Over-Communicating In an Age of Distrust

The moment you are tired of saying it is the exact moment your stakeholders are first hearing it

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

The first church I pastored was a small, revitalizing effort. I loved that church so much. I was a young leader and those wonderful saints had so much patience and gave me space to grow as a pastor, as a leader, and as a man. So much of what I know about leadership I learned in that experience.

One thing I’ve come to believe is that organizations have to over-communicate. There’s a quote, attributed (at least on the Internet which, of course, is never wrong about the source of quotes) to Jeff Weiner, a former LinkedIn executive. He says, “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”

One of the early initiatives I did at my first church was to start a summer soccer camp to reach the community. Our facilities were small but we had a pretty big field. Our neighborhood was filled with a lot of parents and young kids. This was a way of telling our community that we were here, we cared about them, and they might check out our church on Sundays. A soccer camp seems simple, but for our little congregation, it might as well have been the summer Olympics.