personal productivity system like GTD, but a corporate system, if it exists.

When something is decided, who will take on the project? How much time will they have to complete it? What should the finished product look like? How will you followup with the team member to ensure that it’s being completed?

I’ve found that this slow-methodical-unglamorous march of management is just as important, if not more, than the quick-sprint, rally-from-the-back, sparkle-from-the-front, glamorous kind of leadership.

What have you found?
[image by abrinsky]
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What Your Organization Can Learn From Barack Obama

Rodlie Ortiz —  January 21, 2009 — 4 Comments

The new president has yet to sign an executive order (that I know of), yet he has already positioned himself to be a very effective president. This past week, before the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr holiday, Barack Obama sent out a video message calling people to celebrate that special holiday through service.

Calling a nation to service is not new. Many past presidents have done so with vigor. But what is different about Barack Obama is how he does it:

1. Use of technology: When he releases his weekly addresses, they are through YouTube. Through this medium he is vastly expanding his reach and audience.

2. Through offering immediate opportunities for action: A new website has has been created called USA Service through which immediate action may be taken. You plug in your zip code and how far you’re willing to drive, and you’ll be rewarded with a list of opportunities and more information to serve.

Through offering practical and immediate opportunities for service, based upon a level of commitment, was how he won so many primaries and eventually the presidency. You could either make a phone call from your home, drive to a center and make calls as a group, you could volunteer to knock on some doors, or host a party!

What about you? What are you doing in your church or organization to offer immediate action opportunities? When you call people to service do you have a list of places handy where they can serve? When you call people to be witnesses do you also provide immediate opportunities in which someone can witness?
If you’re not offering immediate opportunities for action, then you’re wasting the people’s time. They will end up zoning you out in any future calls, and you will have done yourself a disservice.

Coming up on the 14th of February is Valentine’s day. For the first time in a while it will be on a Saturday. What if churches took that day to teach on love and outreach, and then gave people an immediate opportunity that afternoon to serve and love their community? We’re planning on handing out roses and candies. For more ideas click here and here.

In leadership
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