While The Studio is new, the CCCC Organizational Design Model that powers it is not. Well over a decade ago, CCCC developed and began testing this model in our own organization, step by step, helping shape the CCCC organization you see today. During that time, we grew both our staff and our membership by fifty percent, while also adding new programs to better support Christian ministries and advance our mission.

This is the story of how the model transformed CCCC. May our story inspire you to imagine what The Studio could do for your ministry.

Scene One: The Starting Point

When I began serving as CCCC’s senior leader, I was struck by its potential to do so much more to support Christ’s churches and ministries. God gave me an expansive vision for CCCC’s future. The challenge was that we did not have the capacity to build that future right away. Can you relate to having a compelling vision for your ministry while knowing that, at least for now, it is beyond your reach?

Scene Two: The Turning Point

As I reflected on the gap between God’s vision for CCCC and our available resources, I had a moment of deep clarity: I was thinking too narrowly. I was focused on new program ideas to grow the organization when what I really needed to do was to build an organization capable of carrying the vision. That shift in perspective changed everything.

It also struck me that many other pastors and executive directors may feel the same tension. They can see what God wants their ministry to be and do, but they are still living within the realities of the present. There needs to be a bridge between the present and the future. To address the unique challenges of this in-between space, I began developing a model to guide CCCC and other ministries in thoughtfully designing and building their organizations.

Drawing from my education, research, and careful reflection on what makes a strong, supportive ministry organization, four defining characteristics emerged that shape its every aspect. Such an organization is exemplary, healthy, effective, and Christian.

These four ideas became the Pillars of the CCCC Organizational Design Model, supported by forty-nine Key Indicators that serve as objective evidence of their strength. I wrote detailed definitions for each Key Indicator, and we began shaping CCCC to reflect them.

The model ensured that CCCC leadership considered every aspect of the organization. We didn’t just focus on what seemed like the obvious priorities. We took the time to review all the Key Indicators and challenged ourselves to identify evidence that each was either fully present or could be further developed.

The assessment showed that some Key Indicators were not as strong as thought. It exposed blind spots that might have been overlooked without the comprehensive model to guide our assessment. It also revealed some Key Indicators where we had settled for less than their full potential. As a result, it raised our aspirations for the organization.

Without the model, we already knew the obvious areas that needed work and had high aspirations for them. However, we would have improved certain areas while leaving others underdeveloped. We would have built a lopsided organization. The model gave us a way to examine the organization as a whole. In any organization, everything needs to work together, and the model helped us develop a comprehensive approach to strengthen the entire organization in an orderly way, as resources became available.

Can you imagine the difference it made to my leadership? Seeing the full picture of what needed further development allowed us to prioritize our list of development opportunities in a way that the organization could handle. Now imagine bringing your team together to close the gap between God’s vision for your ministry and your current reality. Can you see it?

Scene Three: The Fruit of the Work

The purpose of change is the fruit it bears. Applying the model at CCCC while I developed it allowed me to see its effects firsthand. In 2012, we made our first significant decision based on using the model, and we saw all the results we expected within eighteen months. It was such an encouragement to the CCCC board and team members. Since then, we have continued to make good progress toward God’s vision for CCCC, both in how we work internally and in how we support our members. CCCC’s potential is being realized in ways I once hoped for, and even in some ways I did not imagine.

Part of the vision was to cultivate a workplace that is a positive, joyful place to be. I longed to create an environment where team members feel valued and able to make meaningful contributions, while working with excellence and experiencing joy. Ministry work is serious, but it is also a labour of love. A workplace shaped by love will naturally show the fruit of the Holy Spirit, blessing not only staff members but also all those served through the ministry.

In addition, I began thinking about the organization I would one day hand to my successor. I conceived of myself first as a steward, which shaped how I lead. I know that every leadership decision I make contributes to the ministry that future generations of CCCC leaders will inherit. That helped me see more clearly that one of my most important responsibilities is to leave behind an organization that is strong, healthy, and pleasing to God. That last part matters deeply. In Christian leadership, pleasing God cannot be taken for granted. It must remain a deliberate and prayerful goal. This is why one of the four Pillars of the model is being Christian.

