Mid-Level Management

So this fall season, sort of early fall season, is a planning season at St. Luke's.

In sort of the end of August and the first part of September, all of our ministry teams, each one of our teams, comes together and makes decisions about what their goals will be, what the team's goals will be to accomplish in 2027.

And then that leads to, when that's done, when they've identified what those goals are, then comes the period when they put together a budget request, a request for funds from the operating budget of St. Luke's to support these goals that they've established.

And that takes, they work on that from sort of mid-September until actually tomorrow is when all of those are due.

And those, we don't, we never finalize a budget until January for a variety of reasons.

We have a generosity campaign, and that campaign will determine how much revenue we're going to have, what we believe will come in.

And we also want to know how the current year will finish.

And so we won't establish the budget until January.

But this is the place where they've identified, here's what we believe we need to accomplish these goals.

Well, then, beginning tomorrow, we have our whole staff's favorite part, which is performance evaluation time.

And we have our performance assessments.

And what we do is we call each staff person in to a very small room.

And it's bare walls and one chair.

And there's these really bright lights that shine on them.

We, cameras are recording everything that they say.

And we ask them, give me one reason why you should be on the staff here at St. Luke's.

Help me understand.

No, we don't, none of that.

It's not like that at all.

Actually, we do say, what were your goals last year and how are you doing on those? Hopefully you've been talking about those all through the year.

But, you know, there's sort of a how we done on that.

But most of it, and the part I think we all enjoy the most and lean into the most is what is it you believe God wants you to do in the year ahead? Like, what are you going to do with your time and your energy? What are your personal goals that can support your team's goals? And what usually happens is the staff person comes in with about 629 things that they want to accomplish.

And they are fully, I mean, they really believe they want to do these things.

The truth is then our job is to say, so just tell us like which are the most important.

Let's kind of get this in order and identify what are the things that really matter to you personally that will move the needle on the mission of St. Luke's mission of equipping the family of God to live and love like Jesus.