How are leadership and snack packs connected? Great question. My friend, Matt Grimes, made a great analogy a few weeks ago. Thought I’d share it with you.
Those little snack pack pudding cups remind me of leadership. Many times, leadership truths need to come in small snack-sized portions. I’d prefer to feed my volunteers small portions over a long period of time rather than large doses concentrated in a short period of time.
I like that. So, we’re trying out a new way to pour into our volunteers in fpKids. Every week before each service, we have 10 minutes to reconnect and pray together before everyone rushes to their rooms. A very brief amount of time that holds great potential when done right.
Something I consistently hear from my boss, Chuck Carringer, is:
We want to add value. If it adds value, people will make a point to come. If it doesn’t add value, they won’t.
(if you’re a leader and not reading his blog… you should. Just sayin’…)
So, the goal is that these 10-minute meetings aren’t just routine, but they add value to those that attend. Taking a tip from my friends at LifeKIDS.tv, we’ve begun using Habitudes to teach nuggets of leadership truths to our volunteers. This is great stuff.
As a staff team, we watch a 10-minute video teaching on a Habitude leadership topic during our weekly staff meeting. We might spend a few minutes discussing how the message impacts us, but generally we let the truth simmer within us. Then we use the same leadership lesson in the form of a postcard to teach from in our volunteer meetings throughout the weekend. We don’t spend more than 5 minutes on the lesson, and the volunteer leaves with the postcard to remind them of what was shared.
We’ve done this two weeks in a row, and I like what I see so far. After the initial weeks, I think I’d prefer to camp on one lesson for a few weeks before moving to the next. So I’m going to test that out this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes.