What CCCC did by using the model is not a prescription for every ministry. The beauty of the model is that it helps each ministry discern what is right for its own calling and context. I’m going to share some of the ways this model helped move CCCC from untapped potential to a stronger, more fruitful future.

As you reflect on what CCCC has done, how might God be inviting you to strengthen the organization that supports your ministry?

Flourishing People

To be healthy, a ministry organization needs people who can flourish.

For CCCC, that meant creating an attractive workplace environment. We decided that rather than simply being an employer, we would aspire to be an employer of choice. We wanted CCCC to be an outstanding and desirable place to work. We paid attention to every detail, shaping our office aesthetics, cultivating a life-giving culture, and providing tools that make work easier as we built an attractive workplace environment.

It also meant prioritizing team care and development. Our policies now support work-life balance and provide flexibility when staff members need to adjust their schedules. Team members have access to a Wellness account for eligible health-related expenses not otherwise covered. We also introduced regular one-on-one employee engagement discussions to facilitate meaningful dialogue between supervisors and team members.

Sufficient Resources

To be healthy, a ministry organization must also have sufficient resources.

For CCCC, this involved building a more sustainable funding model. We undertook a thorough analysis of our programs to determine both how well they aligned with CCCC’s purpose and strategy and whether they were covering their costs. That process led to the closure of two high-profile programs that were past their prime, as we had identified more effective ways to provide those services. It also led to adjustments in membership fees, ensuring that each program could sustainably cover its own expenses. Those changes allowed us to reallocate funds and hire several additional team members, strengthening the organization.

Christian Faith

For the first time, we also applied for and received a significant grant, which helped support The Studio’s development and launch. Because of that funding, we were able to introduce the program in its optimal form rather than as a minimum viable version. This happened because of a decision to stretch our faith. Before using the model, we believed we should operate entirely on earned income. The model helped reshape our thinking and to leave room for God to do what only he can do. Instead of bootstrapping our way forward, we came to trust more fully that God can provide in ways beyond what we expect, in keeping with Ephesians 3:20, and he came through with the funding.

Best Practices

To be exemplary, a ministry organization must embrace best practices.

At CCCC, this included defining our organizational ethos, our shared way of being, as a team. Through substantial discussion with team members, we clarified how we see ourselves, our work, our team values, and our cultural aspirations, and how we can be more aware of our emotional impact on one another. Our Staff Handbook now includes formal statements of these reflections.

Skillful Execution and Adaptability

To be effective, a ministry organization needs skillful execution and adaptability.

As we applied the model over time, we grew in operational management excellence by hiring our first HR professional, our first marketing specialist, and our first project manager. When I began at CCCC, one person, supported by a bookkeeper, spent only a very small portion of his time managing our finances. Today, we have two Certified Public Accountants on staff who care for our finances, improve workflows for financial processes, and advise members on financial management.

We also created a position for a second lawyer, increasing our capacity for legal interventions and strengthening our involvement with the Charities Directorate and other forums that affect charities and their welfare. And, we added a second IT person to help us incorporate technology into everything we do.

We augmented internal resources by replacing legacy in-house digital systems with new software platforms, thereby improving our workflows, marketing efforts, and digital presence.

We became more intentional about mission impact assessment. The model helped us develop new ways to assess how well CCCC serves its members, resulting in a strategically focused dashboard report for our board of directors and a more comprehensive leadership view of our effectiveness. We established four rating categories, each with clear criteria for deciding what is working well and what needs improvement, along with benchmarks for progressing from one rating to another.

This experience changed our approach. Previously, we had focused primarily on informing and educating our members. Through the model, we adopted a mission-first mindset that shifted our attention from outputs to outcomes, from what CCCC does to what our members can do because of what CCCC provides.

Strong Christian Identity and Dynamic Spirituality

A Christian ministry organization needs both a strong Christian identity and a dynamic Christian spirituality.

