Structure is an Act of Charity

Most parish meetings end with conversation. Not decisions. That gap quietly drains your team. 

Tune in this afternoon at 4 on Siouxland Catholic Radio 88.1 FM as Jon gives you three things to fix that: Decide Out Loud. Name the Owner. Set the Date. One clear decision. One person responsible. One firm deadline. Write it down before anyone leaves. And if you think structure doesn't belong in volunteer ministry — Jon addresses that too. Vagueness doesn't protect your volunteers. It burns them out. Structure is an act of charity.

Try it at your next meeting. One week. Every decision. See what changes.

The program is sponsored by Briar Cliff University.

Transcript

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Before we begin, we just want to let you know that Catholic Ministry Professionals is brought to you by Briar Cliff University. Briar Cliff provides a vibrant community, top-notch faculty, and cutting edge programs that empower you to reach your full potential. So whether you're pursuing a degree in business, healthcare, or the arts, Briar Cliff can provide an environment where you can thrive. Learn more at Briarcliff.edu to start your transformative academic experience. And now, on with the show. So this is for any of those pastors, parish staff, and ministry leaders who are just tired of walking out of meetings with nothing to show for it. So let's just kind of set the scene here, right? We just finished our weekly meeting. We just wrapped a one-hour staff meeting. Everyone was there, everyone talked, everyone's busy, and yet we have the same complaints today as we did a year ago or two years ago. Now listen, this is not a people problem. This is a meeting problem. Most parish meetings generate conversation. Conversation's good, but it's not as good as a meeting that creates decisions, that generates decisions. And over time, that gap between talking and doing just quietly drains the team. So today we're going to fix that. We've got three things to talk about. That's to decide out loud, name the owner, and set the date. If you bring these three things into your next meeting, everything is going to change. And so let's kick it off with a little scripture verse, something that highlights what we're talking about today. And that's from Nehemiah chapter 2, verse 18. And Nehemiah here, he's he's telling about the building of the walls, and the people respond, let us rise up and build. So they strengthened their hands for the good work. And that's what we want today to be an opportunity to strengthen our hands for the good work that we will do. That's what we should do every single meeting that we have as a team, not drain our energy, but to strengthen our hands for the good work that is in front of us. And so let's break open these three things in today's episode. The first thing we need to do in every meeting is to make decisions out loud. Most of our meetings, if we're honest, end with a feeling, right? I feel like we should do this. We all feel frustrated about this reality, but most of the time decisions aren't made around those. So this is really simple. We need to name the decision. Someone has to say it clearly in the room before anyone leaves. We are doing X. It's not implied, it's not assumed. Nobody's waiting for everyone else to step in. We're saying it out loud. Without this, everyone walks out with a different version of what just happened. The leader's job is to call the decision even when it's uncomfortable. And so that first one's so important. It sets the stage for the next two pieces. Decide out loud. Name the decision. The second thing we need to do is name the owner, right? It does no good to say we are going to do this if nobody's responsible for making this happen. So a decision with no name attached to it is just going to be a good intention. Every decision needs one person that's responsible for carrying it forward. Not a committee, not a group, but a person who's going to run it for it. If there is a community, that committee needs someone who's in charge of it that can be responsible and take ownership for the decisions that will be made related to that, right? So if everybody owns it, nobody owns it. We can't end up walking out of the meeting going like, we're going to do this. It has to be no Ethel over here, you're in charge of doing this. And that leads us to the third piece that's necessary to make our meetings, to move them from this thing that drains us to move them into something that gives us energy, gives them momentum to the mission that we've been stewarded with. So we need to do the third thing, which is to set the date. An owner without a deadline is just a volunteer with extra stress, right? And that stress builds because if we never get it done, it continues to be this thing that lives over us. And maybe we're just hoping everybody will forget that we were supposed to do this. But the date is what turns, it turns a decision into a commitment. It turns it into something that can be taken on, uh, action on. It also gives you something to come back to, which is where accountability begins. You don't nobody has to be in charge of calling out everyone else for failing or not doing their job. If this person has committed to a date and it's on the calendar and it's set in stone, like they know that date's coming up. And maybe you remind them, maybe not. But if if there's no date, it means that there's probably not going to be follow-through. And that's going to happen like every time, unless this person that's been assigned to this is particularly passionate about it, which could happen. But, you know, more often than not, if a date isn't set, then it's not going to happen. There's there's