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Assume you are an EQP, HP, or RS President. The stake leader to whom you report has come to your Ward as part of a Ward conference. In the last few months, HT and VT has not been very good — say, about 20%. Most of the people in your group are not interested in the being home and visiting teachers. You have approached everyone and assigned the people who are willing the number of families they are willing to home or visit teach. You have also assigned them a list of people to just “be there for” if there is an emergency, but they are not required to visit these people unless they want to. This is because you have a ratio of 14:1 for homes to visit versus active home or visiting teachers. Nonetheless, the most dedicated members of your group went out and did a blitz (which had nothing to do with the fact Ward conference was coming up — it was just something your group decided to do recently), visiting some 35 homes one night to visit people who had not been seen in some time. This boosted home teaching that month but the figures have not yet been reported as the end of the month has not occurred. This generated a teaching appointment for missionaries, and two people who said they were planning to come to church but just hadn’t figured out where the building was. About 50% were friendly and received your HT or VT into their homes.
All families are assigned to someone, and you have a personal priesthood interview of VT interview with every home or visiting teacher who is willing to accept one, each month. Would you do something, or do nothing?
You personally, as the leader of your group, go out every month and visit about 10 families, and so does one of your counselors/assistants. These are new move-ins to welcome them to the Ward and get to know them. you also fund, out of your own pocket, about 110 a letters a month to people who are not seen regularly.
Your Stake leader is teaching a lesson, and takes a moment to “call your quorum or group to repentance” over lacklustre home or visiting teaching numbers. In the case of priesthood quorums, measured by the gold standard of a visit to the home.
How would you respond to this call to repentence as the leader of your group?
Honestly my response if this had happened today it would have been “well if you are going to come in and crack the whip of guilt instead of teaching of the love of Christ then I guess you will need to get another leader as I come to church to be spiritually feed, and this is not being spiritually feed” and I would be then walking to the bishops office to inform him I was done and he needs to have someone else running the org for next week”. I don’t know if my snarky response helps you at all other than seeing what a pissy mood I am in. Quote:Brethren, in the best of all worlds and in those circumstances where it can be done, a monthly visit in each home is still the ideal the Church would strive for. But realizing that
in many locations around the world achieving such an ideal is not possible and that we cause those brethren to feel like failures when we ask them to do what cannot realistically be done, the First Presidency wrote to the priesthood leaders of the Church in December 2001, giving this inspired, very helpful counsel: “There are some locations in the Church,” they wrote, “where … home teaching to every home each month may not be possible because of insufficient numbers of active priesthood brethren and various other local challenges.” We’ve mentioned some of them. “When such circumstances prevail,” they go on, “ leaders should do their best to use the resources they have available to watch over and strengthen each member.”
(Elder Holland, Oct. 2016)Emphasis added.
What does it matter what the stake president thinks? If you know the things you are doing are good and effective, then his comments have no relevance and only as much wounding power as you give them. Bad home teaching numbers in the Church are as common as houseflies but so far no one has been sent to the rack over it. However, if you feel some need to say something…why not speak up (if it’s that kind of meeting) and say, “We can certainly do better, President, but you may not be aware of X, Y and Z….” and lay out what HAS been accomplished. Some leaders will be unimpressed but most would appreciate knowing the full story and probably be willing to backtrack a little. It’s all in your approach. Now, I will say this is the ideal and not necessarily what I would do. (My apologies if I’ve mentioned this before.) We had a general authority (I won’t say who except to say that he participated in the most recent general conference and I was NOT pleased to see him on my TV set) come to our stake for a stake presidency reorganization and during the course of which he interviewed the bishops in the stake one of whom was my now-former bishop. I heard through the grapevine that the G.A. had dressed our bishop down a little saying that “he could do better.” To be fair, that was all I heard. But when I heard about it, I was so mad that I went home and wrote a very sarcastic letter to this G.A., tore it up, and then wrote a thank you note to my bishop thanking him for all his hard work.
