Podcast Episode 130: Episode 103: Special Edition w/ Healthy Growing Leaders

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On this special edition of Rock Cast, Jon, Emily and Nick are joined by Greg Wiens and Dave Phillips of Healthy Growing Leaders. Tune in and listen to great conversations with our

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This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this special edition of Rockcast, the podcast where we go behind the scenes and check-in with the community members, find out what Rock's been up to, and get you all up to date on the latest. We are so excited to have some special guests with us here today. We have the Healthy Growing Leaders team, which you've probably run into at the conference before. And if not, you definitely need to make sure you do that the next time And we're here to talk assessments. So welcome, Greg and Dave. Welcome. Thank you. I mean, thank you. Yeah. We're very excited to have you here. We always have such excellent conversations with you and to be able to share that with the community, I think is going to be extremely advantageous as they're planning how do we engage with people in 2021. So let's kick this off with, first of all, I'd love to have, John, if you don't mind mentioning one of the themes that we're trying to get to this year that will help with people engaging more with Rock and learning more about things. Yeah. So in 2021, we're gonna be adding, we always do, lots of features to Rock. But I think it's more important actually to start using all the features that are actually in Rock. There's a theme for 2021 is identifying those features and really trying to highlight them. Things following, that's a huge, powerful feature that only a few churches I know of are using. But I think the assessments are another one of They're an amazing toolset, easy to take. I mean, the thought that you could send out literally a thousand disc tests to people and automatically have them put into your system that you can then report on and then look at through groups, it's just amazing. And for free. I mean, that used to be something you'd have to pay $15 an assessment for. Boom. You have it for free. That is an amazing thing. Why anybody why everybody's not using this feature, , blows my mind. I know. It's such a high value. Greg and Dave, we worked together for a long time to try and add this valuable tool inside Rock. Tell us a little bit about the background on that. Well, I just wanted to say to you, John, that I have I wish we they could send it to a thousand people and pay us $50 ahead they pay us on our website because that'd be $50,000 revenue that we would get. I'd love Well, they could still do that. They're still you could still send money. That's a good point. No. But I I just think it it is I just use that to illustrate that it is such a the the instruments themselves, because they're free, on Rock is, I think, so often overlooked as well. These are, , not that quality or whatever maybe. But the reality is we charge a hundred and $50 for those same instruments, that suite of instruments on our website. Identical, exact same instruments. Different outputs, as , a little bit different reports, but exact same instruments. , we have developed I've been working in this area since well, it's been the last thirty five years that I've worked in this area of assessments and developing assessments. The cool things that I have always found is that once you help people understand what their real, as I call their A game, what they're really good at, and you free them up to do that and not as much worry about the things they're not good at. Now we all have to do things we're not good at. It's part of our roles and jobs. We understand that. But the reality is, I and that's what really got me motivated about developing assessments. Dave and I have just had a lot of fun. I love working with Dave as a teammate because we're able to see the lights come on when people understand, This is how I'm wired. And whether they're staff, whether they're congregants, who no matter where they fit in a congregation, for people in a congregation to say, well, you don't we're not asking you because you're a female to serve in the nursery, but you've got some phenomenal leadership gifts, for instance. So we're gonna ask you to lead and some of that. Yeah. I've just it's been so cool to see people get on leads. So that's that's what gets me excited about assessments. I don't know. Dave, what do you think? Yeah. It really is, and what's fun is when we're able to be at the Rock Conference, I know back in the old days when we could actually gather and stuff. We see a lot of, we hear a lot of really good feedback from guys that are there, these are really gonna be helpful and that's kind of a- helping people kind of know how they're wired and what they're all about which- from my. Was. Important as a guy that was a connect back er in particular. Really being able to help people identify their wiring for me would have been just incredibly helpful in developing the teams and figuring how to bring somebody on and know what, if they're coming in as this hard driving always winning on conflict profile all these things yeah I'm I'm gonna have an idea. Of who I'm talking to. And out of maybe. when I was at a large church I mean I had a hundred or