Defining Success

On Monday I wrote about a leadership lesson I learned from growing grass. I shared how I failed early in growing new native Texas grass (on the first attempt) because I didn’t know what success looked like.

Honestly, I believe that many of us in ministry wouldn’t know success if it smacked us in the face. Don’t get offended, for most of my years in ministry, I didn’t really know what it looked like either. There’s a great chapter in the book I helped write last year about measuring success and I believe that it speaks to this very issue. You can get The Eric Trap here.

I think that most of the time, we dive into a program, an event or some other activity without asking ourselves the questions, “what does success look like? Is success measurable? Will we measure it? Will we celebrate it?”

No, we usually just jump in and do stuff. We “feel” that we’re successful if we have a certain number of people attend or we raise a certain amount of money or some other highly tangible goal. However, I’ve found that many of these “feel good” indicators probably don’t address the things that are WORTH measuring.

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