RX 24 - Building Bridges, Not Silos - Erin Siegel

Transcribed Content

Alright. Welcome everyone to session number one of the final day of Rx. Just to clarify, this is the building bridges, not silos session for the staff and leadership track. Now I'd like to welcome Erin Siegel from The Crossing. Well, hello, friends. Thank you so much for being here today. I want to just ask if you would help me out with a couple of things to get started. We're going to do like a little poll. So what is the best way to experience the Grand Canyon? Some of you might say hiking. That's a picture of the Bright Angel Trail. That is a lot of elevation change in my opinion. What about camping? Is camping the best way to experience the Grand Canyon? Rafting down the middle, getting all the views from the bottom, or maybe it's catching the views from the rim. Alright, guys. I wanna I wanna see you vote. One, two, three, four. Who thinks hiking is the best way? We have a few in the room. Okay. What about camping? Okay. We got a couple. I'm glad we got a couple. Okay. Rafting. Alright. And catching the view from the rim. Yeah. There might be a few more of us. That maybe is my category. That's my family. We were there just a couple years ago. Okay. I wanna try one more. Okay. This broke the Internet a few years ago. Is the dress blue and black or is it white and gold? Blue and black or white and gold? Do we have a blue and black vote? Okay. Alright. How about white and gold? It's like half and half. That is awesome. Okay. So the dress is actually in this image blue and black. I don't even understand. I don't even understand. Okay. But since then, there's been a lot of science that has explained why some of us see it as gold and white. But I will say we are all right because the maker of the dress, after all of the nonsense that went down, they went ahead and made a white and gold version. So we're all correct. We're all right. But I just want to use that as an example. Like, even in a room this size, we are all different. We have different perspectives. We have different backgrounds, different preferences. We come from different areas, and God made each of us with different passions and gifts. That's a beautiful thing. That's a beautiful thing in the kingdom of God because he does it all on purpose, and then he brings us all together as one. And I'll tell you that affects our teams as well. But now I might be getting ahead of myself a little bit. My name is Erin Siegel and I'm on staff at The Crossing in St. Louis. That's my husband and my family. I have two kiddos, Jacob and Lydia. Jacob is 13, almost 14, and Lydia is 11. We are all middle school this year, and it's fun to be in the same school and crazy how quickly it is going. I have worked at The Crossing for fifteen years. I started at The Crossing in 02/2009 more as like a ministry admin. So I was leading teams of volunteers. I had events and scheduling and those kinds of things, a lot of communicating going on. And then in about 2016, I shifted over to our communication team. And my role changed a little bit. And mostly what I do now is look at assimilation. So I'm trying to put together processes and strategies that we implement across our four campuses. And I love doing it. I love assimilation because I believe that if people stick just a little bit past showing up on the weekends, God is going to meet them in that and do things. Like you guys have seen that in your church, I've seen that in my church. God is so good to us in that way, and we're grateful for it. But I am not talking about assimilation today. I want to talk about building bridges. I want to have a conversation about that. So what I'm going to share are a few things that I've been learning recently. I'm going to share a couple of clips from one of our core experience classes at the crossing, and then I'm going to share a handful of bridge building tools for us to share. So we migrated to Rock in 2016. That's when I was still in my previous role really working in the weeds in the database, sharing communications, leading teams, and that kind of thing. And when we migrated, I got mad. Jim knows because I just felt like I couldn't do anything. I felt like I couldn't do anything. I couldn't find the things that I was looking for. I was massively slowed down. So I wrote my strongly worded email to IT sorry Jim and expressed my concern about this migration. And I just fully expected from them to be like, oh my gosh, you're so right. This has been so hard for our staff. We have to turn back. And it didn't happen. I don't know why. But honestly, they had just moved things. Things were named different words and I couldn't find what I needed to find to do my job. I was slowed down and I was frustrated. But really, what was happening was I was working in my silo, and they were working in theirs. No fault. Right? They were doing their very best to bring us a database to meet our growing needs, and I was running with the ministry that God had put in my hands. They were serving us. They were serving me. They were serving our church, but I just didn't see it that way. I didn't understand it that way. Hindsight, of course, is twentytwenty, and now we probably would agree that we could have done a couple of things differently. Right, Jim? But I have learned so much since then. Like, started sharing tips with other ministry admins, and then it's like, oh, they built me a content channel and it's awesome for my team. Would this work for your team? And we kept sharing enough that I got to the point that I was like, I love rock. I love rock. It can do anything. Do you guys know that? It can do