Do you have a strategy that communicates critical goals and priorities? (207-1)

The effective leader finds a number of ways to constantly restate the goals and priorities of their mission. Read Luke 15:1-32.

Jesus was clear about His mission. According to Luke 19:10 He came “…to seek and to save what was lost”; those that were separated from God. Jesus found many ways to communicate that goal to the crowds that followed Him, His team, and the religious and political leaders. In Luke 15 Jesus reinforced His mission through three different stories about different situations; the sheep were lost naturally, the coin got lost accidentally, and the son got lost willfully. No matter what created the lost condition, Jesus came to find and help those who were separated from God.

The constant restatement of goals is so important that even Jesus, the best communicator and most effective leader to ever live, used three memorable stories of familiar life situations to underscore the goals of the mission for which God had sent Him to earth. A few ideas that will help you reinforce goals and priorities for yourself and for your team:

• Make sure you have the mission, goals and priorities clear in your own mind.
• Ensure the environment communicates the same mission, goals and priorities. You may be saying one thing but the office and work environment may be saying something different through work assignments, signage, performance review categories, etc.
• Start your meetings by reinforcing how that meeting fits into the bigger picture and end the meeting stating how each action item relates to missional goals.
• Celebrate milestones that mark progress toward specific goals.
• Publically reward proper priority setting.
• Find multiple ways to communicate the same information and insure every learning style i.e. visual, verbal, written, etc. is covered.
• Identify your key leaders on the team and insure they are also constantly restating the mission, goals and priorities.
• Be an example.

Have you identified the goals and priorities that are critical to fulfillment of your mission? Do you have a strategy that creates a constant flow of communication reinforcing the mission, critical goals and priorities? Effective leaders can easily copy Jesus’ pattern of communicating His top priorities; He told memorable stories, He found multiple ways to repeat and underscore His priorities, and He used information and situations that were familiar to His audience.