SPACE Core Score - Summer 2008

From Marcus Buckingham:

+ What Is Our Core Score?
By zeroing in on one core score leaders brought clarity to their people.
Ideally, this score will be a leading indicator of success, such as employee engagement or employee safety or crime, rather than a trailing indicator, such as sales or profit or tax revenues, but from the perspective of your followers, what matters most is that it's clear.

One of the metrics SPACE measures is how many leaders are returning to SPACE. If they have participated in a previous SPACE experience - either as a leader or student, it is scored. It matters because the more expertise, experience and context our summer team leaders have, the better the odds of their success. Our choices in leadership are about the most intentional thing we do and it's a choice we make matter.

Here is that particular core score for this summer's leader teams.
: Baltimore - 5 out of 6 == 83%
: Cameroon - 5 out of 5 == 100%
: Hungary - 6 out of 8 == 75%
: NOLA - 6 out of 9 == 66%
: England - 5 out of 6 == 83%
+ Total - 29/34 - 85%

Compare this to the score from Summer 2007 -- 65%

SPACE's Core Score - Oct 2006

In the spirit of last year's State of the 03 post and implementing this idea of a core score....

There are two core scores of SPACE - how we measure how well we are doing. First, let's score how many students after graduation serve in an intentional ministry. Also related, lets count how much of that is cross cultural. Our second core score is how many students we send out each summer and the metrics around those numbers. Let's also see what percentage of leaders have come out of being students.

The first score is important because there is direct function between people that stick around church and people that serve. And within the realm of youth ministry, statistics bear the fact that many students who love student ministries drop their faith after they graduate from high school. The whole intention of following Jesus is to live a life centered around doing something about it. And doing something about it helps solidify faith.

So actually, although we say that SPACE is about student [middle and high school] missions and service, you now you see, like I do, that there is much more at stake...

These core scores also take into account my dteam and the class of 2003. I think it's a fair metric since I actively recruit, when I can, from this class to help me with SPACE. Now that SPACE has been around for 3 years, I'm going to extend the scores to include the set of students that have been part of SPACE that have now graduated. So this is a look at what they are all doing now collectively:

[some of this is repeated from a previous post]
Part 1
** December 2003:
sent 11 of the 03 to Urbana Student Missions Conference

** Summer 2004:
3 - go on a two week long mission trip to Kazakhstan - 2 that also went to Urbana

** Summer 2005:
1 - works with Campus Crusade ministry in Wildwood NJ
3 - help as SPACE mission team leaders - 2 from Urbana
4 - go on overseas missional trips - 2 from Kstan team, 1 SPACE leader, 1 from Urbana

** Jan 2006:
- 3 go to NOLA on relief trips - 2 from the 03, 1 from SPACE
- 1 assist me with SPACE winter expedition - this one from the 03

** Summer 2006:
- 5 lead different teams for SPACE - 3 from the 03 and 2 SPACE grads
- 1 goes to Uganda - from the 03

** Fall 2006:
at least 8 that I know of intentionally serving with students and college ministries around. probably more.

Grand total - since 2003, graduated from the 03 and SPACE
13 - # of unique individuals serving in intentional ministry
10 - # serving in cross cultural contexts

Part 2

[some of you may have seen this also in a previous post]
2004:
3 teams (LC, NYC and DC) of 36 people
7 leaders - 5 of those were students - 71%
approx $7,500

2005:
3 teams (LC, Brasil and Trinidad) of 37 people
12 leaders - 10 were students - 84%
approx $27,000

2006:
5 teams (LC, Merge, DC, LA and Cameroon) of 68 people
20 leaders - 16 were students - 80%
approx $52,000

So that's quite an interesting summary. I'll probably try to this every Fall or so.

