Change

Most people are not indifferent to change.  You either thrive in changing environments or it paralyzes you in fear and anxiety.  However, if you lead an organization change is a way of life.

I have been at my current position for over two years now and I have made more changes than I am comfortable with and I am about to initiate a sweeping change in my department.  This can be difficult to manage and difficult for people to follow so I thought I’d share a few times when change is important.

change is important when the program isn’t working.

A leader should never be so attached to a program, system or plan that they refuse to change if it isn’t working.  Pride will kill an organization.  Chip Kelly is the head football coach for the Philadelphia Eagles.  He brought into the NFL a college system that worked well for him when he was the coach at the University of Oregon.  He came in and got rid of blue chip players all because they didn’t fit into his system.  The team began to lose and he was adamant to an arrogant fault about his system.  Everyone could see that he had to change in order to win games.  You have slowly seen him change.  Why?  Because pride will get you fired.

change is important when it moves the vision forward.

Sometimes leaders change for the sake of change.  They want to shake things up, create a buzz.  However, the best time to change is when you need to find a different way to move the organization forward.  When I got to this church the ministry had it’s premier program on Sunday nights.  That was baffling to me because I always held that meeting on Wednesday nights.  It made sense to me.  It fit the ethos of the church programming schedule and so I changed the meeting to Wednesday nights.  It fell flat.  I have kept it there for two years waiting for it to catch on until I realized recently why the program was on Sunday nights.  Recreation sports are HUGE on the island and there are several clubs that already had a foothold on the teens that meet on Wednesday.  This severely cut into my attendance and caused severe inconsistency.  We would have a few dozen one week and ten the next.

My experience trumped the environment.   I allowed my experience to make the decision rather than studying and learning the environment.

So, in January I will go back to the schedule I inherited with much humility and a bruised ego.  However, the important thing is not my expertise, experience or ego, the important thing is moving the vision of the ministry forward.

change is important enough to communicate

The larger the change the more time and communication must be given.  If you are changing something small then a week or two is fine.  If however, you are going to shift your schedule, vision, direction drastically you need months of lead time to communicate.  Why? A couple of reasons…

1. People are not as consistent as you think they are.  If they attend every other week there is a good chance they don’t hear your information at all.
2. People only listen half the time…I know as a pastor this is depressing.
3. People need multiple forms of communication…don’t rely only on the pulpit, email, social media or letters…use all of them.
4. People need to process how it affects them.  My pastor likes to say that people don’t mind change, its transitions that scare them.  This is pretty spot on.  It is the transition that usually is ill planned and affects the common person.

Don’t be afraid of change.  Sometimes it is necessary.  However, when you change.  Do it for the right reasons.  Do it well.