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The Good Old Days and Other Works of Fiction

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / December 6, 2019 / 0 Comments

When were your glory days? Pose this question and a congregation’s leaders will often tell stories of high attendance, engaged participation, and buildings that couldn’t hold it all. Glory-era memories are almost always recounted as blissful, happy times of pure goodness. However, parts of the story rarely get told—including how the seeds of decline may […]

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5 Practices for Coaxing Order out of Chaos

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / October 29, 2019 / 0 Comments

Chaos is a natural by-product of innovation. Innovation happens best in conditions of upheaval, disturbance, and dissonance. However, people expect their leaders to keep things calm, predictable, and orderly. How do we coax order out of chaos without squelching innovation? Stages of Innovation Innovation occurs in predictable stages. It begins with a disturbance in the status quo, […]

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7 Ways to Inspire Confidence While Saying “I Don’t Know”

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / October 29, 2019 / 0 Comments

People look to leaders to fix organizational problems; a leader who fails to resolve a problem quickly may be labelled weak or ineffectual. However, it isn’t in anyone’s best interest for a leader to start fixing things when the way ahead isn’t clear. How does a leader say, “I don’t know what to do next,” […]

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Disappointed in Your Followers? Try Cultivating Awe!

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / July 18, 2017 / 2 Comments

Every leader has experienced this frustration. You put your best leadership vision and energy foreword but you are met with an uninspired response. You hope for a reaction that is lively, expansive, generous and creative. Instead, your followers are unimaginative, scarcity-minded and inwardly-focused. What’s a leader to do? Turning the tide might be easier than […]

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Don’t Just Talk About Mission-Act With Passion!

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / April 19, 2017 / 2 Comments

Congregations waste precious time forming mission statements that fail to inspire action. Writing a mission statement produces clarity, but rarely generates energy. It’s time to move beyond mission and start focusing on the passion that compels us to make a specific difference. We often think of an individual as having a vocation and an organization […]

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Pastoral Transition-Lifting the Veil of Secrecy

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / July 15, 2014 / 0 Comments

Organizations in all walks of life openly plan for leadership transition. The Church is unique in the veil of secrecy that we draw around pastoral transition. We don’t want to watch people grow anxious, so we withhold known information about departure. In doing so, we postpone the hard adaptive work of leadership transition into the […]

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How to Have a Better Conversation

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / July 2, 2014 / 0 Comments

Board leaders long for meaningful meetings. Instead, many participate in mind-numbing meetings that repetitively chase topics, with little forward momentum. Agendas are rigidly structured around the receipt of reports, with little work that actually impacts the future of the congregation. What would it take to foster more fruitful board conversations? Recently, I observed a board […]

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If-Then Plans

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / April 25, 2014 / 0 Comments

The problem with most planning is that people simply don’t do what they have declared they want to do. There is a goal setting technique that claims a 300% increase in the likelihood of goal attainment. It is called the if-then plan. Heidi Grant Halvorson, the associate director of Columbia Business School’s Motivation Science Center, […]

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A Simple Knock at the Door (Staff Team Communication)

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / August 29, 2013 / 0 Comments

I spend a lot of time on airplanes.  It is one of the side effects (benefits?) of being a national consultant.  We all know that flying is a high tech endeavor.  Commercial aircraft are complex machines guided by sensors, backup systems and safety features that boggle the average mind. The process of checking in and boarding […]

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