At CCCC, that has meant weaving Christian values and beliefs into every aspect of our life together, including performance evaluation, member relations, program delivery, governance, and planning.

It has also meant nurturing a shared spiritual life. We aim to build Christlike relationships within our team and with others. One way we do this is by inviting every team member to contribute personally in staff meeting devotional times. Over time, people have shared a testimony, a meaningful worship song or hymn, a Bible character they identify with, or a Scripture passage that has shaped them. They have spoken about aspects of their faith that have deeply moved them or seen them through times of great distress. These moments have deepened our understanding of one another and transformed how we relate as co-workers. We also pray aloud together in staff meetings for our members and for any specific prayer requests they send to us.

In addition, I developed God’s Workplace, a devotional resource for our members that helps connect organizational and operational concepts with faith and our calling to serve Jesus. In pursuit of a faith-fused work culture at CCCC, we also use this resource in our staff meetings to support our aspirations for the kind of people and ministry we want to be as a Christian organization.

Conclusion

CCCC now has years of experience in shaping its organization by using the model that underpins The Studio. We have learned that the first results of change are evident in the short term, and those early results grow in time and encourage even further organizational development.

My hope is that the CCCC organization that I leave to my successor will be a shining example of what it means to please God as a Christian organization, remaining strong and viable for many years, so that ministries across Canada are well supported in their good work. I also hope to look back one day, knowing in my heart that I did my very best to shape the kind of organization the CCCC ministry needs to fulfill its calling. I can say with confidence that it makes a profound difference when a ministry prioritizes building an organization that can truly support the work God has called it to do.

My team and I have experienced firsthand the value of the CCCC Organizational Design Model. In 2025, our entire board and staff went through The Studio program to engage with it in the same way you can. It is now part of our ongoing organizational development process. The report continues to help us step back and see the entire organization more clearly. It prompts us to reflect deeply, notice what we might otherwise overlook, and set wise priorities that move us forward one step at a time. Because of that, we are building for greater impact on a stronger foundation.

The Studio offers a self-assessment, report, and follow-up guidance to help you understand your organization as it is today and discern your next steps toward fulfilling your vision. As a fellow ministry leader, I invite you to step into The Studio and begin shaping your future organization today.

The post Transform Your Ministry with The Studio from CCCC: The CCCC Experience appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Within every community, there is a historical knowledge holder. This person carries the stories and context for why decisions were made. They remember who has been part of the community and share immeasurable stories of growth and transformation. They can explain the long-forgotten programs whose furniture and habits have been repurposed for something else.

A leader, whether new or seasoned, has the responsibility to listen, ask good questions, gather data, and make wise, knowledgeable decisions. Vision is shaped after insight from people who live and breathe the ministry every day.

Leaders use the strength of relationships and are informally assessing all the time. They know the usual questions to ask. They are insightful and passionate about the ministry. Great leaders keep the ministry moving forward through changing seasons and life cycles.

And yet, there is a risk. The informal nature of assessing can quietly lead to assumptions. We assume things are going well because no one is complaining or drawing attention to themselves. The urgent issues of the day might be masking over hidden, important areas. Team members may have insights that go unheard in the busyness of ministry.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

This is where a structured assessment matters. It gives leaders permission to pause and look honestly at how their organization is currently functioning in relation to its mission. It surfaces strengths, highlights risks, and helps leadership teams notice where systems or practices may no longer be serving the ministry well. Perhaps most importantly, it invites board members, staff, and key leaders to share in the ministry’s health and future.

An assessment is most powerful when it becomes a rhythm, not a reaction. When reflection is normal and not triggered by a crisis. Even the overlooked areas get a response. Over time, this creates a culture where learning, alignment, and course correction are signs of faithfulness.

About The Studio

The Studio is a guided organizational design workshop created for ministry leaders who want space to step back, reflect, and strengthen the foundations that support their mission. It offers clarity through assessment, insight through conversation, and practical next steps shaped in partnership with CCCC.