TOTYNTK - Chapter 4 - Great Leading

Chapter 4 – The One Thing You Need to Know: Great Leading

** The difference between great managers and great leaders:

Great managers discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on this uniqueness. Great managers serve as intermediaries between the individual and the company, and like all intermediaries, they perform their role well only when they perform it one on one.
Great leaders must play a different role. Their job is to rally people toward a better future, and as such, they are not intermediaries. They are instigators. Driven by their compulsion for a better future, their challenge is to do everything in their power to get other people to join together to make this future comes true. So, by definition, they will perform this role well only when they find a way to make many people, regardless of each person's uniqueness, excited by and confident in this better future. If, through their words, actions, images, pictures and scores, they can tap into those things we all share, they will succeed as leaders. If they can't, they will struggle.

** The essence of great leadership:

Discover What Is Universal and Capitalize On It.

** What are the universals of human nature?
[A very interesting discussion on culture, by the way. And.. remember, one significant thing about a culture is how many words they have to describe a concept.]

Anthropologist Donald Brown – Human Universals

1. Fear of death – the need for security
2. Fear of the outsider – the need for community
3. Fear of the future – the need for clarity
We are aware that the future is unstable, unknown and therefore potentially dangerous.
This is why, in every society, we give prestige to those people who claim to be able to predict the future.
4. Fear of chaos – the need for authority
Two universals reveal this fear – first, every society has devised its own story of how the world came to be and in each story, in each creation myth, the world was created out of chaos. Second, one of the most universal of human traits is our need to classify things. Out of our desire for order springs out need for authority. Every society has a word for leader.
5. Fear of insignificance – the need for respect
Usually the need for respect is attended to by an intermediary, by someone who deals with people one-on-one. Today, in the world of work, this intermediary role is played most effectively by the manager, not the leader.

** The job of a leader:

The job of a leader is not to win people's loyalty. The job of a leader is to rally people toward a better future. Winning people's loyalty should be a means to this end, not the end itself. If you have grappled with our fear of the future and somehow neutralize it, even turn it into something positive, you will have positioned yourself to pull off something truly significant as a leader.
[The job of a leader is not based on universal 1, 2, 4 or 5. It is about #3 - leading is about the fear of the future.]
The problem for you, the modern-day leader, is that you traffic in the unknown. All of your conversations concern the unknown, the future, and the possibilities you see there. If you are going to succeed as a leader, you simply must find a way to engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. If great managers are catalysts, speeding up the reaction between the individuals talents and the company's goals, then great leaders are alchemists. Somehow they are able to transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future.

** Clarity is the key:

By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear; to define the future in such vivid terms, through your actions, words, images, pictures, heroes, and scores, that we can all see where you, and thus we, are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

** The balance between giving people clear direction and yet still enough white space to create and innovate

This doesn't mean that you describe in precise detail all of your tactics and plans and deadlines. On the contrary, as we'll see, to keep your followers challenged and engaged, you must allow them plenty of white space to invest, create and experiment. But it does mean that your ability to be clear and your followers feelings of confidence are causally linked.

** Points of Clarity – Where are your followers crying out for clarity?

1. Who Do We Serve?
You the leader must be clear about whom you are choosing to serve because we, your followers, require it of you. When you do this with clarity, you give us confidence – confidence in our judgment, confidence in our decisions, and ultimately confidence in our ability to know where to look to determine if we have fulfilled our mission.
A leader must not be clear on all points and that one of the areas in which he should allow significant ambiguity is in the strategies and tactics selected by his employees. Yes, he should be clear about whom he is trying to serve, but then he must actively encourage his employees to devise novel and as yet unproven ways of serving them. This is the only way to keep the organization alive.
2. What Is Our Core Strength?
3. What Is Our Core Score?
By zeroing in on one core score leaders brought clarity to their people.
Ideally, this score will be a leading indicator of success, such as employee engagement or employee safety or crime, rather than a trailing indicator, such as sales or profit or tax revenues, but from the perspective of your followers, what matters most is that it's clear.
4. What Actions Can We Take Today?
Two distinct types of actions – systematic and symbolic
Systematic action – interrupts our day-to-day routines and forces us to become involved in new activities. It disrupts us.
Symbolic action – doesn't alter what we do, it just grabs our attention. It distracts us, thereby giving us something new and vivid on which to focus.

