Meridian Magazine : : Print

Leadership for Saints, Part 16:
Planning & Organizing: An Evolving Process
by Rodger Dean Duncan and Ed J. Pinegar

As your sense of vision evolves, undergirded by a well-developed personal mission statement (see Part 11), you’re better able to make the myriad of daily choices regarding your time and other resources. This is an evolving process, not a flash point event.

And one thing is certain: as you honor the law of the harvest you will enjoy the fruits of continuous improvement. When you genuinely do your best, your “best” gets better and better.

Values clarification, visioning and time management are critical elements of your leadership. Effective organizing and planning cannot happen unless and until you are very clear about what you stand for (and what you will not stand for), what you hope and what you dream.

Make no mistake, big hopes and big dreams are not just the province of prophets, presidents, kings and others whose leadership is global in nature. Big hopes and big dreams can bring power and energy to any of Heavenly Father’s children. Including you. Take your cue from one of our favorite bumper stickers: “Think globally, act locally.”

Goals. Now there’s a word that puts some people to sleep. Goal setting can sound pretty boring, especially if your experience with it has been less than successful.

How many times have you seen goals announced with great fanfare in a meeting, only to disappear and never be mentioned again?

How many times have you heard someone announce a goal that was so unrealistic that everybody knew from day one that it could never be accomplished?

How many times have you seen a goal that was so vague and nebulous that it would be impossible to know if you ever reached it?

When it’s done right, goal-setting provides direction and purpose. Goals help you see where you’re going and how you can get there. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

Lewis Carrol’s wonderful book Alice in Wonderland offers some pertinent lessons. You may recall the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat about the importance of setting goals. Consider this passage in which Alice asks the Cheshire Cat for advice on which direction to go.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

It really takes no effort to get somewhere. Just do nothing, and you’re there. If you want to get somewhere meaningful, however, you must know where you want to go. Then you need to make plans on how to get there.

Suppose, for example, that you’re in a Relief Society presidency and you have a vision of consistently providing high quality visiting teaching. How would you go about achieving that vision? You can hope and pray and show up on time for meetings and some good will be accomplished. But if you hope and pray and show up on time for meetings and use a planned, goal-focused approach, your chances of real success are greatly enhanced.

Here are some reasons to establish goals whenever you want to accomplish something significant in your marriage, family community, business and Church calling:

• Goals provide direction and traction. For the example just used (consistently providing high quality visiting teaching) you can think of dozens of ways to improve visiting teaching. To get something meaningful done, though, you must have a definite road map—a target to aim for and to guide the efforts of you and the other sisters. Then you can translate that vision into goals that take you where you want to go. Without goals you are sure to spin your wheels going nowhere. With goals you can focus energy and effort on the activities that provide the best traction.

• Goals help make your overall vision attainable. Most visions cannot be reached in one giant leap. You need many smaller steps to get there. If a bishop’s vision is for every endowed member of the ward to hold a current temple recommend, he probably can’t expect to proclaim his vision on January 1 and then see every adult member on the ward temple trip in February. Many intermediate goals must be accomplished—from reactivation, to building faith, to strengthening marriages, to re-teaching the law of tithing, to scheduling interviews and counseling—before the overall vision can be attained. Goals enable you to achieve your overall vision. How? You divide your efforts into smaller pieces that, when accomplished one by one, add up to big results.

• Goals provide measures for success. Goals provide milestones along the road to accomplishing your vision. If you decide “consistently providing high quality visiting teaching” requires five intermediate goals to reach your destination and you complete three of them, you know you have one intermediate goal remaining.

• Goal’s clarify everyone’s role. Effective goal setting helps people avoid duplication of effort. Effective goals help you integrate and coordinate the use of your people resources, your time resources and your budget resources. Effective goals include a designation of who does what. They bring clarity to mutual expectations. That way, each person understands his accountability and what others are depending on him to provide.

• Goals give people something to stretch for. When people are properly led and motivated, goals give them a sense of direction and purpose. And goals that require people to stretch—remember President Kimball’s call to “lengthen your stride?”—tend to bring out the best performance.

In the next installment we’ll explain how to establish “SMART” goals that dramatically boost the likelihood of achievement.

The daily choices we make are the foundation stones of our mansions of exaltation, or the perilous sands of calamitous failure. – Archibald F. Bennett

Are you farsighted? … This means "insight." …the ability to sense the long range values—to plan for them and to sacrifice the immediate pleasures for faraway rewards. – Mary Brentnall

… most people do far too little goal setting, including the reflecting that precedes the setting of such goals. – Neal A. Maxwell

A prerequisite for "doing" is goal setting. Actions are preceded by thoughts and planning. – Marvin J. Ashton

Just as faith without works is dead, likewise, works without faith are dead. We can cause righteous desires to come to pass, for in the words of our Master, “According to your faith be it unto you.” (Matthew 9:29) – A. Theodore Tuttle

One ship drives east and another drives west with the selfsame winds that blow. ‘Tis the set of the sails and not the gales which tells us the way to go. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Progress is measured by milestones. What many good people lack are markers that might tell them how they are actually doing. Goals can become a ritual or a fetish, but in the right measure they can give us some much needed reference points. – Neal A. Maxwell

Recognition of intermediate goals reinforces our resolve to complete our annual goals. —Victor L. Ludlow

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next stop: only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road. – Dag Hammerskjöld

It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want—Aristotle

This empowerment process requires … modeling Christlike behavior; building caring, trusting relationships; setting up clear role and goal expectations; identifying sources of help; and requiring accountability. – M. Russell Ballard

Note: The excerpts of Leadership for Saints posted on Meridian are only a fraction of the contents of this 349-page book. To learn more about this ground-breaking book and to order copies, click here.

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