With CCCC as your guide, you’ll shape an organization grounded in your ministry’s reality and designed to magnify your mission impact. Through a thoughtful assessment, you’ll see how your board and team members perceive your organization: what’s strong, what could grow, and what needs more clarity.

You don’t have to interpret the results alone. Our team walks with you to make sense of what you’re seeing, identify practical next steps, and move forward with purpose. Faithful leadership means being willing to learn what you didn’t yet know.

Visit cccc.org/thestudio to learn more.

The post You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Now we will take the output of the theory of change and apply it to a strategy map to determine everything the ministry must do internally in order to put the theory of change into action. A strategy map ensures there is an alignment of the ministry’s resources and activities and its mission goals. Once the map is completed, in addition to showing the strategies in place, it can also be used to identify:

1. activities and resources that are not related to the ministry’s current goals by examining activities and resources that are not shown on the map. You might want to continue with those or you might want to reallocate them to your goals.
2. goals that do not have sufficient support
3. processes that need improvement

Introduction to Strategy Maps

Kaplan and Norton (the inventors of strategy maps) suggest nonprofits put customer needs (for charities, the term is beneficiary needs) at the top of the strategy map, but Paul Niven in Balanced Scorecard: Step-by-Step for Government and Nonprofit Agencies says you can add an extra line above that and label it Mission. The mission activities that go on the top of the strategy map were identified by the theory of change as Initiatives.

The theory of change takes you from your vision for the future you want to help create through to the initiatives you will take (your programs and services). The strategy map takes the initiatives and inserts them at the mission level, then drills down into the organization to see what kind of organization and infrastructure you need to build to support the initiatives. The rest of this post will show you how to develop a strategy map for your ministry.

Strategy Maps: Step-by-Step How-To

Click on the image of the CCCC strategy map below to open it in a new window, and then open our theory of change in a third window. That way you can follow along the steps as I describe them.

NOTE: For brevity, neither the CCCC Theory of Change or Strategy Map show all of our programs and services. We’ve included only those that are new or expanded initiatives.

1. Set the Boundaries of the Strategy Map

• Our strategy map starts with our End Statement (our vision) at the top. Everything we do is done to make this vision for the future a reality. The point of all strategy and work at CCCC is to help our members be exemplary, healthy and effective Christian ministries. We spaced the key words across the top of the strategy map so we could later link all strategies to at least one of these words.
• We also put our value proposition at the top, as a reminder that these are the reasons why our members value us. Everything we do needs to reflect our value proposition. Our value proposition influenced some of the strategy map content because we wanted to be sure we deliver the expected value!
• Our corporate values were added at the bottom of the page where they represent the foundation of our way of organizational life. Regardless of what we do, we must always be true to these values.

2. Create the Rows of the Map

The left-hand column holds the name of each of the rows. Each row examines your organization from a different perspective. You may want to give a different name to a perspective if that makes more sense in your context, but regardless of the name the perspective should be the same. For example, we don’t think of beneficiaries. Our beneficiaries are our members, so we called the beneficiary perspective the member perspective. It means the same thing but uses our terminology.

• The mission perspective answers the question, “What are the essential things that we must do to fulfill our vision?”
• The beneficiary perspective addresses the question, “What must we do well to satisfy our beneficiaries?”
• The operational perspective examines the question, “At which processes must we excel if we are to meet our beneficiaries’ needs?”
• The assets perspective asks, “Do we have what we need in terms of people, technology and organizational climate?” Includes the human capital (skill, talent, & know-how), information capital (information systems and infrastructure) and organizational capital (the culture, leadership, internal alignment with goals, and teamwork) necessary to support the strategies
• The financial perspective addresses the reality that none of the foregoing will happen if you don’t have any money. Money, or the lack of it, is the constraining factor for nonprofits. This perspective has two components, recognizing that to improve your financial position you must do at least one of two things: grow revenue or improve efficiency.

Both Niven’s book and Kaplan and Norton’s guide you through the more detailed mapping within each perspective.