** The Disciplines of Leadership – How do the best leaders achieve this clarity?

1. Take time to reflect
2. Select Your Heroes with Great Care
You must remember that the employees you choose to celebrate will reveal the future you are trying to create. When you bring an employee up onstage and praise her performance, this has a management impact. It will make this particular employee feel appreciated and will motivate her to do even better. However, it will also, if you do it well, have a leadership impact. If you can tell us, your followers, exactly what she did to deserve this recognition, if you can show us the people she served, or the strength she embodies or the scores she achieved, or the actions she took, you will make everything much clearer.
3. Practice

** Summary

Effective leaders don't have to be passionate. They don't have to be charming. They don't have to be brilliant. They don't have to possess the common touch. They don't have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals – our need for security, for community, for clarity, for authority, and for respect – our need for clarity, when met, is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience and creativity.
Show us clearly whom we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions must be taken today, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.

My thoughts:
1. For such a grand topic as being a good leader, this chapter has given some very clear - get it - and tangible suggestions for improvement. Core strengths, clients and scores are very concrete things we all can work and concentrate on.

2. You can teach a person to be clear and vivid. But can you teach a person to be a visionary? If they get the vision, you can teach them how to communicate it with clarity. But what if they never form their own visions? How do we create visionaries? I suspect there might be something supernatural here - see Joel 2.

3. Some ideas that relate to SPACE --
- I would like to think that I have been pretty clear when I have prepared teams that I have personally led. It usually centers around an idea like - "Our whole purpose is to serve and bless our GCC mission families." For overseas summer mission teams, that is who we serve. And I would think that at least some of my team members got tired of hearing me say it so much. The bigger question is how clear are we on our mission with SPACE on a bigger scope.
- Knowing our core strengths - not just within our teams but the student ministry overall [LC and CpR] - is important especially as we put summer team experiences together. If our mission teams are really put together with a partnership in mind, knowing our core strengths is an important piece.
- I see SPACE having two primary core scores right now: One of them is the proportion of students we send out versus overall students in the ministry and that theoretically, this proportion should grow. The second core score is how many students actually leave the student ministries to serve intentionally. Which reminds me that I'm working on an update for this year to my "The State of the 03" post from August of 2005 - more on that score later.

Related : My notes from Chapter 2

Summer 2007 Leadership Score

Below are the percentages of leaders serving this summer that have been a part of a SPACE experience in the past. We consider this measurement an important one to track - one we consider a "core" score.

Baltimore [9th grade] - 3/7 42%
NYC [10th grade] - 5/6 - 83%
England [11th grade] - 2/4 - 50%
Hungary [various] - 5/6 - 83%
total - 15/23 - 65%

This ratio is important to measure because it gives us a feel for how experienced our leaders are, how well we know our leadership team in general, and the-oh-so-subjective criteria of 'Do they get it?' If they have done something with SPACE in the past, that criteria is probably yes.

[Related: Fall 2006 core score]

Part of SPACE's Core Score

AMsr in India with Adventures in Missions. She has been there since September and will be there until December. See SPACE's Oct 2006 core score. More images of this team here.

Another Core Score

In a previous life [SPACE], I felt it was important to measure two things. [And I hoped that the people that we brought on as leaders understood why these were essential.]

1 - How many people come back to serve out of their natural inclination after an experience we had provided?

2 - How many leaders returned?

Inspired by this post, I think there might need to be a third core score.
3 - Which leaders are creating leaders and how many are they creating?

TOTYNTK - Conclusion - Intentional Imbalance

As we’ve seen in each of these roles, the critical skill is not balance, but its inverse, intentional imbalance. The great manager bets that he will prevail by magnifying, emphasizing and then capitalizing on each employee’s uniqueness. The great leader comes to a conclusion about his core customer, his organization’s strength, its core score, and the actions he will commit to right now, and then, in the service of clarity, banishes from his thought and conversation almost everything else...
It takes insight to focus in this way, and discipline, and since lopsided bets can be scary, courage.

"Do first things first, and second things not at all." - Peter Drucker
I think this was the best book I have read all year. Pick it up if you get the chance.

Favorite 2006 posts

Here are my favorite posts from 2006. Enjoy.

