Minding the Menial or: What I Learned At Lunch With Perry, part II
I suddenly found myself, with some fellow staff members, at another lunch with Perry. This time it was at Cracker Barrel. I do not take for granted that I am able to hang out with Perry “Just Perry” Noble. It is a sweet time of open and honest conversation with a hefty dose of humor included. And I always learn something.
The question I asked this time was related to how we can deal with menial jobs. These are the aspects of our day-to-day jobs that we may find ourselves doing in a begrudging manner or the ones we find ourselves ignoring all together. As far as I know, there is no job that does not include some menial aspect to it. We all have junk to do.
Perry’s answer was two-fold. First, we must remember that the jobs we consider menial are the ideal job to someone else. No matter what job or task we consider menial, there is someone out there who would love to do that job. This is easy to say, yet difficult to comprehend. It does not seem possible. One example was brought up that there are people who want to serve at NewSpring and their ideal job is to pick up trash around the seats between services. That, a job most of us would consider menial, is what some people want to do to help out.
But we cannot always find someone else to do the menial jobs. The second part of Perry’s answer was that we sometimes need to roll up our sleeves and get the job done. We can work on building awesome teams around us to take care of all the tasks — appropriately suiting people to ideal jobs — but there will always be menial tasks that we have to simply get done. And the best way to do that is to — well — to do them! It is no secret that we are in a culture of doing other duties, as assigned at NewSpring. It is refreshing to work with people who genuinely do whatever it takes to get the collective jobs done.
I was encouraged from this lunch to re-evaluate all things menial. But the ultimate lesson for me is to simply roll up my sleeves and get the job done. I am sure this is a lesson I have learned before, but it appears to be one of those I-need-to-be-reminded-of-this-constantly lessons. Stop feeling enabled and stop feeling deserving. Stop thinking you are too good to do something. If it needs doing, do it.
What are the menial tasks in your job that you find yourself having to simply bust out?
Setup and Striking tech for an event
I currently have a team of about 35 people who I have on a schedule for running the sound board and visual presentations for our 7 worship services each weekend. The fact that there are ~35 of them means that they are on a rotation. I simply have no need for 35 volunteers each weekend. Plus… we wouldn’t want to burn out a volunteer! This leaves me with a problem however… and goes back to a post I made recently (here) that says, “there’s an old business axiom that says you can hire unfriendly people and work hard to teach them to smile or you can hire smiling friendly people and turn them loose. The latter seems like a nice shortcut to us, which is why we think it’s important to specifically choose our greeters instead of simply taking the first volunteers for that position.”
Since my volunteers sometimes work the board only once a month in some cases… they often do not retain enough knowledge to properly mix a worship service. It is sometimes just easier for me to do it myself. We had our Christmas Cantata yesterday evening and I intentionally did not schedule a helper for myself because it is easier for me to just run the show myself than try and explain to someone else what it is I want to do.
I am, however, working on this problem. I am working with the tech team of a church near us and we are going to hold an intense AV training session for both of our teams in January. Hopefully our volunteers will be able to grow and learn something from it!
I must say however that I do have a handful of volunteers that are rock stars. They know what they’re doing and are willing to learn. They usually get schedule on weekends that I’m out of town. Some of them even have backgrounds in radio!