The Rev. Dr. Rob Voyle is a leader in the development and use of appreciative inquiry in church and coaching settings.
Rob's Approach to Training
>> See more on Rob's
Helpful, Humorous, Healing
approach to training.
Dr. Kim Voyle has extensive experience in Spiritual Direction, Career Counseling, and Personnel Selection
She is available for Career Coaching and Counseling.
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We don't need better people
to create a better church.
We just need to help the people we have
be their purposeful best.
The worst thing in American business is the annual performance appraisal.
It evokes fear and robs workers of the right to pride in their workmanship...
Edward Demings
Think back over all the annual performance reviews that you have received...
How many left you:
or did the review leave you:
I have asked that question in many executive coach training programs and on average only 8% of the respondents report a positive experience of reviews that improved their job performance.
Rather than achieve their purpose of improving performance, the annual performance review actually reduces effective performance and yet the majority of employers continue to use these destructive practices.
As a church consultant I have often seen these same destructive practices used in the church, often under the guise of "Mutual Ministry Review." For the sake of the church let us be smarter than the world and find an effective alternative!
If your try motivating people by lighting a fire under them, all you get is burnt butts.
A more enlightened approach is to find the fire inside of them and fan it.
Just because annual performance reviews don't achieve their objective we don't have to give up on the pursuit of excellence.
We use an appreciative inquiry model of continuous improvement to create cultures of excellence in which we can:
We cannot achieve life by having less death.
Rather than reviewing performance to discover what is wrong we need to discover what is valuable and how we can grow that which is valuable. By regularly reviewing what is valuable.
Here are three appreciative performance valuing questions:
A narrative example of failure and success in creating Cultures of Excellence. The parables are excerpted from the complete manual and are suitable for sharing with Church Boards
Do people need feed-back? If "yes" then why? ...
Most people affirm the need for feed-back but rarely with a clear understanding of why.
If the answer is to improve future performance (this actually is the only valid reason, since we will spend the rest of our lives in the future) then we need to ask: Does feed-back improve future performance? And the answer is categorically No!.
However feed-forward has shown it can improve future performance.
Let's define out terms:
To improve performance we need to spend our time focusing on what to do in the future and ensuring that people have the skills, motivation, and resources they need to implement those changes.
In the Program, Participants will Learn: