Hey everyone, welcome to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast, where we help you build, run, and keep great teams. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in. Well, William, last week we talked about how to notice change and what to do when we realize change needs to happen in our teams. This week, we're going to talk about hey, how do you actually go and do that change? How do you implement that change into your team? Just give me your initial thoughts about now just implementing change into your team.
SPEAKER_00It's super hard. So Sociology 101. And Dr. Pericone, who was amazing, he said the primary function of a large organization is to resist rapid change. Wow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. The primary function of a large organization is to resist rapid change. You say, I'm not a large organization, we're only a church of 200. That's twice as big as the average church in America. Like you're a bigger organization you think, and when you try to change, you're gonna run into trouble. If you don't believe me, like just ask Jesus. Like he tried to change, he ended up nailed to a tree. So you know, yeah. Well, we won't go there, but it's just fascinating that the people chose Barabbas over Jesus. It is, yeah, it is. Yeah. So anyway, uh, when you're leading a change, know that you're signing up for a really hard job. It's not easy. Uh, we talked last week about uh maybe the number one rule is don't go too fast. If you go too fast, you're going to erode trust in your team. Yep. Okay. So go go listen to that podcast if you or oh, watch it the podcast. I'm learning to change myself. And uh watch that pod and and see if it speaks to you in some way. But let's say you already know this is this is gonna take a while. So how do we make a change, right? And if you don't think it's gonna take a while, think about your friends. I I'm old enough to remember Slim Fast, give us a week. We'll take off the weight, and it never works. You lose weight, you gain it back. Permanent weight loss happens through slow sustained change. It's true in churches, true in schools, true everywhere. Slow sustained change. Step one.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00There's a great book, if you can still find it, from a professor at Harvard. His name was John Cotter. Okay. And the book is called Leading Change. And when I was doing my doctoral work at Reform Seminary, I I asked him if I could use that framework to write about leading change in the established church. Because the number one function of a large organization is to resist rapid change. And it's a fabulous book. His first step is um create a sense of urgency. Okay. Like people won't change if there's not something urgent. Yeah. Have you ever had a family member, or maybe it's your story, where they've had a heart episode, you know, and they've had to have open heart surgery, and you see them a year later, and they're lighter and they're thinner and they look good. Well, what was it? Well, they cracked my chest open, and I I'm not gonna do this anymore. Exactly. Resist rapid changes is solved with creating a sense of urgency. Now, if you're in ministry, I got a I got a little hack for you. You don't have to create urgency. You already have it. Yeah. I mean think of the different urgencies that are already there. You don't have to, you don't have to go create anything. It's already here. How's this one? Uh just now, right now, somebody died into a hopeless eternity.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's why you listen to such an uplifting podcast.
SPEAKER_00Just now, someone else died into a hopeless eternity. We have the most urgent task in the world. Yeah, you can say it positively. What if we could overpopulate heaven? Exactly. I kind of like that approach better than you know, the but really, this is not no one's kidding about this. No one talked about hell more in the Bible than Jesus. Yeah, it's not a pretty picture. So if you want to create, you don't have to create an urgency. This is the urgency. And God has said, guess what, leaders? You are plan A for solving the issue. And I don't have a plan B. Yeah. That's pretty urgent, right? Reveal urgency rather than create it. Now, if you're if your church's like, well, we don't talk about that, or you're in a school and we're not into salvations, or you're if you're on any form of teen Jesus leading any exact form of organization right now, the number of people who are listening to you is going down in the country, not up. Now, our international listeners, our work that we do, like in South America, Sub-Sahara, Africa, you know, I mean, the the church is on fire, but here, uh, many people would say we're quickly becoming Europe. Well, that's a different urgency. Do you want to be irrelevant? We've been riding on the coattails of a really phenomenal set of circumstances that happened in a Great Depression and a war and an economy that boomed after that. That's over. Yeah. There's an urgency. So, number one step is to reveal urgency. Maybe it's as simple as the building is falling apart. Your children are not safe here. We need to do something about that. Yep. And raise some money to build a building. But create a sense of urgency, or I might, I might, I don't want to improve on Dr. Cotter, but reveal an urgency. Now, here's a step that's not in Dr. Cotter's book. Show how the organization has always dealt with that urgency in the past. Yeah. There's a quicker way to say it. You say, uh, reveal your heritage. Okay. Okay. So here's how