Creativity is Messy

Creativity is not neat. It is not orderly. When we are being creative we don’t know what is going to happen next. When we are being creative a great deal of what we do is wrong. When we are being creative we are not efficient.

-Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, p. 163

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Have You Been Googled?

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Have you ever "googled" yourself?  Of course you have.  And what did you find?  Chances are as you may be either looking for a church/pastoral position or hiring for one, you've turned to google.  But what are the challenges and potential problems for both the potential candidate and the search committee?

In the Call and Response blog from Duke Divinity school, Carol Howard Merritt discusses the issue of search committees and Google.

This experience has made me wonder: what happens if someone on a search committee Googles the name of a candidate who has been attacked by a vicious blogger? How much will that weigh on the committee’s decision? We can usually control what sort of information we put on the Internet about ourselves, but we cannot control what people say about us. We also have very little legal recourse in these situations (to dig deeper, see Daniel Solove).

How do we lead religious institutions in the Google generation? There are a few possibilities.

First, religious leaders can severely limit their web interactions. Some people have decided that it is too dangerous for one’s reputation to get in the mud of social media. If they do interact, then it’s all business. I respect this decision, but I also think that social media presents incredible opportunities for us to connect with people in authentic and creative ways. I would hate to miss out on that because I’m a pastor. In fact, it seems that I should be involved because I’m a pastor.

Second, we can encourage no-Google policies in our job searches. This is something that Daniel Solove condones, but I’m afraid it is not possible. When an employer is trying to gain as much information about a candidate’s character as possible, then I’m not sure that they can ignore such an important research tool. And even if the search committee did maintain a no-Google policy, the people in the institution or pew will be looking up the name on search engines.

Read the rest HERE

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Don't Do the "Yearly Dump"

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It doesn't matter if you are in a business or a church/ministry...yearly performance reviews are the norm.  But are they necessarily the best.  I appreciate Phil Cooke's thoughts on it, in his latest blog post:

If you store things up and do the "yearly dump" I think it creates many more hard feelings. Employees need to be reviewed, encouraged, and corrected. But do it as the problems (or good stuff) happens. Don't wait until they've forgotten what the reprimand was about in the first place.

(read the whole post HERE)

Phil communicates what I have been thinking for a long time.  It may be necessary to document performance for the employment file, but in terms of actual usefulness, it is better to receive (both for the employee and the organization) real time feedback.

What do you think?

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