so programs that was. Responsible for as a connections pastor inside. I would love to have had that advantage to be able to say, okay, here's a hard driving, always gonna win person coming, setting up an appointment to tell me how I need to do my job. So, it'd be nice to have that little bit of insight before that meeting actually happens. Right, and we use your tools internal to our organization. Right. So, we bring new people in and they're interviewing, we have them take the assessments, and then we talk to them and say, Hey, your assessment's compared to the team. This is how you're gonna feel different. You're very extroverted. You're gonna feel it's a monastery here. And that's okay. And some of us are gonna be , Wow, we can't get a word in Edgewise. And that's okay, but this is how you're gonna feel. This is how we're gonna feel. And it doesn't rule anybody out. It just helps us understand that first day and how they're gonna relate to us and we're gonna relate to them. Sets healthy expectations. And, Joan, what you just said was it's not going to rule anybody out. That's what we hear a lot. People are concerned that this is going to be this flag waving, oh, you're not qualified kind of thing. Whereas it really is, and I'll let Greg talk to this, but we know everybody is so wonderfully made and we're all complex. And so the more we understand that about ourselves and about other people, the better we can see how God has wired them. Definitely. Now you keep using the term wiring, and I wanna just pull back for that in a minute and say the the suite of tools that you have inside Rock is you call it the true wiring suite. It's on your website. It's inside the Rock instance. Can you list for us the assessments that you have in there and what each of them kind of measures? Yeah. Let me do that. In fact, let me give you a little background first. And it's really interesting. I had had these disparate assessments that I had worked on, as I said, for thirty five years. And, but it was after meeting you guys that you said, well, can you put them together in a kind of a sweet thing? That's where Truewire really came from. I mean, it was in our conversations with you guys. So I wanna thank you because you have forever changed our lives and our ministry because it's it was just the dialogue, discussion with you to say, yeah, we need to put this together in a suite, and God just really used you. So I wanna thank you in that. But the one of the things, as Dave said, , Psalm one thirty nine says, we're fiercely and wonderfully made, and God was in us, He formed us while yet in our mother's womb. And we talk about hardware, that I think that you talk about someone's true wiring, it involves both hardware and software. Now hardware, just your phone or my computer, we don't change the hardware unless you you get a new one. And it's the same way. God was with us, and he formed us while he got in our mother's womb. And so certain instruments measure your hardware, certain ways you've been construed and will be construed to act your entire life. DISC is one of those. DISC measures your behavior. And, , my kids, , as soon as they were born, I could pretty much identify the passive one, the aggressive one. I mean, yeah, there are certain attributes you can pretty much see. And it's it's it's so fun to watch them blossom more fully in that. But it's that's the hardware, and there's certain aspects of us are are hardwired in. Then there's software. And in that same passage in Psalm one thirty nine, David says, And yet all the days of my life were written in your book before one of them took place. You ordained, he said, all those days of my life. And so it's really interesting that God has scripted us and sculpted us through all the days of our life. And so for me, we call that software. We're hardwired in some certain ways, and that way we don't change, but we're also software there's software that got certain events, significant family of origin issues, certain traumatic defining moments in our life have scripted us in certain other ways, certain other environments. And so some of that is software in your phone, can upgrade, you can do that some of the software. And we have things emotional intelligence, which is another instrument that we measure on the Turarry suite. And EQ measures basically four things. How well do you articulate your how well are you aware of your emotions? How well do you articulate those in the moment? How well aware are you of other people's emotions? And how well do you allow them to articulate their emotions in the context of your relationship? So it measures those four things and a couple others. But it measures basically the person's ability to access emotions as well as cognitive portions of the brain and express that. So that's the EQ. That's entirely software, and that can be changed. Those are simply skill sets that can be changed. And so, as Dave alluded to earlier, these instruments aren't used to beat up anyone, it's to say, and I always say every instrument has a margin of error, even the ones that I develop. They all can they have an error built into them. And so, , just because someone scores high or low or even anywhere on any these instruments doesn't mean that's exactly what they are. So I always confirm in the person's life with what the score says. So that's the emotional