So, you’re thinking of pulling the plug on that ministry.
You’ve looked at the numbers. Participation is down. Volunteers are getting harder to recruit. Impact is diminishing.
But wait.
Before you send that ministry out to pasture, take a moment and be sure you’re looking at ALL of the relevant data.
It’s possible that the impact this ministry is having isn’t showing up on the normal metrics report. You may need to look beyond the numbers.
Years ago I had lunch with a leadership mentor of mine, who served as Vice President of one of Canada’s largest, national grocery store chains. They had recently made the decision to open many of their stores 24 hours, and I asked him for the rationale behind the decision. Did their market research really find a sizable group interested in shopping at 2:00 am?
“Actually, no, we found very few customers interested in shopping at 2:00 am,” he laughed. “But what we DID find was that even though few of our customers were interested in shopping at 2:00 am, many were VERY interested in shopping at a store which they knew WAS open at 2:00 am…Even if they had no intention of taking advantage of it. In other words, it became very important to our customers who were shopping at 2:00 in the afternoon to know that their store cared enough about them to also be open at 2:00 in the morning.”
Bottom line? Impact doesn’t always show up on the normal metrics report, and leaders need to develop a 6th sense about where ministry impact is showing up outside the limitations of hard numbers.
So before you pull the plug on that struggling ministry, ask yourself these questions:
- Could it be that the impact of this ministry is being felt ELSEWHERE, outside the constituents of the ministry itself?
- Where else should we be looking for possible impact this ministry could be having?
- Would the decision to end this ministry leave an unanticipated hole that could be hard to climb out of?
I’ve learned that effective leaders pursue answers to these questions with relentless fervour.
Because sometimes the most significant impact of a ministry just doesn’t show up on the normal metrics report.
How do you evaluate ministry impact ‘beyond the numbers’?