anything. And so I eventually was asked for a handful of hours every week to project manage our rock projects. So now I'm the bridge. I get to be a bridge between the ministries that we serve as clients and our technical teams. And I love it. I love getting to do it. Now maybe you have had a similar experience. You have been sitting in your job and you're frustrated because something just happened that you weren't expecting to come. Or maybe you are on a technical team and you're trying to implement something and people are like, wait a second, and pushing back hard. Sitting in a meeting with our technical team, it can literally feel like we're speaking different languages. They say things like lava and fluid and people's eyes kind of glaze over and it's like, what are you even talking about? It can feel easier and faster to go ahead and work in our silos. The technical people keep doing the technical things, the ministry people keep doing the people things, and we'll we'll get there eventually. We're all pushing people towards Jesus, and we're all gonna we're gonna get there eventually. But really, that doesn't reflect the unity that Jesus wants for us. In John 17, we read Jesus' prayer for us on the worst night of his life. He is waiting to be betrayed. He knows that he's headed to the cross, and he was thinking about us, the church, the people who are coming after him, and the unity that he wants for us, and he prayed for us. So I mentioned that I wanted to share a couple of clips with you. The Genius of One course is a class that we ask everyone in our church family to go through, all of our staff. It is a class, it's a five week class that's just based on practical tools for living in unity. So I have a couple of clips. I'm gonna share the first one a few minutes right now. Let me read for you just a little bit of that prayer. I pray, father, that all of them may be one just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The prayer here that Jesus prays is that we would be one, that we would be one as he and the father are one. Now there's an obvious question, but the the question is this. When time is of the essence, when the clock is ticking, when Jesus knows that he has very little opportunity to pray and he prays for us, what does he pray? He doesn't pray that we would be popular. He doesn't pray that we would be the coolest kids in the school. He doesn't pray that we would actually be the smartest people and always win the debates. He doesn't pray that we would be the wealthiest or the most powerful or the most beautiful or the most athletic or creative or artistic. You just heard what he prayed. He prays that you and I would be one as he and the father are one. Now there's an awful lot to that, but what Jesus is saying here is that we would be connected, that our stories would be connected, that our our lives would be connected, our our passions, and our gifts, and our hopes, and our dreams, and I would even say our tears, and our grieving, everything, our lives would be so interwoven that somehow we would be one as he and the father are one so that the world would know that the father had sent him. There's a word that I'm gonna use now. The word is mission, and you'll hear this a little bit later. But this is, it's missiological. What Jesus is saying is for us to have an effect in this world, for us to proclaim the gospel in this world, it will come back to how we treat each other. You see, it will come back to this idea of you and I being one. Jesus says, the closer we are, the more united we are, the more we work together as one, the more we reflect this beautiful relationship between the father and the son. The more this happens, the more the world will pay attention to Jesus, and they will know that the father has sent him. Another way we might put it is this, we know as Christians that we have this this goal in mind of what we're supposed to do. We are to go into the world. We are to proclaim the gospel. This is what we do. But apparently, how we do this matters as much as what we do. Let me say that one more time because you'll hear it again throughout this course. How we do what we do is as important as what we do. So he said it a couple times, but I'm gonna say it again. How we do what we do is just as important as what we do. How we interact and how we love each other on our staffs, it's just important as the ministry that we're carrying out. Now, huge disclaimer. I don't do this right all the time. I am not perfect at this. We have a church. We have a class. We all go through this probably every three years because we leak. We forget. We forget the tools at our disposal, but we think it's really important. So today I'll just share a few of the mistakes that I've made along the way and hope that that is encouraging to you. So one other thing I want to share is that no matter how big or small your team is or no matter what your role is at your church, if you're technical, if you're the lead technical person, if you're in a ministry, if you're a ministry admin, if you're a pastor, you can build bridges. You can do this. So let's get started with a few bridge building strategies. Bridge builders listen well. One of the first things that I noticed when I started kind of in this project management role was the chaos of how people were telling us what they needed from us. It was like a hallway conversation, and then there's a team message coming in, and then there's some emails, and then at the end of a meeting it's like, oh, we could use this. And it was like, So in order to be able to listen well, we created one process. There's one place for our staff to go to