intelligence. Now motivators are another kind of I'll call those firmwares, I apologize for getting a little too complicated, but motivators are those those internal drivers. You may be a d and an I on the disc, but look entirely different from another d and I. And why? Well, it's because there's certain motivators, certain drivers inside of you that cause you to that drive that d and I behavior. And so motivators are more internal, and there's 22 motivators. They fall into four basic themes, and it's directional. Do you wanna, , you wanna influence the direction of the organization? Are you motivated to fulfill your position? Are they positional? Are you relational is your third theme, and are you motivated to build healthy relationships? And fourthly, intellectual. Are you motivated to use the gray matter that God's given you in some ways and use that for expediting the kingdom? So, the motivators are kinda not clearly because I've seen motivators change dramatically because of experiences in people's lives. They're not Interesting. Not clearly software or for or hardware. They're kinda in between. And the other two instruments that are in in the in the suite, one is conflict profile. Dave alluded to that a moment ago. How do you handle conflict? Which is directly related to EQ. I can give you a little hint there. Person people who have higher EQ tend to handle conflict differently than those who don't have EQ. But that's very, very helpful, especially can't tell you how many times I've been called into church board meetings because of a conflict between a pastor and a staff and the board and staff or pastor, it's purely over the conflict profile. And the last one is a fairly common one that most of us know about, which is spiritual gifts. And the difference I I always say the difference between spiritual gifts and motivators, they're very similar, but motivators all the items of motivators are about life in general. So it's about how you're motivated and driven to act in life in general. All the items on the spiritual gift instrument are all about working within the body, the body of Christ. Sometimes they're different, sometimes they're the same. Sometimes they align, and sometimes they're different. It's not doesn't matter what's good or doesn't make it good or bad. It just means that they're different. So those are the five instruments. That's so interesting that you can slice that up in five different ways, and I bet that's not an exhaustive list of all the ways you could look at someone Yeah. To understand them. No. In fact, I I just got home from Chicago last night, and they I I a number of churches hired me to come in and and to do full day assessments on senior level staff, and I use 13 different instruments. Wow. But five five of those are the true wiring. Five are the true wiring, and then I use another eight more to to parse those up. And that it's simply because we're so complicated. That's one of the reasons I have difficulty when someone uses any instrument. Don't care if it's an Enneagram, a DISC, a Myers Briggs, to describe a person as, oh, you're an SC. No, they're so much more than an SC. Right, Emily? You're much more than an SC. I don't think I am an SC. I'm an SC. Whatever. Yeah. It's true. Unite. It is true. So there isn't a good or a bad of any of these, and there are so many ways to look at things. You feel when someone learns more about themselves, I imagine that they interact with other people differently, but do you think they perceive themselves differently if they've never taken these before? Yes. I'd say a lot of the time other than that. I say a lot of the times we see the light really come on in their eyes and what they they're able to have language now that explains Why they act the way why they behave the way they behave- and anytime you can give somebody language words to help describe. The way that they're feeling in the moment it really is beneficial to them to be able to do that. so if I take all five of these instruments and Rock. And I understand how they relate to each other then I can then I now have language to describe if I really. I mentioned that in conflict profile if I have this tendency to want to win all the time. Or if I have a tendency to always yield. And just give a just whatever you guys do it in it can see that now I have language to say that I can see that. Oh, look, now I know why I feel this way. It helps me articulate that, which will then serve me as an individual, but it obviously will serve the church as well. For sure. What are some of the ministry applications that you see? You both have pastoral roles. I imagine you have some really incredible insights into that. Yeah. , it's interesting for me that, first of alland I do find a number of Rock churches are using it for staff selection staff, Especially during this COVID time, a lot of staff are being reassigned. What a better way to help reassign responsibilities and to look at where are your strengths? Let's figure out how we have to reassign because of COVID and some of the limitations. So how are we gonna do that? Where does that fit? And this is , the instruments are wonderful to help look at that, for staff selection, staff assignments, ministry roles. But small group leaders, I , first of all, training small group leaders, helping leaders understand their own wiring tremendously