How do you keep your staff motivated and ensure they give their best effort every day they go to campus?
They need to know how to win.
Winning is motivating! Seeing progress and success in your vision energizes your staff and fuels hard work.
But your team can’t tell if they’re winning if they don’t know the score. Compare the last time you played pickup basketball for fun versus when you were in a real, competitive game. When you start to keep score, it raises the stakes. Everything feels more meaningful.
Your staff really want to do a good job. They do. But oftentimes they don’t know exactly what constitutes a good job. They have an idea in their head of what it means to be on staff but when they walk on campus it’s easy for them to wonder, “What am I supposed to do?” “Is this really working?” That uncertainty discourages effort. You, as their leader, have the ability to bring incredible focus, clarity, and assurance to their job by defining the win.
Defining the win means giving your staff clear, tangible steps to take on a semester, monthly, weekly, and daily basis. When your staff shows up knowing what they need to accomplish to win, they will labor more confidently and boldly. As they start to see their labors have a direct impact on the movement, they will be even more inspired to work hard.
Most of us are familiar with setting semester Keys to Victory. Those are effective in painting big picture goals. However, it’s important to implement a rhythm of defining the win on a more regular basis as well. When you help your staff get into this habit you are equipping them to be productive. As they get more practice, they will quickly learn to define the win for themselves.
Let’s look at the 4 areas you can help define the win:
1. Keys to Victory (Semester Wins)
Setting Keys to Victory is your chance to provide some broad guidance and growth to your staff members. When done well, Keys to Victory tend to add a ton of value to our staff. They are able to see that you are thinking through their health, growth and development. Knowing you are FOR them is a reassuring feeling.
When coming up with Keys to Victory for your staff, try to think through the following areas:
- Stage of Ministry
- Next Step to make a disciple
- Godly Character
- Personal Life
Their semester evaluation is a great place to start when thinking through ideas. I’d also consult the discipleship objectives we’ve set for our staff members. I would limit coming up with only 3 or 4 total Keys. It should challenge them but not overwhelm them. Their Keys to Victory will guide your time with them throughout the semester. They are one of the first places I look when prepping 1-1s each week. You don’t want your Keys to Victory to be something you show them at the beginning of the semester and don’t review again until the end. Make it a regular habit in your time with them to update their progress.
Defining this macro “win” is a great way to shepherd your staff well, grow their leadership, and further their ministries!
2. Monthly Wins
You need to help your staff break down their keys to victory to fit within the seasons of ministry. Each month at your Monthly Alignment Meeting you should build necessary convictions, provide appropriate training based on what is coming up, and look ahead to the month’s agenda. However, at the end, you want to summarize all of that into 2-4 very clear action steps. You want your staff to walk away knowing what they must accomplish to be successful.
Some examples might be a sowing contacts goal in September or an evangelism goal in October. It might be a recruiting goal. Whatever it is, make sure it’s something that is in your staff’s control. Set a goal for evangelistic appointments, not converts. Measure how many times they invited someone to the conference instead of the number attending. It’s okay to have those overarching goals, but the “wins” need to be actionable.
Once your staff have those goals, come up with a way to keep them in front of the team. There must be a scoreboard that is visible that shows progress towards those goals. I’ve found that making monthly wins public and visible is more helpful than keeping them private on a piece of paper. A month is long enough to lose track amidst all the details and the wins get lost. After you come up with them at your strategic meeting, have your staff post them somewhere everyone can see.
3. Weekly Wins
Once you get to the weekly wins, you are helping your staff narrow in their focus to the nitty-gritty of ministry. These also tend to be a lot more personal. I wouldn’t post weekly wins for the team to see. These work best to include in a staff report. Weekly and Daily wins are where you REALLY start helping your staff become productive.
What I’ve often noticed is our staff are very vague when it comes to Weekly Wins. They’ll put things like:
- Have the Sig Ep Bible study
- Speak at Late Night
- Do Expense report
All of those are specific items, but only the expense report is something that might not happen if it wasn’t written down. The Bible study and the talk are going to happen no matter what. Staff need to figure out what they must do to knock those items out of the park. Weekly wins are designed to drive productivity and keep ourselves on track with the right tasks at hand. A better way to write the Wins above might be:
- Invite 10 of the Sig Eps to the Study
- Practice talk out loud 2x before giving it
- Finish expense report on Thursday morning
Suddenly those wins have actionable steps to take. They would then take those wins and timestamp them on particular days. They would use their calendar to write in when they would do those goals. Another common weekly win is “share the gospel 2 times.” That’s not bad, but that may happen or it may not. You can have them be even more specific. “Text guys until I have 2 Gospel appointments set up.” That pushes them to do even more and is something they can control a little more. Over time with practice, your staff will get better and better at defining weekly wins.
4. Daily Wins
It’s important to help your staff have a system for tracking their productivity. There are all kinds of apps and calendars out there that keep track of to-do items. I’ve found that the staff who are MOST productive when it comes to their schedule typically have a paper, hand-written system to track their daily goals. It’s more visible.
As their director, help your staff come into the office or on campus each day and write out 3 big wins they want to accomplish that day. Sure, there might be 10 other tasks that have to get done, but your goal is to help them narrow it down to the most important. Write them down. Have them keep their planner or whatever system handy. They need to be able to finish the day and mark those off.
Better Accountability and Growth
As their leader, these rhythms will help you see how your staff are processing through their job, what they view as most important, and allow you to give more direct feedback to help them grow. All of our staff are committed to the job and the vision. They work hard. They want to be effective. As leaders, we need to help nudge them in the right direction so their efforts make the biggest dent for the kingdom.
Put it into Practice:
- What are some examples that indicate your staff either do or don’t know what to do?
- What are the current issues your staff are having in productivity and effort?
- Are they currently excelling more in their short term (daily/weekly) planning and productivity or the bigger picture (monthly/semester)?
- For each of your staff, which of the above wins would help them step up their productivity most? How can you help them?