3. Work from the Top Row Down

The key to developing a strategy map is to realize that it does not document everything that you do, but only those things that are most critical to achieving your vision. So there will be lots of ongoing things that are good and necessary that will not appear on the strategy map. The idea is to reduce the clutter so you can easily focus on the essentials. These will be either new things you need to start doing, or things you are already doing that need significant improvement.

And remember, an organization’s strategies are a unified set of goals, including objectives and actions, that move us towards fulfilling the vision. The strategy map shows how a strategic initiative flows through the organization aligning all parts to support the initiative.

Mission Perspective

We took the Initiatives column from the theory of change which is our perspective of what we need to provide, and turned it around in the strategy map so that it was from the perspective of what our members needed in order for our End statement to be fulfilled.

For example, we identified faith and practice guidance as an initiative. We can provide guidance, but what our members need are faith-infused practices if they are to be exemplary Christian ministries. The theory of change identified what they need, and the strategy map created the category the need fits within. For example, providing guidance is a specific thing we can do, but if we think of members having faith-infused practices, we have created a category in which guidance is but one possibility. The category could stimulate other program and service ideas, making the strategy map a dynamic document. In fact, this led to another new program — our God’s Workplace staff devotions.

The benefit using both a theory of change and a strategy map is that the theory of change produces an explanation of why we think a given action will work and it allows us to test the explanation for reasonableness. And by stating it from the beneficiary’s perspective in the strategy map, it means we take responsibility for the end result. In other words, if our guidance on faith and practice is ignored, then we can’t say “We’ve done our part” and be satisfied. Because we take responsibility for the external change, it means that if no external change happens, we have to ask why our guidance wasn’t accepted and acted upon. Was it relevant? Realistic? Persuasive? Affordable? If external change isn’t taking place, we must make the necessary internal changes that will produce a different external result.

Other Perspectives

Once you’ve got the mission perspective, the rest will flow out from it. We drew lines to connect each individual initiative to all the other initiatives that it supports, so we could see the linkages. Then we found which initiatives end up supporting three or four of our key words from the End statement at the top. Those boxes we highlighted for special attention. Although we want to do everything on the strategy map, if we have to set priorities (which unfortunately time and money require us to do) then we will work first on the highlighted boxes because they provide the biggest bang for the buck.

Outcomes

The board approved our strategy map at the February board meeting, and since then we have drilled the map down to the departmental level so we now have operational maps as well as the strategy map. Allocation of resources, priorities, and other decisions will now all be based on our maps.

The post Strategy Maps Adapted for Charities appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

• before you need to,
• before you are desperate,
• while you are still strong, and
• when there is still time for a new strategy to mature enough to carry the organization.

Why Ministries Die

I’ve wondered why ministries sometimes die, since the mission of the church continues until Jesus returns and there is still lots to do! Once a ministry has been established for a while, I think death must result for one of two reasons:

1. A ministry’s programs and methods are simply no longer relevant, or
2. Its leadership does not grow with the ministry and becomes increasingly not up to the task as the ministry outgrows them.

The good news is that both of these scenarios are avoidable. If leadership is on the ball, there is no reason why a ministry should die.

Attitudes to Avoid

But ministries probably will continue to die because we think we are so much smarter than the leaders in the case studies of organizations that have failed. I’ve read How The Mighty Fall, and as I read about all the failures I thought to myself, “Okay, so I won’t do that” or “I’ll watch out for that!” But I shouldn’t be so sure about not repeating their mistakes. In Not for Free: Revenue Strategies for a New World, Saul Berman outlines the failures of many companies but then warns his readers:

Do not think that you and your colleagues won’t make some of the same mistakes as the media industry has. Do not think that you are invulnerable to being blindsided by technology change, market change, or new competitors. Do not think that it will not be difficult to innovate your revenue model as rapidly and as thoroughly as you need to. Do not think that you have “plenty of time” to work things out. Those are exactly the same mistakes that media made. Too many of the executives thought they had more time, thought they had a good read of the market, thought they could wait for “better” ideas and options to come along. They neglected opportunities, failed to invest in revenue innovation, stuck to their segmentations, pricing, payers, and packaging not because they were dumb or blind but because they were normal. The easy path, the normal path, is to find all the reasons not to innovate your revenue models rather than seizing opportunities for revenue innovation. Don’t be normal. Don’t take the easy way out. There are no second chances and the clock is ticking.