Being Replaced Because of 2506
SPACE Mission Advance 2006
Cameroon, Day 12
Cameroon - It All Means [Tony's personal debriefing]
Youth Ministry in 50 Years
SPACE's Core Score - Oct 2006
Can We Lose More Leaders

[Related -- My 2005 favorite posts]

Book Notes - Organic Community

Organic Community - Joseph Myers [recommended to me by a CA staffer]

1. Organic Order - Synchronized Life - moving from master plan to organic order
master plan - community based on programming
organic order - community based on environment
This is not a call for "come what may" leadership and ministry. There is a difference between being organic and seeking organic order.
I like small groups. I question, however, the manner in which they are promoted and structured At their best, small groups supply an organic-ordered environment for some people in some seasons of their lives to grow their sense of healthy community and belonging. At their worst, small groups deliver a manufactured environment that is promoted for all people and for every season of life.

2. Patterns - spatial observation - moving from prescriptive to descriptive

3. Participation - responsible anarchy - moving from representative to individual
people participate as individuals not as teams or groups
people participate in a decentralized, local way
people participate with the whole of their lives
people participate in a way that is congruous with the way they are asked
the aggregate of participation becomes known as the team or group acts, thinks and makes decisions

People participate as individuals. They are interested in why they - specifically - are being asked. They want to know that you have chosen them first and foremost because of who they are, not to fulfill a strategic master plan.
"Why me?" comes from a deep desire to live beyond one's self. A person wants to contribute in concrete ways, possibly in ways that only he or she could.

4. Measurement - recalculating matters - moving from bottom line to story
Are the stats on the back of a baseball card the true means of discovering the great players among the good?
Reducing living organisms to a census count demeans the way we were created.
Kennon Callahan has coined a phrase: "persons served in mission." He suggests that when we provide our congregational "counts," we remember to count "persons served in mission," not just our members, attendees and former members. Might I add that by using the words "in mission," Ken is confirming that story is the measurement tool of community. Churches don't become legendary on the community grapevine via reporting of numbers. They become legendary through the sharing of their story of mission within the community.

5. Growth - progressive evolution - moving from bankrupt to sustainable
model for growth: large-lump vs. piecemeal
pattern for maintaining growth: incremental vs. quantum leap
bankruptcy vs. sustainability
Consider these questions before you launch your next initiative:
- How much of our future will this one thing control?
- Will this one thing that I'm planning deplete all or most of our resources?
- Will this one thing I'm planning consume all or most of the community's life?
- If what I'm planning fails, will it devastate the whole?
- If what I'm planning succeeds, will it devastate the whole?

6. Power - authority - moving from positional to revolving

7. Coordination - harmonized energy - moving from cooperation to collaboration
The spirit of cooperation is a rigid spirit, one that stifles creativity and discovery.
People are not primarily looking to cooperate with our plan for their lives.
Often when people talk about "being intentional" what they mean can be summed up with words such as purpose-driven, measurable, scientific, deliberate, planned, calculated or premeditated. The problem is that all of these words are rooted in assumed control, and community cannot be controlled with intention.

8. Partners - healthy alliances - moving from accountability to edit-ability
Accountants keep records. Editors wipe away errors while keeping the voice of the author.

9. Language - future lingo - moving from noun-centric to verb-centric
Almost all Internet language describes relational activity.
Ask yourself - What am I treating as noun that really is verb?

10. Resources - mining wherewithal - moving from scarcity to abundancy
The spirit of abundancy is a celebration of possibilities.
A better question for the church might be "What can the church do to assimilate itself into people's lives?" instead of "How can we assimilate people into the church's life?"

+ My observations...
:: Loved Chapter 3 on Participation - made me think a lot about how we invite people into serving or on teams. How many times do we neglect to answer "Why me?" when we invite someone.

:: Chapter 4 on Measurement - how does this change the core score that we keep? I think it expands what we measure.

:: Chapter 5 on Growth - really different way to think about growth and control and large-lump and I really appreciate the idea that new initiatives shouldn't be the all-in-all, aside from even talking about sustainable growth. And part of that is my disposition to not want to be in charge of "all if it."