helps them be more patient and empathetic and understanding of people in their groups. The same thing with as we talk about, , children's ministries. We talk I mean, I don't care. In any ministry across the church, from my perspective and and I just wanna add this to what Dave said earlier. When we do these assessments on people and they oftentimes, it's not we're telling them something they don't know, but we're giving them permission to admit stuff they know deep in their heart. Mhmm. And and it's almost I feel validated. In fact, you've heard me from your story Yeah. , and I was I can remember in high or in in middle school, my old mother grabbing me by the earlobes and saying, Gregory, don't I knew I was in trouble when she said Gregory, but Gregory, don't you dare start something new until you finish something. Do you understand me? Well, I grew up thinking I was a bad person, seriously, because I liked starting things and hated finishing them. Well, that's now that I know all that I know, I'm a great starter. I'm really good at creating chaos, if you will, or, , creating things. I am horrible at at yeah. Dave is shaking his head, but I'm really horrible at finishing those things. Well, I had learned it's not I'm a bad person. Understanding that it's , for the kingdom, how do I harness that for the kingdom? Well, I need to develop a team around me. Know, I never operate by myself. I have people who are great finishers that work with me and keep me focused. But again, had I had these assessments even in my twenties, it would have helped me. It wasn't up to late into my thirties that I come to the understanding that, oh, Greg, you're not a bad person. There are just ways you need to manage your attributes for the kingdom. So that's usually when you go through assessments, we find that in any whether it's staff, volunteer, wherever it is, we're helping people come to and embrace the way they're the way they are designed by God, and that's okay. It's not a bad thing. It's just about a, , how do I have to harness this for the best of the kingdom? I I agree. I think one of the biggest moments of my life was around the distas. That it hardly that I understood myself, but more importantly, I think it took the opened my eyes to the fact that everybody doesn't have the same motivations on the inside. And I was using my I assumed we all thought the same way and all had the same emotions and motivators on the inside. So I was judging their intentions or their actions based on my motivations and then finding that they were incongruent, so therefore they were doing something wrong. But then when I saw, oh no, we're so different on the inside, it's just we are on the outside and that's okay and it's good that it helped me see other people differently. Of the would add is kind of back to Emily's question, how would I use it in ministry and trying to figure this out? What I call it, it's an experience gap. So as a pastor or a leader the church, you bring somebody on in a group based on however you figure that out. They were the one that bugged you the most, or they talked to you the most. And so you bring them on in a team, and over the course of three, four, five, six months, you'll know exactly how to work with that person, It'll take some time. But what I think you can do if you can understand the instruments and how to provide the assessment you can shrink that time down from six months to maybe a month if you really understand how that person's wired so you don't have to. You don't have to work with them over six months to figure that out you could start from the very beginning understanding. Kind of how they're wired so that that that six months of pain. You might have been able to get figured out in the first thirty days and decide how to manage that so that I call that the experience gap and it really shrinks that down. So and I know Greg has mentioned this before the assessments are perfect so the instruments are not gonna be perfect so you're not gonna nail it and know exactly it's gonna take experience. It's gonna take working with them it's gonna take. trying some. But boy, it's a whole lot easier when you can start with that knowledge of kind of how that person's wired before you give them a task or give them an assignment and know whether or not you can let go of that and pass it on to them. Mhmm. Yeah. , one of the instruments that start every one of my small groups with, and I've been leading groups for thirty some years, whenever I start a small group, we do spiritual gifts. Simple instrument. , it's biblical. Everybody feels comfortable with it. And the reason I do that, spiritual gifts, and I do that, Dave, right when we start the group because it does that very thing. You see someone in the group who, , you're able to talk about the differences and someone in a group who has mercy. Well, you're able to talk about how their heart is really gonna bleed for these kinds of things and others who have leadership or other kinds of gifts. And it helps us, John, exactly what you just said. In the context of this group, in the forming and storming stage of this group, be able to appreciate each other's strengths, not as threats, but as really strengths for the kingdom. And even though they're different from mine, they see all of life differently, they're still, they have strengths to bring that