Saturday, May 24, 2014

The Juncture Council: A Ministry Organization Layout

I recently thought up the following company structure for a nonprofit organization and presented it at a meeting for a forming ministry a few hours ago.

Most organizations today follow a simple "command hierarchy", if you will, from the board of directors to the executive director through a bunch of people down to the people who actually do work. In nonprofit organizations, especially those with a vision, the visionary is typically not the type of person who wants to deal with all the implementation/facilitation details like law or finance.

Therefore, I propose a new structure, one that clearly separates the roles of chief visionary and executive director, also being sure to prevent the animosity between the types of people that produces tension or fallout in an organization. Instead of placing one chief from each "side" in a superior/inferior relationship, place each of them at the top of their own hierarchy. The chief visionary's subordinates include PR, spiritual leadership, outreach opportunities, and other things that generally don't involve a lot of hard real-world facilitation. Things under the executive director include administrative assistant, treasurer, legal counsel, and whatever other objective and non-interesting (at least to the visionary) jobs need to be done to implement the ministry.

The unique feature of this structure is the juncture council: the coming together of the vision and the implementation hierarchies. It is, in essence, a board made up of people who want to make all the amazing things from the visionary side happen in the real world, compromising if necessary to meet with real-world requirements, as assessed by the implementation side. Then, all the actual doing of things and action committees are placed under the combined authority of the juncture council. When problems arise or progress needs to be reported, the juncture council also acts as a router to inform the appropriate top director as to the situation.

The job of the chief visionary, once everything has been set up, is to hand down assessments of the effectiveness of the vision implementation to the juncture council and maybe also look for new areas to expand into. The executive director's continuing job is to facilitate the ministry's operation by navigating the hierarchies, cutting red tape, and getting stuff out of the way of people who know how to do their job.

I hope this idea will help you in some way. Be aware that information and command often flow in totally different paths, so be ready to create a different organizational chart for resources.

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