We have already established that Clear Expectations are the foundation of a healthy marriage, parenting, or working relationship. They allow both parties to be on an even playing field and they are required in order for true communication to happen. The better we get at expressing our expectations the less we deal with those nasty assumptions that so often disrupt healthy relationships. (You know the ones like, “You saw the sink was full of dirty dishes… I just assumed you would go ahead and clean them!!”)
I have found that though Clear Expectations help create clarity and unity, they do not necessarily lead to efficiency or effectiveness. In order for expected behaviors and attitudes to move to accepted results there must be a system of Regular Evaluation that takes place. This is something that is quite obvious to most business people. Most of my friends who work in the secular, professional world take things like daily briefings and weekly staff meetings as standard operating procedure. It seems, however, that many churches still operate on a system of “shared trust” rather than regular evaluation. The thinking must go somewhat like this, “Since we all love God and want what is best for His Kingdom, surely people will work in the way I think they should, in the time frame I hope they will, with the effort and professionalism that the job deserves.” A quick look at the state of the American church will show that this just is not the case.
As I have heard countless times, you must inspect what you expect. I don’t believe people fail to meet expectations because they don’t love God as much as they should, or love their job, or love their spouse, or their children. They fail to meet expectations because they never inspect and evaluate their own lives, because they were never taught that they should. Our entire school system teaches people to perform up to the level of evaluation of their superiors. It is the extremely rare case that you find people who live up to an internal standard of expectations. That is partly true because in order to live that way you have to unlearn most of what society blasts into you from birth.
How do we change this pattern? We teach people what it looks like to regularly evaluate their lives, one step at a time. I know a church is struggling with this issue when I hear things like, “We cannot seem to get enough volunteers… and the ones we have are so unreliable!” My first thought when I hear that is, “What kind of evaluation methods do you use for your staff members on a weekly basis?” What I will often find is… none. There is a meeting where volunteer needs are discussed, but not a follow-up where the volunteer process is evaluated. There are no 3/6/12-month employee reviews. If you ask the average staff or volunteer “How are you doing in your job?” they would not really know how to answer the question.
When there is a culture of expectation and evaluation at the top of an organization, then it is natural for that culture to flow down to each level of the organization. Often times people believe that regular evaluation makes people feel like they are being micro managed or that you do not trust them to carry out their job. Though that can be true it is more often the case that regular evaluations can help cement positive behavior, provide a foundation for risk taking, and quickly deal with vision shifts.
I assume that most people working for me are going to do a good job. That is why I hired them (or recruited them if they are volunteers). If I did not think they could do the job I would not have asked them to do it. Therefore, I fully expect most of my evaluations to be good, reinforcing positive behavior. That reinforcement then becomes a new foundation upon which the employee can reach even higher to attain larger goals. Given time and consistency these foundations can lead to proper risk taking (which is something I love to see in people in my organization/church). Take my son, Jared, for example. He is an active, adventurous, risk-taking human being; in other words he is a “boy”. He has almost no fear when he is on the ground. He will jump, fall, fly, roll, to no end on the ground. If I take him one foot off the ground and set him on the couch he is able to take even greater risks as he can now perform greater leaps and daring acts. If I take him ten feet off the ground on a tree branch, however, he will cling to me with all his might. That is simply because ground-level to tree-level is not a regularly evaluated and reinforced position. Instead of encouraging him to take more risks I am actually killing any risk-taking desires he may have. When we regularly evaluate people and reinforce positive behavior, we provide them with an ever-higher foundation upon which they can excel. When we fail to regularly evaluate we will often find that they have either become stagnant (clinging to the tree trunk afraid to fall), or that they have moved way off course.
People move off course due to vision shifts. They move way off course because their vision shifts happened a long time ago and nobody ever evaluated them (or helped them learn how to evaluate themselves). A one degree shift in direction is not a big deal if I am correcting it every five feet or so. If I am only correcting it every five miles then it becomes a much larger issue. How many times have we seen marriages torn apart by seemingly minor things? How many times have partnerships and relationships ended and the people on the outside are left wondering, “How could that small thing have done this?” It is because small vision shifts left unevaluated over time lead to large separation.
In the church world this has often occurred because the vision of the church is not clearly expressed or evaluated. As a result people are left to create their own vision of what the church is and what it is about. So, you have parents with small children who love the children’s ministry and tell their friends, “Our church is all about kids!”. The parents with youth will say the church is all about youth. Those in the crisis food ministry will say that the church is all about helping the hungry in the community. The worship team believes the church is all about the Sunday worship experience. In fact the church is most likely deeply committed to all of these things, but is not about any of them. What has happened is that people have shifted off of vision and onto programs or strategies. The danger is often not seen until the vision requires that programs and strategies change. Then you face the inevitable conflict that arises when people complain that the church just does not have the same vision that it used to.
This leads to our last, and most uncomfortable, step towards avoiding conflict, Early Confrontation, which we will look at next time.
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