I don't have, and do the same. So I start every small group I do with just that one instrument. That's an amazing idea. Mean, within Rock right now, people listening to this podcast could implement that concept where allowing group leaders to send that out to their groups and then having access in their toolboxes to everybody's results so that they can have those ahead of time and maybe kind of compare and contrast for that first meeting or second meeting. That's a great idea. And I think it goes back to this feature and going back to the features that aren't used. Why are assessments not more commonly used? I think it goes to two. One is visibility. I think the right people in the church who are going to be passionate about this concept don't know it exists in Rock because they're not coming to the conference. They're not reading the manuals. They shouldn't be there, they're doing other things in their ministry. So it's discovery that these things exist. And then the implementation steps, which are not huge, they're fairly easy, but both of those barriers are really caused by the people who would be listening to this podcast. So I'd say if you're listening to this podcast, you need to help the discovery of this, go to the people in your church who don't know this exists, at least let them know it exists. And this is a toolset that can easily be rolled out and then be willing to commit the time to it. I think as IT and technical people, we get so excited about new filters in Lava or new this or new that, new bright, shiny technical feature, but where's the spiritual piece of that? It's more of administrative stuff that we tend to work on instead of the ministry stuff. This is pure ministry. And so I would just challenge you guys to at least fix the discovery problem. Make sure that the people inside your staffs know about these assessments and give them some usage. We just talked about several ideas right here, but there's a million more you could do. And be willing to then help implement them. During COVID, this is a perfect time to be working on this feature. It requires no in contact touch points. In fact, it's better if you're not being bothered while you take these assessments. So get this feature rolled out while you have time, and then as you come out of COVID, it ought to be in your internal processes and already working. That's a great point. Think maybe one of the other potential stumbling blocks is people aren't sure what to do with the information when it comes back, and interpreting it can be challenging. And and you don't wanna interpret it the wrong way, but what do you do with it, and how do you apply it across groups? And there's some excellent documentation, Greg, that you put together that's inside the Rock documentation. You have excellent documentation on your website. But it that can still be concern, I think, people have. But that's something that you can help mitigate as well, right, if they wanted to reach out to you and talk about how to apply this across leadership or groups or Yeah, and we've actually put together some online learning. So, if you have somebody that's responsible for groups, and you said, Emily, they're afraid they don't know what to do with this information. We have some online learning that they can just go through at their own pace and really get a much more in-depth view of what's going on with the instruments. That's amazing. Well, I know we need to close it out, but just wanna end on saying thank you, Greg. What you've given and the generosity you've put into this is amazing. I know, I forget how long ago, it was almost probably ten years ago that I first got in contact with you because I was looking for an open source dist test, was impossible to find I found your website, and you graciously said, Yes, use it. Get it out there. And I just want to tell you, that is so rare. Everybody, especially on these assessments, it's a very lucrative thing if you're not generous, and I've never seen someone be as generous as you with this. And I just wanna thank you on behalf of the Rock community for everything that you've done and everything that you continue to do. Well, thank you. As metal sharpens metal, so we sharpen one another. And I would tell you you heard me say earlier that I am here today, and TruWiring exists because of you guys. So thank you. It's been a great partnership. It really has. Yeah. And before we close out, what is your website address that someone can come to to get your online information or to connect with you for additional help with their application of this in their church? So, HealthyGrowingLeaders.com is one place start- truewiring.com- is where we have more information truewiringforchurches.com. The problem for the onlinelearninglearning.truewiring.com is going to give you that online learning so I just gave you four URLs, can figure that I think they're in the documentation too, just so if you get confused, but that's good. Great. Well, thank you so much, and we appreciate you joining us and really speaking into the heart of what's behind the assessments, why they're there, and just we we love being able to share your generosity with the Rock community. Thank you so much. We love being with you guys. Thanks. My pleasure. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? 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