tell us what they need. And that comes into us, and we process it. And we had to train our staff, right? Over and over, somebody would stop by, it's like, oh my gosh, that sounds like such a fun thing to do. Go ahead and go to the form. They would send an email like, oh, thanks so much. Here's the link to the form. Because if we could quiet the noise and turn down that chaos, it actually creates space for us to be able to listen really well to the ministries and what they need. So you guys can absolutely do that too. When a request comes in, we have a look at it and see is it something that we can deal with quickly. Hour count is kind of an hour. If it takes an hour or less, we can pass it right on to a team member and they move forward with it. If not, then we toss it into the projects plug in. I'm going to go back to this several times. It has been a game changer for us. So we put the project in, and then I will set up a kickoff. In the kickoff, we invite whoever is making the request for a change or a project or whatever and then someone from our technical team. And my job as the project manager, again, is to listen. I know sometimes in our culture we've lost that as a skill to really listen well. So I try to intentionally go into those meetings and set aside my stuff. My projects that I'm working on, my deadlines, the things that are going on at home, my kids texting me, and I try to focus in on what this ministry is asking of us. That builds bridges with them. When I can be fully present and give them my attention, they know that I'm for them. They know that I'm showing up for them. We listen intentionally and we ask curious questions. Because we ask questions, that means we're listening. We're processing the things that they're telling us and then we're asking them more questions to learn more to get to the root of what they really are asking us for. So here are a few questions that we use. What are you hoping to accomplish, or what is your end goal? What's the problem you're trying to solve? What are your ideas for solutions? Sometimes they have some ideas because they've heard of another ministry using something. And we go, oh gosh, that's actually a really great solution. I think we should do that. Or who is your audience? I will say if there are technical people in the room, one way to really build a bridge with your folks who are not technical is to ask them some of these questions. I know we're busy. I know we have full plates doing things. But when we go to a ministry and we say, what's something that's taking you a long time? What's your biggest pain point using Rock? They go, oh my gosh, you care. You care about what we're doing. You care about how we're using this tool. And you're going to win them over in ways relationally that maybe they weren't won over before. Sometimes asking those curious questions is to get to the thing behind the thing. So this is like a really silly example. But somebody from Kids Crossing might come and they have that pre registration, the new family registration block, and say, oh my gosh, we need different questions. And you might go, Okay, send us what questions you want off or what questions you want added, and we'll see what we can do. But if we ask a couple more questions, we might actually get to the thing that's happening, the thing that they're hoping for or working against. So maybe it's, well, we actually want to ask these other questions because we want different data on the families. Oh, Okay, that's different than us just changing questions. They also might say, oh, the new family desk on Sunday mornings is getting crazy. Like we're getting a line, it's throwing off check-in, people are late to service and late to their rooms. It's like, oh, that is a different problem that we need to try and solve. So that's where the listening and asking those questions really helps to get to the root of the problem. Sometimes we just have to create space within our teams for them to be heard. I don't know about you, but if you have more than one technical person or if you have more than one person working on event, you will have two different opinions on how to approach it. Two different ways that they would solve a problem, two different opinions on the order of doing things. And if we create space for both to be heard, for everyone to be heard, we're actually at the end going to come out with a better solution because we're going to get the best parts of each person, and they're going to come to an understanding with each other and then go to agree to be like, no, that is the best way. And then we could do this, and then all of a sudden they're working together, and we're building unity, and we're going to have a better solution in the end. Sometimes that listening is me just listening to one of our developers talk out loud. I may not understand probably not everything that they're saying, but I can ask a few questions and listen and all of a sudden they get unstuck. I can also listen to hear in their voice the thing that they're excited about. They might come to me and again talking about things that I don't really understand and I can hear it come out in their voice that they figured something out that they're really excited about or they're proud. And I have to say, way to go. Way to go. I'm so like, that's so exciting and get to celebrate with them. So I said it a couple of times, but I hope this is encouraging for you guys in the room. If you are not technical or if you are technical, there are still ways to listen and participate in the conversation in really meaningful ways. I don't have to know everything about how rock