If your church, ministry, or department has culture of evaluation, you’re in the minority. With so many pressing ministry responsibilities, the temptation is to cut off what’s in the past and focus on the future exclusively. However, successful leaders know that if it’s important enough to do, it’s important enough to evaluate. Period.

Evaluate what? Everything. People, programs, events, structures, services, processes, buildings, music, relationships, stewardship, communication, publications, ministry effectiveness. Everything.

There are a lot of reasons leaders may not prioritize evaluation.

• They don’t have enough time.
• They think everything is fine.
• They’re afraid of being critiqued.
• They’re afraid to critique others.
• They don’t have the energy to fix what’s broken.
• They don’t think evaluation is a worthwhile spiritual activity.

If you choose not to evaluate, you need to know that you’re the only one in your church not evaluating. Every person who attends a service evaluates it. They’re observing in the parking lot as they approach your facility and during the service as they worship and listen to the sermon. Then they evaluate with their family over the lunch table after the service. They may even evaluate with others at the water cooler the next morning. They’re evaluating everything the church does. Shouldn’t you?

If it’s important enough to do, it’s important enough to evaluate. 

There are two keys to fostering healthy evaluation on your team: trust and teachability. Many teams I’ve observed lack one or both. You build trust through honesty and vulnerability, and it has to start with the team leader. Consider having your team commit to an honesty policy where each team member knows he or she can share every bit of truth with you and each other, even down to the last 5 percent. Where there’s trust, there can be teachability. When team members have trust, they can open themselves to being critiqued and corrected by one another, knowing it will help them become better leaders. 

Here are some tips for establishing a culture of evaluation:

Schedule it
Give evaluation a spot on the calendar every week by putting it on the agenda in service planning, staff or departmental meetings.

The 1 percent rule
The goal of evaluation is constant incremental improvement. Ask the question: How can we be 1 percent better this week than we were last week? Consistency will set you on a course to excellence over time, but you’ll never make consistent improvement without consistent evaluation.

Study success and failure
We’re often tempted to spend most of our time evaluating what didn’t work. While we should get to the bottom of what went wrong, we shouldn’t forget to study our successes as well. It’s just as important to know why a certain event or process succeeded. Once you know, you can leverage your successes to make them repeatable.

Evaluation is everyone’s job
Good evaluation happens when multiple people give their opinion and point of view. The senior leader won’t see everything, so you need others watching as well. Paid staff, ministry leaders, and volunteers should all carry the privilege and responsibility of evaluating.  

On April 20, 2010, a BP (British Petroleum) oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico caught fire and exploded, killing eleven people and creating what some have called the largest environmental disaster in US history. The rig was equipped with multiple systems designed to constantly evaluate its safety and stability. Because the rig had persistent mechanical problems, alarms sounded constantly, often waking the crew in the middle of the night. As a solution, employees finally disabled the alarm so they could sleep through the night. When the rig caught fire, no alarm sounded. 

Regular times of evaluation are opportunities for team members to sound the alarm about something that needs to be fixed. Fixing problems usually isn’t convenient, but silencing the alarms is much more costly in the end. To some, the sound of constant alarms is annoying and depressing, but remind yourself that the sound of the alarm doesn’t mean you’re failing. If you use it as an opportunity to grow, it means you’re improving.