what it what in the world do you mean with this, William? Here's the maybe the single best piece of pastoral advice I got when I was at Princeton Seminary. Okay. Okay. Uh, Dr. Jack Stewart said, when you get to your church, especially if it's the older the church, the more important this lesson. Okay. I want you to go and find the board minutes for every board meeting in the history of the church and sit down and read them all. Doesn't that sound riveting? Yeah. Everybody who's still on the podcast and didn't just tune out, listen, here's what happens when you do that. You start to discover the reason the whole church or school or nonprofit started before you got into bureaucracy, before you got into some of you have a church that actually has something called the Committee on Committees. Yeah. And some of you are like, Are you kidding? Others are like, oh, I've lived it. I've seen it. The Committee on Committees was never in the original charter of your church. Exactly. The original charter was how do we overpopulate heaven? That's right. So the first church I served, uh, wonderful people, and I was the associate pastor as First Presbyterian Hendersonville, North Carolina. Okay. So this is in the Western North Carolina um region. It was founded, I think, 1838 or at nine, or somewhere in there. You can use AI and prove me wrong, but somewhere in that general chapter. And so here I am, the young guy, and I want to start some new sort of evangelism initiatives. But I remember Dr. Stewart, go read the church minutes. Hendersonville is a little town. Okay. It's not far from where they filmed Deliverance. So if that helps anyone old enough to know what that means. So I started reading, and I came across this thing. The church had not always been where we are right now. It moved. Okay. It moved early, early, like 1840s, somewhere in the 80s. Yeah. Yeah. They'd just gotten there, they'd just gotten settled into their place, and then they decided to move. Well, moving an entire church, that's some change, right? Yeah. Like physically moving. Yeah. They had to move the cemetery. I mean, like, that's a big change. So why did they move? So you got to do a little history. Uh, this was, you know, mid-1800s. This was the very unfortunate part of our history where we had the trail of tears. Yep. You know, uh, the people who were here first, indigenous, Native American, whatever you want to use that that is not offensive, but the people who were here first got run out as we expanded. Okay. And this isn't to create opinions about that, but but the reality was if you lived in Western North Carolina during that time, you if you were an indigenous or Native American, you didn't want to go near the invaders, or if you were a Caucasian and a settler, you tried to stay. It was very, very tense. Sure. I mean, like literally life and death tense. Yep. First Christian Church in Hendersonville decided to move their church outside the safety of the city. Wow. To be closer to now, now, guys, this is an anachronistic word. It's not my word. Please don't like this. Is just what the board minutes said. We want to move closer to the savages so we can share the hope of Jesus. Wow. So from the change. I mean, from the beginning of that church's history, they said, we're actually going to put our lives, no, we're going to put our children's lives on the line to try and share the hope of Jesus. Jeez. Well, you tell that story to the people that are currently in the church, and I just said, Isn't that great that that's who we are? Yeah. Now, can we start a contemporary worship service? Yeah. I mean, who's going to argue with that? Like, so you reveal a sense of urgency. We need to overpopulate heaven or however you want to say it. And then you want to talk about, and this is what we've always done. Yes. I guarantee you, if you look at the organization you're leading, if it's a Team Jesus organization, if you go back to the charter and the start, no one ever started a church saying, why don't we start a place where we can all be bored? Yeah. Where we can all wonder why we're here. Where we can all say, well, we've never done it that way before. That's not in any charter anywhere. Yeah. So I think if you'll become the resident expert on the history of your organization, you're going to unlock some things that can really lead to uh there's a sense of urgency. Yep. And this is always who we have been. Yes. We we moved at First Press Houston. They were so kind to put up with me. I was this 31-year-old, arrogant senior pastor. They, frankly, they should have used a search committee. And uh they didn't have those at the time, but uh they called this 31-year-old kid to lead this very large church. And I had this fabulous idea that we should move every single worship service to a different time so that the 11 o'clock hour could be for a modern service in our new facility. And I mean, this is the oldest church in the Sam Houston went to First President Houston, right? What kind of idiot does that? Okay. But the people were kind and we started digging into the history, and we realized I'll get it all wrong, but it's like we had the tallest and first steeple so people could find the church. We had the first, uh, we were the first church on the radio, we were the first church on television, we were the first church, dude. We were the first church cookbook in Texas because we wanted to have something you could give people who don't go to church that would make them say, Oh, that's a cool place.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00This is what we've always been. And somebody, not me, on our little change committee said, What if we put up banners? Now, if you're old, you'll remember this. But Sports Center, which I think you still pay attention to how you consume it, but I watch it on a television. My television's just about yay big. Right. So they used to have a thing at Sports Center. When they'd go to a commercial break, they'd say, Did you know? And they'd share like an old sports stat. Yeah. And this committee member said, What if we put banners up everywhere? They said, Did you know? First Press Houston was the first to do this, also we could reach more people. Wow. Let's continue the tradition. I can't take credit for that, but man, this fabulous layperson came up with it. We put banners everywhere, we moved everything, and everybody was fine. It was a long road to get there. Yep. And I can't take credit for any success. I probably messed it up and got in the way, but but wow, we we we saw the urgency, and then we had some people who were kind enough to say, This is what we've always done.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00By the way, if you're a new pastor in a more established church, you can go to the oldest people in the church and say, When we were at our very best, what did we do? Yeah. No one turns that conversation down.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00You get to remember the good old days. You get to tell the new young guy what the good old days were like. I wish I'd have done more of that. So name the urgency, show how you've been doing it the whole of your history or at the beginning of your history. Let's recapture our history. Yep. Then uh form a sense of what that urgency and heritage means for today. Contextualize it. Contextualize it right here, right now. Yep. We've always had kindness toward the poor. Did you know that they're more poor living within a three mile radius of us than ever before? Wow. Time to get serious about that. What does that mean? So cast a vision. Next step, and again, this is so slow. This is so slow. If you want to go fast, go plant your own church and you can do what you want for about 10 years, and then you'll be faced with the same thing. After you reveal urgency, show how you've always been a part of it, cast some vision. Dr. Carter had the great wisdom to say, form a guiding coalition. Now, this doesn't mean your church board, your school board, your form a focused group of people, ideally, some people that are in leadership and some that are younger than what's in leadership, and have them come around and start kicking around to ideas. How do we make that vision happen? Yeah. Way too often I thought as the leader, I had to provide a sense of where the end zone was and the playbook with every play to get us to the end zone. That's not the way it works. Yeah. You know, the best leaders I know, I've got one uh pastor friend just over the way that speaks to millions of people every every single week. And he told me one time, uh, William, I think I just I can get up in the crow's nest and I've got a sense of where we need to point the ship. And his exec pastor interrupted and said, and I'm down at the bottom of the mast with the steering wheel. And I said, Boss, I can get us there. Yep. It's exactly right. It's not all on you to get every detail done. So form that guiding coalition, right? And really hand over the authority of them to them of saying, if this is the vision we believe in, if this is who we've always been, if this is an urgent need, you guys help me figure out how we get there. After that, look for the smallest win possible and go win. Yep. So it's like uh uh do you know who Dave Ramsey is? I do. Okay. So Dave is this uh don't be in debt person baby steps, and he's been a friend and a client for years and years and years. And if you follow his method at all, he says, you know, the trick to getting out of debt is most people don't have just one credit card. Yeah, they have a bunch. The trick to getting out of debt is finding the smallest debt you owe and pay it off and pay it off. Because momentum is the biggest friend of change. Yeah, let's say it again. Momentum is the biggest friend of change. Think about if you've ever lost weight, how'd you get to the you lose that first five pounds? You're like, I'm actually, this is pretty cool. I'm I'm gonna keep going, you know, or taking a new momentum is the friend of change. So find the smallest win you can toward the end zone. Ask the group what's a small win to guiding coalition? What's a small win we can create that will create some momentum and start stack the Dave calls it the debt snowball. Yeah, there you go. You should talk to Dave. I should. Yeah, I should. Yeah, he you know, he's getting a little older. You could be the new fresh voice.
SPEAKER_01I I need to practice my debt speeches. I don't know if I could match what he's got going on. He's pretty dangerous now. He's pretty good. I do want to ask though, when implementing change, the one thing that is you can almost guarantee is you're gonna get a little bit of pushback. Sure. You're gonna get some people that are like, hey, I'm not so sure that this is the right move to make. And if you've taken the time, you've already decided um amongst the you know, council of other people and chosen that, hey, this change is necessary, but this person is still not getting on board. How do you address that? How do you move forward and continue to make the change while trying not to offend or do you disregard? I mean, what would you advise?