works. I don't have to know all the ins and outs of a ministry in order to actually be a valuable person at the table to listen and help move things forward. So if we listen and ask questions, we may come up with a more helpful solution than what was initially asked for. And we break down walls, and we grow and trust together. Bridge builders know that communication is key. I know you guys might roll your eyes at this, and that's really Okay with me. But email etiquette is a thing. And what I try to do is answer emails within twenty four hours. Responding to emails might be one of the biggest communication tools that we have to build bridges. If I get back to somebody they know I have read their message, that I care about what they're working on, and that I'm thinking about it or I'm trying to track something down. Even an email, like even if it's, hey, I saw your email and I'm still collecting information. I'm going to get back to you by Friday. That goes such a long way than for someone on the other end being like, did they see it? Did they read it? Do they care? And I know we're busy. But like I said, just a little note back helps build those bridges. Communication along the way improves buy in and trust and unity. So when we're working on a project, we're going to keep going back to those ministry leaders and say, this is where we're at. Are we headed in the right direction? We might show them kind of a benchmark of where we are and make sure that we're headed in the right direction. I think that just makes them know we're, again, for them and that we're all working towards the same thing. Here is our projects plug in. This is just an example of one of our projects. We have deadlines and benchmarks. We have details for the project that are there. Then we get into the conversational part. So some of that is going to be our communication within our team going back and forth. What do I need to get from the ministry leader and bring back to our developer? What questions does our developer have on the project that he needs answers to or she? And then also, we can tag in people from the ministry. So in this project, we kind of got to a benchmark and Stan was able to send kind of a page link. And they were like, oh my gosh, that looks so amazing. So they are kind of getting drawn in and they're getting excited about it along the way too. As far as communication, I think setting boundaries can also be really helpful. And we communicate them really clearly. There's boundaries all around us in life. There are rivers that separate land. There are fences that separate your yard from my yard, but then I have a door that people can come in and go when I've invited them, hopefully. But we have all of these boundaries and they just make really clear structure for us. So a boundary has three parts, what you need, when you need it by, and the consequence. I know, I know, consequence sounds like a really yucky word. But really what we're just saying is that if you don't do your part, then we won't be able to do our part either. We're a team, and let's all be in this together so that we can get all the way to the end. So an example is, again, a silly example. We're working on copy for a web page that a team wants to go live on Friday. So we might be able to say in our conversations, like, we're not writing the copy. You're writing the copy. So we need the copy by Wednesday so that we can have the page live on Friday. That's just really clear because then they know if we don't get the copy and if we don't get it by Wednesday, then there's no way that our team can have the page ready by Friday. Again, it's a silly example but I think it's having the clear communication is really helpful in helping everyone move forward. We say a lot clarity is kindness. Bridge builders invite people in. So we've all been in a place that we're trying to roll something out and people feel surprised. We get pushback or we're on the other side of that, right, where I was before, where I'm feeling surprised about something. A tool to try and prevent that on the front end of things is seeing who is not in the room that should be from the beginning. So if we have a project and I have a technical person in the meeting and I have a ministry person in the meeting, it's possible that we're not going to get anywhere unless we have somebody else in the room. We might need a pastor that oversees that person or a manager. They might need leadership approval. So looking at that from the beginning is actually going to help build that bridge and help a project get all the way to the end without bumps. I can't guarantee there won't be bumps, but it might be better. So we have a serving profile. It's a form and a workflow and a bunch of other things all put together, but it is something that is highly used in our context. It's a discipleship tool for sure. So we ask everybody who's going to serve to fill it out, our staff members fill it out. It is a little bit of church background, their story with Jesus, what they've tried at the crossing, and then some other personal history type questions. Our team was noticing that it was kind of problematic in how it was currently set up. And so we started talking about what would it be like to open it up and change it. This is a project that nobody was coming to us and asking for, but it would really benefit our church and our staff and our database. And so we wanted to move forward with it. We had to get the right people involved from the beginning. So one of our first steps was to go to leadership and say, hey, we know this tool is really important to us. Here are a couple of the downfalls that