Dee Hock, the founder and former CEO of Visa wrote an article a number of years ago called, “The Art of Chaordic Leadership.” In this article he spoke at one point about who managers should spend their time managing and it got me thinking about where our time could be used most wisely as leaders in college ministry. After we have done our regular duties in preparation for the group, where should we focus the rest of our time and efforts?
Let me first point out that for the sake of what we do I am applying Hock’s thoughts to leading, not managing. Dee Hock used the percentages of 50, 25, 20, and 5 to distinguish how much time is spent on each level of leadership. I think we can use those numbers, but I’m going to change the levels to apply to college ministry. He begins by saying, “The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self: one’s own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts.” Hock claims that we should spend 50% of our time on self-management. After thinking about this it makes a lot of sense. How can we expect others to follow our lead if we are not first inspecting our own lives to make sure we are worth following? However, I think all too often we attempt to lead those below us as soon as we see ourselves as leaders without first evaluating how to be the best leader possible.
Most of us before looking to manage self tend to first look to lead the group as a whole. In fact, we have a tendency to just jump in without even thinking much about it. From what I’ve learned I think after learning to lead ourselves we need to be spending 25% of our time looking at how we can build the leaders directly below us. For advisors that means the student leaders in the group and for student leaders that means prospective student leaders. What are some good ways for developing student leaders? I’ve mentioned before that you should be having regularly scheduled leadership meetings. Sometimes these meetings will need to be between just the advisors and student leaders, but often you can open these up to any students who want to have input into the group. Also, why not take a leader out to lunch once or twice a month? Even if you’re just meeting them at a dining hall on campus it will be a good chance to encourage them, share more of the vision God has given you for the ministry, and get to know them better.
The next level for advisors should be prospective student leaders. We should be looking to spend 20% of our time with these students in order to always be building future leaders for the ministry. The turnover rate is fast in college. Most organizations keep their people for more than four years, but for most students that’s all the time we have and by the time they move into leadership we may only have two more years left before they graduate and move on. So, the nature of our ministry is that we must always be looking to develop more leaders in order to plan for the future. The exciting thing about the nature of this is that we get to pour into and be a part of developing the lives of so many students in a very little amount of time. Hopefully, what we are able to give students they will be able to apply in different areas of their lives after graduation.
The last level we must focus on is those students who attend our campus ministry, but are not current or prospective leaders. This is the level that we should be investing 5% of our time into as advisors. Some of you probably think that sounds crazy, but if you are already investing a lot of time into your current and prospective leaders then those student leaders should be able to invest a lot of their time into the rest of the students who attend.
One of the major benefits to spreading your time out this way is that you will be able to introduce changes to the group more easily as you first bring them to your student leaders and then the group as a whole. By the time you bring any changes to the group your student leaders should be so excited and on board that they will influence other students in the group to embrace the changes as well.