a principle out there, and I forget the name of it, but essentially work expands to fill the container set for it, right? It just fills whatever space you give it. So if you give a deadline of a week, they're probably going to try and get it done in a week. If you give them a deadline of a month, it'll probably take a month. And the reality is that it could probably be done in either one of those timelines. So it's just important to set a firm deadline so that the owner of the decision is able to take action, but also gives themselves the opportunity to hold themselves accountable before the rest of the team has to call them out and do it as well. So let's talk about how this looks when it works, right? So the pastor and the staff are in a meeting and they're meeting about the fall festival. And instead of ending with, let's keep talking about volunteer situation, right? And we all know this, right? We just we know there's an issue with the volunteers. We haven't quite decided when people need to sign up, how many we need for this area, you know, are the there going to be volunteers in the greeting area? And what does this all look like? So instead of ending with, let's keep talking about the volunteer situation, maybe the pastor needs to say, or whoever, you know, the pastor could designate someone to run the meeting. Maybe that person says, Well, we're moving forward with a volunteer sign up at all masses the last weekend of September. That's deciding out loud. Like we know that this is gonna happen. We need to have this happen. So we're gonna turn to the DRE and we're gonna say, Ethel, you own this, right? That's name the owner. And then finally we need to set the date, right? I need a plan on my desk by October 1st, right? And you might say, well, you know, we're planning to announce this the last weekend of September. So maybe you walk that back a little bit, right? But that's setting the date, all right? We're gonna do this the last weekend of September. Ethel, you own this. I need the plan on my desk by October 1st, which means that she needs to decide within that decision, right? She needs to decide what the areas are for the volunteers. She needs to figure out exactly what that's gonna look like. And then she needs to have that sign-up ready for the last weekend of September, which means that then she's gonna be able to get that list of volunteers to the pastor by October 1st. Now, what this does is it frees the pastor from the burden of micromanaging over the next month, six weeks, however long we have until the fall festival. And it also empowers Ethel to just go do the work. Ethel, you don't need to run every decision by me. You know what I want, you know when I need it, you know when we need it, and you and we're expecting you, we're we're expecting you to do the job and to get it done. So what can go wrong in this? You know, how do we guard against problems that could happen? Let's let's look at some specific issues, right? We might have made this decision, right? We might have said, you know, Ethel, I need you to I need you to look at this signup, this volunteer sign-up at all the masses. The decision could get fuzzy after the meeting if if someone sends a recap email that softens what's said. So that's why you need these three pieces, right? We need the decision, we need the owner to be named, and the deadline, because that makes it very concrete. If instead we just say, well, we're gonna write down, you know, we just sent out that, well, we decided to do something with the volunteer situation, and that's the recap that's sent out, that could be a problem, right? So we need to write the decision down in the room, word for word, maybe even put, you know, decision owner deadline, mark it out like that. You know, the other thing that can happen is that the owner of it, right? Ethel could say, yeah, I could do that, but she doesn't actually have the capacity, either maybe the technological know-how to do a really simple sign-up, or maybe she doesn't have time. You know, the fall's a busy time for DREs. They're gearing up to kick off their faith formation programs. Maybe she can't actually deal with this extra piece. So before we name the owner, maybe we need to ask these individuals, hey, do you have time? Do you have room in your schedule to do this? And that's just a simple way to offload it, uh, to, you know, front run that and to be able to kind of name these ahead of time. Well, there might be a conflict here, maybe this person doesn't have time. We're giving them the chance to take ownership and even to take ownership of the work they're doing and saying, well, I can do this for you, but it means I won't have time for X. So when should I do that? And then the final thing may be that the date is just fake, right? If it gets set just to end the conversation, but not because anyone believes in it or it ties into the practical reality of the parish, it's gonna get lost, right? So the owner can set the date, you know. Uh maybe the pastor doesn't set the date, the owner does, you know, because if they pick it, they own it. Again, people need to have some ownership or they just feel like they're just being managed from above. So we name the decision, the owner has the opportunity to opt into it because they're they're saying, I have time to do this, I can take it. And then finally they're opting into the deadline. So maybe it doesn't have to be specifically this date, but then you can come back and make sure we make it very concrete, we write it down word for word in the meeting before everyone leaves so that there's no confusion. One final thought, too, is that if the decision is made and the owner's named and the date's set, and then nothing