Berman was writing about the particular problem of consumers expecting services or knowledge for free. What’s the issue in your ministry sector that has the potential to be a seismic shift? Donors will support the ministry that does what they care about the way they think it should be done. If you are still doing things the way the founder did them forty years ago, you are likely finding it harder and harder to raise donations because donors expect your methods to adapt to today’s methods and situations. Some anonymous person said, “Even if you are on the right road, you will eventually get run over if you just sit there.” You never arrive at a place in your lifecycle where you can camp for the duration. You’ve got to keep moving!

Find Your Ministry’s Lifecycle Age

Do you want to know how long your ministry will last? One clue is what your expectations are. Ichak Adizes says in Managing Corporate Lifecycles that organizations will remain young as long as the leaders expect more than the results they are currently getting. When leaders accept current results as the expected results, then the organization starts to age.

Determining where your ministry is in its lifecycle is important, because once you start on the downward trend it is very difficult to revive the organization. In Stall Points, the authors say that once you have a significant downturn, research shows only a 7% chance of ever recovering to see moderate or high growth again. If you wait until you plateau, it is too late to do very much. The problem is that long before you hit your revenue peak the basis on which you were viable has already expired. You’ve already used up much of the grace period to get something new going. Are you still growing? Well, sheer momentum will carry even a dead organization forward for a number of years before it finally collapses and expires! There is no reason to delay jumping to a new lifecycle once you are solidly on the growth track of the first one. You keep the first one going as long as it continues to grow, but when it is done, you have something else to go forward with.

Ichak Adizes has a free online assessment and a diagram of a corporate lifecycle to help you determine where you are in your corporate lifecycle. It takes about five minutes to answer some questions and generate a graph showing where you are. You want to be on the left side of the bell curve. That side, because of its shape, is called the S-curve because it is the shape of an “S”. There is a slow period of growth at the beginning of an organization’s life, then rapid growth as its products and services catch on, and then the growth flattens out as the organization matures.

Leading Indicators of Organizational Death

There are also some leading indicators that can help you find where you are.  In Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top, and Stay There, Nunes and Breene say there are three hidden S-curves that will flatten out well before the revenue curve does. If you watch those, they will tell you when you are approaching the top of your revenue curve. The three hidden S-curves are:

1. Relevance – Over time you can lose your relevance either to your donors or your beneficiaries.
2. Distinctive capabilities – Over time you can lose your distinctiveness and become just another ministry.
3. Talent attraction – People sense when an organization is past its prime and it becomes harder to attract and retain good staff.

If you have reason to wonder about your ministry’s relevance, distinctiveness or ability to attract people, you need to take action!

Some leaders can only see one S-curve, and can’t conceive how to start something new (anything that is really new will always appear radical). But if you only exist on one S-curve, you will end up simply trying to outdo other charities doing what you do, attracting donations solely on the basis of incremental improvements in cost or quality or both. Perhaps who has the lowest overhead percentage! This is not a long term solution. It often ends up as though you are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Nunes and Breene say when you compete like this, the future is bleak and can only end in organizational death.

Organizational Renewal

A healthy way to think about your ministry’s future is to imagine that it has a shelf life and will expire unless it is renewed prior to its ‘best before’ date. The key word here is ‘renewed.’  You can’t plan on the same old, same old taking you into the future. The same mission, yes. The same values, yes. The same methods and assumptions? No!!

An expiry date is stamped on everything you do. If you don’t watch the dates, there will come a day when your entire ministry will expire. Organizational longevity is dependent on keeping those expiry dates as far out as possible.

