Leading With Your Strengths
We’ve got a problem at our house. We have possums living in our roof. Now before you get all mushy and goofy, they are not cute or cuddly. They are noisy and emit alien-like screams in the middle of the night to compliment all of the WWF-esque thumping that they do on our bedroom roof.
But I had a cunning plan to get rid of these ‘pesky varmits.’ Pete the Possum man told me that all I have to do is to close up any cavity space underneath the house, then the possums can’t climb up the walls into the ceiling space. Problem solved. With a torch in one hand and my ‘no more gap’ spray cans in the other, I took up Pete’s advice and did a long commando-crawl underneath the house to their most likely infiltration point.
You should know, the space under our house is dark, very narrow, full of cobwebs and dreaded Australian spiders such as redbacks, funnel webs, white tail spiders which are all very bad for your health should they bite you.
Knowing the risk, I emptied the cans of ‘no more gaps’ in the cavity space. As I was finishing up, a blob of the ‘no more gaps’ fell on my face and down my neck. It went rock solid and very sticky in about 10 seconds. I had to then commando-crawl back out and hurried up to my bathroom mirror where I saw that half of my goatie beard was covered and the whole left side of my neck.
To cut a very long story short, I had to cut off half of my beard and spent a couple of hours peeling the remainder from my neck (now I know how women feel when they wax). Not a great experience. I didn’t really do the job that well. It isn’t finished, it won’t keep the possums out and I hurt myself in the process.
Churches do the same thing. We try to do things that we aren’t good at ourselves. We often don’t finish what we start. We don’t do it well, and we often hurt our brand/church in the process.
We try to:
- Design our own website
- Create our own brand strategies
- Develop our own social media
- Create our own video
- Design our own logo (by committee)
- Do our own PR
Like me, churches need to understand where its strengths lie—what they are good at, and what they aren’t good at. We need to lead with our strengths and get help in the areas of weakness. If that means hiring a graphic designer, a brand strategist, a videographer, a PR specialist, etc., then so be it. If it means that it will cost us money, so be it.
We must remember to lead with our strengths and stick with that. In every other area we need to surround ourselves with those who are brighter, smarter, and more talented at what they do. In the end we will be better off because we did it.
What areas are you weak in? What areas are you strong in?
Hello Steve,
I just stumbled on your blog via twitter and enjoyed this piece. A lot of churches struggle with looking for external expertise and try to get their members to do everything. This is great if they have such expertise in-house but because churches can’t have all the knowledge and skills they will ever need. Church members can easily get burdened working on projects they have little or no expertise and interest.
Lack of money is the reason for some churches not getting outside expertise but that should not be used as an excuse. Churches need to think creatively on how to get external expertise. Pro bono or volunteering opportunities could be negotiated between creative churches and external experts to produce win-win results for all concerned. Marcus Buckingham’s stuff on maximising your strengths in an organizational context is quite interesting and related to this post.