HOW TO LEAD the Creative Person on your Team

Tony Morgan shares some great tips on how to lead the creative types on your ministry team. As he points out, don’t assume they are all on the worship and arts teams.

Tell them what to do, but not how to do it. You can hold them accountable for the results, but don’t force them to embrace a certain process.

If you want their input, you’ll need to ask. If you stop asking, they’ll stop contributing.

If you ask, you better consider their input. If you’re not really going to use their input, it’s better not to even ask.

Know that they’ll be emotionally attached to what they create. So, if you decide not to use their creation, you’ll have to process that appropriately and not abruptly.

You need to give them a deadline, but it better be reasonable. Creative people need room to dream and let their ideas percolate.

Don’t try to motivate them with money, but they do want your praise. They’ll react when the extrinsic rewards are taken away, but they’re really intrinsically motivated.

They’ll get easily bored if they find themselves stuck in the routine. They need the freedom to take on new challenges and opportunities and hate to get stuck in maintenance mode.

They deliver new ideas, but they dread the details. To bring the best out of them, you need to protect them from the bureaucratic structure and administrative tasks.

They need a creative and participative environment. Creative people need the fuel that other creative people generate.

You need to provide boundaries, but they need to experience freedom. Boundaries force people to get creative. That’s when the best ideas are generated. But if creative people ever feel restrained, at best they’ll start to sulk and at worst they’ll join another team.

Read Tony Morgan’s full post “10 Keys to Leading Creative People“

Rockbridge Seminary students enrolling in the fully online course “Lead Like Jesus” during the January Term may want to make this a topic for discussion with fellow learners in the course.

How to be a smart church innovator

Church leaders today have to be innovators. I’ve tried my share of innovation, but what I tried wasn’t always smart. Larry Osborne, senior pastor of North Coast Church in Vista, CA, recently posted some helpful innovation tips on his blog. 

Students who have taken the Rockbridge Seminary online course “Leading Change” will remember the change analysis assignment using the Nelson Change Formula, a tool used to predict the effectiveness level of an innovation. Remembering Osborne’s tips may make the formula even more useful. 

1. Whenever possible, innovate at the edge of the organization – or even outside the existing structures. 

Over time, our best innovations will often be so successful that they swallow up the old.  But the goal is to have past gains swept aside by the success of the new rather than tossed aside in anticipation of the new. The difference is critical in terms of organizational chaos and pain.

2. Make sure you have both Champions of the Future AND Protectors of the Past.

If your bias is innovation, you may need to identify someone within the organization who naturally wakes up worrying about the negative effects of any proposed changes. If your bias is for protecting the past, you’ll need to find a way to give someone in the organization the freedom or even the job of rocking the boat. That doesn’t mean you’ll do everything they suggest. It does mean they’ll have a place at the table and the opportunity to have their risky new ideas carefully considered rather than relegated to the nut pile.  

3. Remember, the startup phase ends the moment we’ve gathered critical mass and some raving fans who love what we’ve created. 

When we started a video worship venue called The Edge, it quickly grew to over a thousand each weekend. But with the speed of cultural change, it wasn’t long until what was once edgy no longer pushed the envelope to the same degree. Some of my team wanted to make wholesale changes to make sure The Edge stayed edgy. But doing so would have driven away six to seven hundred of those who loved it just the way it was. Our solution was a series of subtle changes to keep things moving along and the startup of a new edgier edge called LAST CALL. It allowed us to continue to innovate without losing all we’d worked so hard to gain.

4. Have an exit strategy. 

Serial innovators make their plans with a clear exit strategy in mind. They don’t burn the boats. They unlock the back door in case they or their idea have to make a quick exit. Sometimes it’s with the words they use. Think how much easier it is to shut down an experiment than a new initiative.

Osborne’s full blog posts:

Innovation’s Blind Spot: Protecting the Past as Important as Creating the Future?

Innovation’s Dirty Little Secret