SPEAKER_00I wish I had thought this through more when I was a pastor because I screwed it up so much. But uh, you know, there's a uh I'm gonna get the words wrong. We can put it in the show notes, but uh the the curve of adaptive change. You have early adopters, then you have innovators, then you have early adopters, and it's like a curve that goes like this. Very few innovators, a few more early adopters. If those are the only people on board with your change, it's gonna die or you're gonna get replaced. Yep. You know, but if you can move to that middle part of the bell curve where when we realize it's okay, we're gonna get on board, then then you can get to the backside of people that really don't like change. I have I have dear family members that hate change. It's not a good or bad thing, it's a it's more of a wiring, right? Uh, and and they'll probably come along. And then there's just the anchors.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and the anchors are gonna be anchors no matter what. And I I we should probably do a whole podcast and invite an expert in to talk about how to deal with them, but I don't know how to, and then and you'll get the craziest stuff. Like, I remember sitting across the table from uh in a different church I served about a small change we were making, and my dear friend who was an elder said, But William, what about the one sheep who doesn't want to get on board? Jesus left the 99 for the one. I'm like, that's not about change, that's about salvation. Yeah, right. So I would, I would, if I were a leader and I were looking at this, I would make sure as you're building that guiding coalition that it's not all innovators and early adapters. Yeah, you've got to have some people. And then secondly, um, I would look for uh we're in Texas, so we know what a bell cow is, right? The bell cow is the one with the bell, and all the other cows follow. And uh we were in the in the middle of trying to move all these services at first pres. And again, I'm not the guy that gets credit here, but it got pretty messy, and there was a lot of noise, and here I am, this new guy and young and arrogant. And I was 31, so I I I actually knew everything, Jared. That's right. I don't know as much now. But uh three older guys in the church, I won't name them because they're I just won't, but they're just so dear. Literally all octagenarians uh that everyone respected. And uh back in the day when people watched these things called televisions, yeah, there were commercials. And well, I know about those. Okay, well, there was an E.F. Hutton commercial. E.F. Hutton was a financial advisor, big noisy restaurant, and everybody's making noise, and then EF Hutton opens his mouth and the whole restaurant goes silent. It's like when E.F. Hutton talks, you listen. Everybody listens. Well, that's who these three guys were. Yeah. And they knew I was in trouble and on the ropes, and this is how good they were. One of them said to me, William, do you want to go get lunch with with two friends? I'm like, sure. He said, Okay, we're going to get oysters. You like oysters? Yeah. We're going to Guido's. Well, Guido's is an hour and a half away from first. So we had an hour and a half drive, we had an hour and a half lunch, we had an hour and a half coming back. And by the end of the thing, they had hit, they said, Well, what if we did it this way, William? Well, what if we did it this way? Yeah. And then we all agreed on kind of more or less their fixing of my mess. And we had a board meeting that night, which was it felt a little bit like the okay corral, like we were headed toward, it was gonna be bad. And those three guys stood up and said, I think we found, I think we might have found a way worth trying. Yeah. And they outlined this way, and no debate, unanimous vote, off we went. Doesn't make it a perfect decision. Sure. But they were able to bring along the rest of that curve. We were good, good people. Yeah, you just people get really nervous about change. And I understand this more now that I'm not in ministry than when I was, because when you're not ministry, you you work hard all week, you you're trying to spin plates, both you and your spouse are working, the kids have got stuff going on, one of them's in trouble, one of them's sick. You get to Sunday and you get to church, you want some sanctuary, you want one-consistency, maybe even reliability. Just something that's staying the same. Yeah. So you know, when you get people mad at you for change, it's not that you're doing a bad job. It's it's just hard. Yeah. The the primary function of a large organization is to resist rapid change. So before you go down that change initiative, listen to the first podcast and weigh whether this is a change worth making. Exactly. And then look at, you know, okay, where's some urgency I can reveal? Uh, where's something in our heritage that shows we've always been trying to fix this urgency? Uh, how do I cast a vision for that and get a guiding coalition of people who are not just the innovators, but people that represent others? How do I create some short-term wins? How do I bring along the people that are the E. F. Huttons of the church? And then after a while, a long, long while, it will cement itself. And your change may go away. Yeah. Uh it's been, golly, 17 years since I've been at that church. And uh, and and they still have that service. They changed the name, but it's still there. And you know, things are still uh moving right along. And and I can't take credit for that, but these older guys that got along, this coalition that they they helped me do what I didn't know how to do. And that was dude, we got to take our time. Yeah, we got to go through a process, and it doesn't mean it will always work out. Just ask Jesus.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. They didn't like his change very much.
SPEAKER_00No, they're gonna like it in the end. They will. They are. They will. I I know it because uh we're gonna overpopulate Evan. That's right. And they're gonna get to the other side and say, ah, it's a pretty good change. That's right.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Well, change, if you take your time, will make your team, your organization, the best it has been yet in 2025. Thanks again for joining us on the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're looking for more leadership resources, you can find us at Vanderblumen.com and on socials at Vanderblumen. We'll see you again next week where we continue discussing how to build, run, and keep great teams.