we're seeing. And here are a couple of the things that we want to do to fix it, to make it a little bit better. And they were like, yeah, that sounds really great. Let's do it. Then we went and talked with some of our pastors and said, hey, pastors, you use this tool all the time. You're the one sitting down and talking with people from our church. Are there questions that people get stuck on? Are there questions that we need to change how they're asked? Are there questions we need to add? And so in doing that, we had conversations along the way to get the right people in. HR was using it. Youth Crossing was using it. And we had to make sure that they knew a change was coming and give them the heads up to be wrapped in the process. So we let's see here. We took some really strategic steps to get the right people in the room. The alternate thing can happen too I don't know if you guys have ever been in this place too many people can be invited into the room. That's called too many cooks in the kitchen. It can make a project really, really complicated. Over the summer, maybe it was more like in the spring, we had a project we were working on with Kids Crossing. And we had the kids admins and the kids pastors, the kids directors, several people from our team, probably 15 people in the room. You should be laughing. This was a terrible choice. It was a terrible choice. And I was thinking, this is going to be efficient. This is going to be amazing. We're all going to get through this. We're going to take steps. She's like, no way. You're right. No way. There was no way in that room with over 15 people that we were going to make progress. It was a huge mistake. So a few questions that you can ask to get the right people in and avoid having too many people. Who's the most involved? Who's using it the most? Who's most heavily impacted by a change? And is there a process that goes beyond the requester? That's kind of what I was saying when is there a manager or a pastor that needs to be involved in the conversation? Or is it something that just needs to go all the way up and get approved by a leadership team? Now there is a difference in getting the right people in room in the beginning for the development phase and then wrapping people in along the way and again at the end. What we could have done with Kids Crossing maybe was sit with the users. Hey, what are your connections like? What kind of columns do you need? That kind of thing. And then start building it out, get buy in from the right people and take steps that way rather than have everyone in from the beginning. Sometimes you kind of get to a place where it's like leadership has to make a decision. Here's where we're headed and we're going to go ahead and move forward and we start implementing. One way to bring people in closer to the end of a project is to plan for training. I cannot express to you how important this is and how much it helps our ministries feel tied together and feel tied to what we're doing in Rock. So with the serving profile, one, we're trying to build it in a way that it's not going to look that different for the user. Right? That's really important. That's helpful if we can do it. And anything that we've changed, we're going to train on. So once we roll everything out and go live, then Karen might go and do a Loom video. She does that a lot. Or might go into our pastors meeting and say, okay, pastors, I need ten minutes. I'm just going to show you some of the changes. That just helps them to know how to use things, and we're really being proactive and then being able to use the tools that we're creating for them. Another example would be we have a big event coming up in September that we invite our church body in to join a serving team. So there's one weekend and a lot of connections come in. So from the assimilation side of things, I'm always saying personal follow-up, personal follow-up, personal follow-up because we know people don't really read emails. And we wanted to do a training on texting. Now texting through Rock is not anything new. Some of our teams were really utilizing it already, but we wanted invite people in that weren't using it yet. So we had a training on texting. We asked people if they wanted phone numbers ahead of time so they could do hands on testing while we were in the room, and we all sat together. We probably had 40 different folks representing different ministries come in for this. And Kieran did an awesome job, like, showing what it looks like to interact on your phone, in the browser, and then, you know, best practices allowed people to ask questions. We sat next to people and helped them through the process. Those ministry leaders, like I could see it and I could feel it. They walked out of the room feeling encouraged, like we were for them, and that they could use this really as a tool moving forward. Bridge builders expect bumps along the way. You guys know we work for Jesus. We're on staff. But we don't always all see things the same way. I'm sure I have hurt some of my coworkers. They have hurt me. We have misunderstandings. And that's just part of the world that we're living in. So a tool that we use a lot, this is a tool that counselors, therapists use with their clients. If we think we're about to walk into a rocky conversation, we halt. So am I feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? I don't know about you, but hangry is a real thing in my world. And so sometimes it is so true that a snack can bring my temperature down a little bit. It's true. So if there's something going on, if I need to step back a little bit and assess how I'm feeling, I need to do that. Let's see. So I had this experience over the summer that somebody came to me and and we were having conflict, I could feel myself ramping up and I had to halt. So now we are talking about conflict resolution. Jesus shows us the way. I'm guessing some of us have read or heard Matthew 18 before. If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you've won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church. Now here's where I wanna share one more clip with you from the genius of one. Let's go back now to verse 15, and we'll break this down point by point. Jesus' plan for conflict resolution begins with you. This is your conversation to have. You're not inviting somebody else into this. That's the second step. Remember? So now it's just going to be you. Go. This is an active verb. You don't sit even when it's not your fault. We're called to go. That's right. And there's two sides to that, Judy, because on the one hand, you just don't wanna wait too long to have this conversation. When you wait too long, your imagination starts to run away. You you you start to get angry about things that aren't even true. Right. Oftentimes, the longer we wait, the more people we pull in and it turns into gossip. And you're right. You mentioned it. The longer we wait, evil can seep in and start writing untrue stories in our head and making the rift even worse. That's it. So we wanna go sooner than later. That's right. When you pull more people in and then gossip starts to creep in and that's not the way of Jesus. So, but on the other hand, it's also true that sometimes you might need a day or two to pray this thing up, to prepare for the conversation. You wanna prepare and pray. Yeah. That's right. Alright. And then the next step is, you go to the person. There's something so winsome about being able to come to somebody and say, listen. I need to have a conversation with you because, something's happened between us, and I have not shared this with anybody else yet. It's so different versus like, hey. I've already talked to 10 people about this bump I have with you before we even have a conversation. The Latin root for the term confront literally means con confrontum, which means to the forehead. We actually turn our face towards It's face to face. A loving thing. So many times we're taught, like, confrontation is a bad, ugly thing, but it's really this beautiful thing to turn your face towards. That's great. So we go to the person, and then we do that in private. This isn't a public conversation. You're not having it in the public square. You're not yelling across a group of people about this. You are, trying to find a quiet place where the two of you can get together face to face in private to have this conversation. If you use email or text, make sure the only thing with that is just to set up the together time. That's right. Please don't ever try to use email or text to solve a major confrontation. You can't. Well, with that, that's right. And you don't wanna write, like, you know, in all capital letters. Not write in all caps. Yes. It's like you're yelling. You're yelling. But, that's right. So, so we're gonna have this conversation in private, and then the next thing is it's to discuss the problem. It's so tempting to wanna, come up with a laundry list of things that that I'm angry at you about at what we call kitchen kitchen sink arguments, where you throw everything in. Listen, it's it's gonna be important every time that you just focus on the problem at hand. Discuss the problem. And then finally, we do this for the purpose of reconciliation. We do it not to win, not to be right, but to restore the broken relationship. That's the goal of Matthew 18. That's the goal. So if the goal is restoration and reconciliation, like I had a bump with a coworker over the summer and I was really unsettled about the conversation, so I I looped back and I said, I'm really unsettled about that conversation. Can we revisit it? So we found a quiet place off in the corner and we had a hard conversation. It was not fun. It was uncomfortable and it was hard. But we walked away at the end of it, understanding each other a little bit better, being a little bit more for each other, and knowing that we're going to get through bumps. We just got through one. So even if we don't agree in the future, it actually adds to that relationship because I know they're going to put forth the effort and so am I to get to the other side of that bump. It takes humility and time to circle back and make sure everyone is good. But if we get to the end of a project or an event and there's confusion and frustration and broken relationships, it's just not worth it. So conflict resolution with the purpose of reconciliation, it does build bridges and breaks down our silos. Has anyone noticed how many times I've used my own mistakes? I'm not perfect. Our church, we're really committed to unity. We have a class that we ask everyone to go through, and we still aren't perfect. We make mistakes, but it's worth it to keep trying. So bridge builders listen well. They know communication is key. They invite people in, and they expect bumps along the way. Practicing these skills will break down our silos and allow us to obtain the best results with bought in teams that are equipped with tools that they actually use. The best bridge builders bring people together in thoughtful and winsome ways for teamwork and collaboration to preserve unity and trust. So I thank you for being here, and I beg you to try one of these things out this year and try to be a bridge builder and just see what God will do with it. I can't wait. Thanks.