So, do what I say not what I do.
:shifty: Talk with him about it or ignore it, depending on my relationship with him. I also would mention Elde Holland’s talk and ask him for specific advice on how to me more effective and better at actually serving people.
Gerald has more wisdom / restraint than I. This actually happened to me. I was a HPGL at the time. I DO care what the stake thinks, because when I put in many long hours, doing my best, and they respond with censure rather than support, I find it disturbing. Remember, we are volunteers, nothing more.
I also found it sloppy they hadn’t done their homework before coming to our Ward so they could do a better job of motivating us. The Ward I lived in was the bottom of the barrel in terms of reputation, unfortunately, and I felt he came to the Ward with that attitude. This was in spite of the fact that new people like me had moved in and had done much to change the culture.
But personal feelings aside, my main concern as I sat there were the dedicated members of the quorum who were making the 20% happen every month. These were the people who made 35 extra visits on top of their regular home teaching routes that month. And their reward, from a Stake perspective was a call to repentance.
So, I like Gerald’s response the best — speak up right in the meeting and let him know of the things he might not be aware of. Express appreciation for the men in the room who WERE making a strong contribution.
I wouldn’t even rule out a private convo with the Stake Exec Sec, or the SP counselor who interviewed me every couple months for a PPI. I would share with him the plight of an HPGL, a volunteer, and the negative impact it has on Ward members who are making a strong contribution to be censured like that. I wouldn’t expect any kind of response (such as an apology) but I fully expect it would temper their attitudes a bit next time they came to the Ward.
I also had them once accuse of us of not having our records clean because we had 99 prospective (adult) elders and only 1 active. This was in a Ward Council I spoke up and told them I had a note on each one of them — why they weren’t coming to church etcetera — and had visited most personally. When they asked, I shared some of the more extreme reasons, and how many of them were unordained from when they were children. A few would swear us off their doorstep and threaten to send the police.
And then, a note sent off to the Stake Exec Sec and High Councilor over the Ward, and maybe the SP themselves about our non-recorded efforts before the NEXT Ward conference. If they were too busy to learn about our efforts, so they could minister appropriately, I’d make it easy for them.
Each month I also reported everything we did beyond the visits in the monthly report. Those monthly reports only provide a fragment of local priesthood holders’ efforts and don’t tell the full story. You have to be proactive and tell that story yourself.
The 20% who did all the work would also be the ones who actually show up to the stake meeting. The 80% who don’t care about HT will not be present to hear the lecture. Some things just don’t change.
Maybe the leadership can learn to show love and support to those who attend. If not, the 20% will soon become 5%.
Maybe the leadership needs to come help in the vineyard?
My immediate answer, try to ignore it. By the time I was a WML I had already developed an aversion to metrics. Unfortunately people tend to judge the success of missionary efforts by looking at numbers, it’s what we know. Everything is measured, correlated, and cause-ated. As an example, we know exactly how many Book of Mormons need to be handed out in order to produce one baptism and we know it down to the 4th decimal place, so we set a goal to hand out X number of BoMs with the expectation that the number of books we hand out multiplied by the BoM to baptisms ratio will yield Y number of baptisms. The metrics go on and on, many meetings turn into an attempt to motivate people to get the numbers up – which often translates into making people feel guilty about their current efforts regardless of what people are already doing.
I adopted a “the buck stops here” attitude with the metrics. I’d go to my stake (even area on a few occasions) meetings, get beat up over the numbers, but I wouldn’t pass on the beating to my missionaries or ward members. The guilt over never doing enough to measure up stopped with me. Our local people never heard any hand wringing over not meeting goals (goals they never set I might add).
In the context of PH I’d try to do something similar. Let the SP get upset about the HT statistics but I wouldn’t relay that message back to the quorum. So the formula would be: SP gets upset about the percentages in our interview, I act like a wounded dog, the SP goes away thinking he’s done his duty, and I go away thinking “we’ll keep doing what we can and I’m not going to let it get to me.” I take the bullet for the quorum.
