The Three Essential P’s – Part 3 – People

I have been holding off on writing this post. The challenge I am having is keeping it brief so you will read it, while still doing the topic justice.

People are the components of an organization that make it successful or unsuccessful. In business the mantra is “people are your most important asset”. Unfortunately, businesses abandon this solid business principle for more typical HR practices.

An organization of one is not much of an organization, so for the purpose of this post I will reference an organization as an entity consisting of more than five people.

A church, like a business has assets. Our building is an asset as are all our tangible, owned items. There are also intangible items such as a logo or brand a culture and intellectual property (music, software, copyrights, etc.). And then there are people. The church is called to be a good steward of all its assets, this applies even more to the people it employees. Not only are they assets, but they are people – and people are the church. But for arguments sake, let us assume for just a moment that they are nothing more than assets. Let’s say that the right people are the most important asset our church has.

How do we treat assets we value? Take our building as an example. We value our building as an asset and strive to be good stewards of it. In doing so, we continually invest money and time into the building to keep it looking and functioning as well as we possibly can. In this way we continually add value to the building whereby being good stewards of what has been entrusted to us. Now, we all know that the building is only a tool, yet we put time and money into it. How much more valuable are the people we work with? Like the building, if we continually use these assets without making significant reinvestment the value of these assets will only decrease. We must add value to all our assets – especially our people if we are to be good stewards of everything God has entrusted to us. If you hire the right people today, will they be the right people when you grow? I would argue probably not, unless you are investing in them.

So, we need to ask: how do we add value to our people? If you are a leader, this needs to be a primary focus. This is what Jesus did with the 12, if we are following his example we need to do the same with those he has entrusted to us.

OK, I feel like I have just begun to scratch the surface of this topic and could write about it for a hundred pages or so, but I won’t. The purpose of this series was to present the three essential P’s and give some thought on how to evaluate them.

So, some questions you should ask to evaluate the health of your organization from a people perspective:

• Are you staffing for the vision?
• Does your organizational structure identify what is most important to the organization?
• Do you have the right people in the right positions?
• Do you have well defined expectations for leaders, managers and individual contributors?
• Do you have team work and participation?
• Are you promoting internally or are you hiring externally?
• Is the culture healthy? Are attitudes good? Are there strong social bonds?
• Are people being innovative?

Chances are you can say that a couple of these attributes are where you want them to be, most are present but could be improved and a few are lacking. If you can answer favorably to all these questions and your organization is not achieving your goals, I would encourage you to re-evaluate your answers. Though this is not an all inclusive list of attributes for a healthy organization, it is a sound starting point. When all these attributes are favorable your organization will be in the top quartile of culturally healthy organizations.