Create a Crisis – Part 3

In my “Create a Crisis” series I’ve talked about what a Thematic Goal is and what the process is like for creating one.  Today I thought I would reveal what our Cross Point Staff Thematic Goal is for 2009.

This year our thematic goal is about securing the foundation among our staff.  As I was praying and brainstorming our thematic goal for this year, I became burdened by the need to establish an even better foundation of trust and unity among our team.  Cross Point has grown significantly within the last 12-18 months on all fronts.  From increased attendance, to a new campus, to additional staff, to more ministries and programs, we have experienced a lot of change.  Growth so quickly has increased the pace of our days and the flow of our communication quite dramatically.  We have always been a very tight-knit team, but I began to see the potential for our trust and commitment to one another to become compromised if we didn’t turn up the heat in this area.

I knew what I wanted to accomplish among our team but putting it into a clear, concise and catchy thematic goal was a bit more of a challenge.  After a couple of months of pondering and prayer, we settled on this:

Thematic Goal: WE!

WE! represents our commitment to one another as a team and the ministry that God has called us to.

To describe and support WE!, I came up with five defining objectives which describe how we plan to be committed to WE! this year in very practical and tactical ways.

We Are Family – influencing and developing family values among our team.  What are the most critical family values that we need to instill?

We Need Each Other – clarity, communication, systems.  What do we need to do to create systems and communication plans that help develop clarity and candor among our staff especially between multiple campuses?

We Can Work it Out – focus, discipleship, stewardship, volunteer development.  What do we need to do to help our staff “work smarter, not harder”, “do more with less”, etc?

We Will Rock You – creativity, ingenuity, risk-taking.  How do we create a culture where innovation is at the core of what we do?

We Celebrate – How can we infuse celebration throughout our day-to-day activities?

To help communicate the goal to the staff, I purposefully tied each objective to a well-known song.  We played the song and shared the objective in hopes of creating a fun, memorable experience.  (Yes, it was borderline hokey, but it was fun and it worked!)

Over the next several months we will work through these objectives and infuse it throughout our organization in a variety of ways.  I’ll be sharing more soon.

In the meantime, I’ve got a Starbucks gift card waiting for the first person who can name the song (title and artist) that I used to help communicate each of the five defining objectives.