SilentDawning wrote:I also found it sloppy they hadn’t done their homework before coming to our Ward so they could do a better job of motivating us. The Ward I lived in was the bottom of the barrel in terms of reputation, unfortunately, and I felt he came to the Ward with that attitude. This was in spite of the fact that new people like me had moved in and had done much to change the culture.
Shouldn’t the SP be interviewing the quorum leaders? Isn’t that the time to do the homework? I think what you got was a generic dressing down for not doing HT that gets repeated in every ward, regardless of how well/bad they are doing with the HT program.
SilentDawning wrote:But personal feelings aside, my main concern as I sat there were the dedicated members of the quorum who were making the 20% happen every month. These were the people who made 35 extra visits on top of their regular home teaching routes that month. And their reward, from a Stake perspective was a call to repentance.
Why weren’t you guys doing 40 extra visits on top of your regular assignments?
SilentDawning wrote:And then, a note sent off to the Stake Exec Sec and High Councilor over the Ward, and maybe the SP themselves about our non-recorded efforts before the NEXT Ward conference. If they were too busy to learn about our efforts, so they could minister appropriately, I’d make it easy for them.
That might not work. From what I’ve seen over the years one of the unstated purposes of ward conference is for stake leaders to come down and complain about home teaching during the PH hour. I’m exaggerating, but at least 25% of the time the PH lesson during ward conference
isgoing to be home teaching. You could have phenomenal stats (like 40% home teaching or something equally unattainable by most mortal wards) and the message would still be “get better at home teaching” because that’s the lesson stake leaders have prepared
for every wardand because 100% is impossible. I don’t think the stake leaders have the time or inclination to do custom tailored messages that follow each ward’s dynamics (I don’t know, maybe they do). I think they probably start with whatever message they were told to give during training meetings and each ward in the stake ends up with a Sabbath day observance lesson, or whatever the theme of the year happens to be… and home teaching at least 25% of the time. I like Gerald’s answer. We do tend to focus on what we lack and overlook what we’ve accomplished. Guilt is not a good motivator.
Gerald wrote:Bad home teaching numbers in the Church are as common as houseflies but so far no one has been sent to the rack over it.
What’s the worst they could do? Release you?
😆 I have been doing a lot of research on personality and its impact on behavior in my work. I have a trait known as proactive personality — the tendency to want to act on your environment and change it when necessary. It’s my nature when I’m in situations that I don’t like, to try to find a way to alter the situation to make it more favorable. While you have to be judicious and realistic about what you can change, and what you can’t, this was a situation where I felt, afterwards, I should have said something. I definitely said something to the quorum members in a different meeting where I thanked them for their participation, that I don’t think the MLS reporting system allows us to tell the full story, and encouraged them to keep on, keeping on.
Like you say, even if you express your naked feelings about the way the SP handled the situation, the worst he can do is fire me. I would like to think I can share with them the negative impact of their behavior, and if there is a 20% chance this might encourage them to rethink the way they interact with ward leaders, so be it…if it was a paid position, I’d be a lot more careful…and would probably simply ignore it and then do damage control with the quorum in a separate meeting (like I did).
SilentDawning wrote:I have been doing a lot of research on personality and its impact on behavior in my work. I have a trait known as proactive personality — the tendency to want to act on your environment and change it when necessary. It’s my nature when I’m in situations that I don’t like, to try to find a way to alter the situation to make it more favorable.
I think my personality has changed. I used to me more of the type that would put my tail between my legs (to use Nibbler’s analogy), but the last 5 years – even before my FC – I think I realized that looking over my life I was too much on the side of not speaking up. I started seeing times that I should have stood up more and started really regretting that I had not.