Tips for Longevity

I wrote the following points in 1997 for a business column, and I think they have stood the test of time (I’ve adjusted them to suit charities):

• Understand the reasons behind your success: A truism I’ve used often is “Success breeds success.” We learn from our successes and each success generally opens the door to more opportunity. However, success also breeds potentially harmful attitudes, such as the feeling of invincibility. You think success is a ‘right’ you’ve earned. You may even believe what reporters write about you. The issue is that since you have been successful at a particular period and in a particular set of circumstances, you may now believe that success is an automatic, ongoing condition. When you enjoy success, make sure you understand what conditions and decisions led to success. If you don’t understand why you were successful, you won’t recognize when those conditions change and you will take a hit.
• Challenge your “sacred cows”: Some leaders know what led to success and elevate that causal factor (a strategy or a program) to the status of a ‘sacred cow’. This is equally dangerous because it reduces your thinking to a set of limited options. The antidote is to recognize that for a particular set of conditions, the ‘sacred cow’ is the appropriate means to success but it may not be appropriate tomorrow. Identify your ‘sacred cows,’ let people know they are no longer ‘sacred’ and get your team to challenge their continuing effectiveness.
• Examine your strengths: Often the areas in which we feel strongest are the breeding grounds for our downfall. Our strengths are assumed to be safe areas and therefore aren’t examined as carefully as they should be.
• Plan for today and tomorrow: Your ministry must maximize the fundraising value of its existing programs while developing their replacements that will attract future donations and grants. Tomorrow doesn’t just happen, yet many organizations rest on their current successes without realizing it is only a matter of time until their current programs are obsolete. Get people thinking both for today and tomorrow.
• Stay fresh: Make room for new initiatives by abandoning old initiatives that have served their time. Stay fresh. Keep the real winners, but let go of anything limping along. Treat the continuation of every strategy or program as a fresh investment decision. No matter how good they’ve been, which ones will provide the best results for the future? Support those. Extend the shelf life of your ministry by developing the next generation of programs now while you still have cashflow.
• Re-examine current operations for potential improvement: Over time you always lose efficiency. Either people get sloppy or performance improvements elsewhere surpass you. Keep your head up and look for ways to improve. Always assume you can do better. Make your equipment work harder and help your people work smarter!
• Look for new opportunities: Look for unmet needs your beneficiaries have and fill those; and find out why some people choose not to support your programs (so look for donors who have never given to you but who do give to similar ministries).

Conclusion

At CCCC we are checking our own “best before” date and beginning a process to find the next S-curve for us. I’ll keep you posted as we progress in a series called “Strategic Review” which you can access from the right navigation bar.

I don’t know what the future holds for CCCC, but I really like what Peter Drucker said:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Rather than waiting for external forces to act on CCCC, we are choosing to ask Drucker’s question

If we were starting today, knowing what we now know, would we do it the same way?

We are re-designing our ministry and, in turn, our future. How about you?

The post Is Your Ministry Near Its “Best Before” Date? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

There are a few key options for how a senior staff person structures his or her linkage to staff (and there could well be many more):

• A CEO-COO model where the senior staff person has one direct report to whom all other staff report directly or indirectly. This maximizes the ability of the CEO to focus externally and to do strategic thinking, but it can also isolate the CEO from operational activity and it certainly distances the CEO from staff.
• A CEO-Senior Team model where the senior staff person has two or three direct reports who then supervise the staff and operations. This keeps the CEO “in the loop” and better in touch with the organization, but it also divides the leader’s attention between future-present, external-internal, and strategic-operational matters, with the urgent often trumping the important.
• A CEO-Functional Leadership model where the heads of all the functional areas report to the CEO. This includes fundraising, operations, accounting, human resources and so on. I suspect that this is the default model that just evolves as an organization grows. The leader has the greatest hands-on ability to manage the ministry, but on the downside the senior staff person is more like a team leader than an organizational leader. Is there still time to think about the organization as a whole as opposed to the work of the functional areas?

My question is, if you were giving advice to a new senior staff leader about the kind of reporting structure that would serve them best, what advice would you give? What factors do you think the leader should consider? How do you think the senior staff person should allocate his or her time, assuming the ministry has a reasonably well-developed staff?

Please jump in!

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