happens, there's an issue there with just following up as a team, right? And so the simple fix for this is just to put it on the agenda for the next meeting. However, you're tracking your meetings and and what goes into the agenda for a given meeting, close the loop as soon as you open it. Put it on the meeting agenda for that given week just to make sure that it comes back up. Have people set a reminder in their phones, right? You need to bring this to the meeting at this time. Close the loop so that it doesn't become an issue where people just aren't following up. We can have a lot of decisions get that get made, and we don't want to make sure that they get lost just because you know, no one person, maybe the pastor who's in charge of the meeting, doesn't necessarily have everybody's individual little tasks right in front of them and decisions right in front of him at any given time. So we need to have a process, just a mental reminder to schedule those things into our calendars. Again, those schedules, those concrete things, they they really help you to follow through without having to just keep it all right up here all the time. And I think with that we can move on to the devil's advocate. And I can hear, I I mean, that I think an easy like devil's advocate for this one is that we're a parish, we're not a corporation. You know, the this feels really rigid for a ministry environment, especially when a lot of the people who enter these meetings who have to help with decisions, who have to follow these things through, they're volunteers. And I can't hold them to deadlines like I could for employees. And so I want to respond to that first by saying that I think if we're honest, there's plenty of times we don't hold our volunteers accountable either. And so, you know, maybe there's a little bit of fuzziness there, but there's a real reality that um unclear decisions and no accountability doesn't protect your volunteers, it burns them out. People want to know they're doing something. They want to know that it matters enough that you're paying attention to it. And the reality is that Ethel doesn't need less structure. She needs to know exactly what she's carrying and when it's due so that she can plan her life around it. She wants to do these things, but if there's if there's nothing tangible for her to grab onto, put on her calendar, then there's there's no way for her to plan around it with her life and her 17 kids that she has. The other thing is that it's it's more respectful of someone's time if you're being clear, right? Not loose, not like, yeah, whenever it works, which really means whenever it works for me as the pastor, as the leader to do the thing, and then I'll come barging in and I'll let you know how I think about the fact that we haven't gotten this done yet, right? It's more respectful for both of you. It gives you a real opportunity for real dialogue, real conversation. And then the reality that the most frustrated volunteers aren't the ones with deadlines. They're not. They're the ones who showed up, they said yes, and they never heard from anybody again. Or they came in with an idea and then there was no follow-up, right? Structure is an act of charity. Vagueness is not kindness, structure is an act of charity. And here's the thing is when you raise the bar, people rise to meet it, right? They feel like what they're doing actually matters. And low expectations do exactly the opposite. They make people feel like you don't, you don't think they're capable of anything. You it means you're treating them like children. Instead, we have to treat their work, we have to treat their work like it counts. All right, of course, we never want to leave you without some action that you can take today based on today's conversation. And so the action is very simple, right? For this next week, your next meeting, I want you to do exactly what we did in our three things today. For every decision that's on the table, everything that's on the table, you have to add an owner and you have to add a date, right? Give it name to it. Say we're making a decision on this. All right, here's the owner and here's the date. And that needs to happen this next week. Just do it, just try it. Like, don't do it to one time and then stop. Like, try it for a while. Every single one, but I believe in one week you're gonna see what changes. And then the other thing you can do, if this episode's touching your heart, if it if it's kind of hitting the button for you, share this episode with your pastor or a friend in ministry and start that conversation with them today. Just hit the little share button and send it on over via text and say, hey, you know, I heard about this, I think it could help us. I'd love to hear your thoughts and just see what happens. You can also subscribe, you know, share it, share these episodes with uh with anybody that you think could benefit from it. And if you want help then building the kind of meeting culture where decisions actually stick, you can book a discovery call at Catholic Ministry Professionals.com and we'll walk you through it. And finally, I want to thank you for listening to the Catholic Ministry Professionals Podcast. Please just take a moment to subscribe and leave us a review. And with that, we'll see you in the vineyard. The Catholic Ministry Professionals Podcast is brought to you by Briar Cliff University. Briar Cliff provides a vibrant community, top notch faculty, and cutting edge programs that empower you to reach your full potential. So whether you're pursuing a degree in business, healthcare, or the arts, Briar Cliff provides an environment where you can thrive. Learn more at Briarcliff.edu to start your transformative academic experience.