LookingHard wrote:Honestly my response if this had happened today it would have been “well if you are going to come in and crack the whip of guilt instead of teaching of the love of Christ then I guess you will need to get another leader as I come to church to be spiritually feed, and this is not being spiritually feed” and I would be then walking to the bishops office to inform him I was done and he needs to have someone else running the org for next week”. I don’t know if my snarky response helps you at all other than seeing what a pissy mood I am in.
Meh; sometimes I think the people in charge need that to remind them to either
leador shut the hell up. Just getting the title doesn’t make one a leader. As a missionary I was in a training where the AP’s taught about this sort of super committed super missionary that goes the extra mile in everything and that there are only 1 or 2 in each mission. They then taught about using the covenant process to hold us accountable in achieving our goals (IOW I could covenant with God to do 100 sit ups every morning). Then they asked us all to covenant to become this sort of super missionary and sign a pledge to do so. I left without signing but had forgotten my gloves and had to come back a few minutes later to retrieve them. One of the AP’s cornered me and asked me why I had not signed the pledge. I responded that I take my covenants very seriously. According to their presentation there is only 1 or 2 of these super missionaries in each mission. Therefore the remaining 99% had just made a covenant that they would likely break.
The AP said that they needed me to sign because they needed the signature of all the missionaries to present to the MP. He told me that in my case, my signature would be meaningless but just to sign it as a favor to the AP’s.
It was then that I realized that some things that we endure are a form of motivational theater. The numbers, productivity, and engagement are what they are in the trenches. The leadership puts pressure on the management to do better. The management then goes through the motions of applying guilt, inspiration, or motivation to change what everyone knows will likely not change. Everyone goes home until next week and the status quo is maintained.
amateurparent wrote:The 20% who did all the work would also be the ones who actually show up to the stake meeting. The 80% who don’t care about HT will not be present to hear the lecture.
I remember coming to the church for a training by a stake official in my 20’s. I remember it because he publicly reprimanded me for not bringing a pen and paper to take down notes. Thus I learned of my own little part in this motivational theater. I now bring pen and paper and write stuff down. I even keep a notepad and pen in my shirt pocket. About half the time I am writing stuff down just to be seen writing stuff down.
Roy wrote:The AP said that they needed me to sign because they needed the signature of all the missionaries to present to the MP. He told me that in my case, my signature would be meaningless but just to sign it as a favor to the AP’s.
Yours is the only signature I need.Roy wrote:I remember coming to the church for a training by a stake official in my 20’s. I remember it because he publicly reprimanded me for not bringing a pen and paper to take down notes.
Me in the front pew at church for the next meeting:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/cujDcac.jpg [/img] I’m juvenile. Fight fire with fire, right?
Roy wrote:I remember coming to the church for a training by a stake official in my 20’s. I remember it because he publicly reprimanded me for not bringing a pen and paper to take down notes. Thus I learned of my own little part in this motivational theater. I now bring pen and paper and write stuff down. I even keep a notepad and pen in my shirt pocket. About half the time I am writing stuff down just to be seen writing stuff down.
Despite the story I’m about to tell I still think this former SP was a very spiritual guy.
Many years ago we had a stake president who was part of our ward. Like most SPs he was not in our ward often, maybe once every 6 weeks or so. But when he was there and sitting on the stand he always had this journal open taking notes. He did similarly at stake meetings. At least everyone thought he was taking notes. I was called into the bishopric while he was SP, and as is tradition here when the SP visits he takes the second counselor’s seat next to the bishop and the counselor moves over a seat on the other side of the SP. It was hard not to look at what he was writing, and I was always curious about it anyway. I saw him writing in his journal or another notebook many times. He was never taking notes whenever I looked. Sometimes he was making to do style lists related to church, and sometimes they weren’t related to church. At least once he was writing a talk for another meeting. Once he was writing a letter to a missionary. Sometimes he seemed to be doing something for his work (he was a lawyer). A couple times he wasn’t actually writing at all, he was doodling. I never told anyone what I saw, except here in anonymity.
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