Today’s Mission
Day 13
Ridiculous Lines from the Chronically Ineffective Leader
“But I Don’t Know Anyone to Ask”
Leadership is getting people to help you
when they are not obligated to do so.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Every would-be team leader, salesperson or nonprofit director faces the same challenge: they don’t know anyone else. It doesn’t take long in the recruiting process before we run through our list of friends, family and acquaintances, and find ourselves saying, “I don’t know anyone else.”
But for the effective leader, this only means it is time for the next step. When we run out of people we know, we begin the process of building a team around something other than ourselves. And this, believe it or not, is a great thing.
When we get to this point, we can begin a deliberate sourcing process that increases our possible pool by tenfold or more. So today, in addition to your follow-up work, you’ll return to the ongoing leader’s work, continuing the process of sourcing for additional people who might someday be on your team.
Today’s Mission
- Contact five people in your church whom you may not know very well, let them know that you are in the process of building your youth ministry team for the coming year and ask if they have noticed anyone in the church who they think might have gifts for working with youth.
- Contact five parents of some of your more enthusiastically involved youth and ask them for the names of anyone they would recommend as a potential leader.
- Ask your colleagues on staff again for the names of any people they may not have thought of a couple weeks ago.
- Scan through the church directory to see if there might be someone there that you missed.
- Remember to look around on Sunday morning to see if there might be someone you may want to ask others in the congregation about.
- Add any new names to your master recruiting list and rank them (ABC, WEB) as you have ranked the others.
- Take out your master recruiting documents: your needs list and your ranked pool list.
- Check your email to see if anyone has responded to your email invitation, and reply to those emails immediately.
- For those who have said yes, send an email suggesting a meeting time and place for you to talk further about what you’re looking for.
- Hold any scheduled meetings with potential volunteers.
- For those who have said no,
- Move their names to the bottom of the pool list, under the section called “No.”
- Beside each name, write what role each person has said no to.
- Remove their names from the needs list.
- Place new names in the blanks left by those who have said no.
- Send your standard invitation email to the people you have added to your master recruiting list.
- Send a follow-up message to any potential volunteer who hasn’t responded to your last message in three days or more.