Evaluation: Some Basic Principles

Ian Evison, Congregational Services Director, Central Midwest Unitarian Universalist Association

Formerly the Research Director at the Alban Institute, and a founder of the Congregational Resource Guide, Ian Evison now serves as the Congregational Services Director at the Central Midwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Ian offers the following key points to remember when approaching the evaluations of congregations and their leaders. A fuller discussion of these points, as well as some additional resources, are available through Ian's blog on this topic.

In my view, there is a pretty strong consensus across denominations about what the basics of good evaluation should be.

A little playing on the Web came up with a very good summary—four pages. And really the last two pages of the four are the crucial ones. The "Ten Principles of Pastor Evaluations" (from the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church) represent the core of present wisdom on the subject. While some principles may not apply directly across all denominations, much of this material does apply.

Those who wish to begin doing evaluations might meet with the appropriate leadership group and read aloud and discuss point by point these principles or my interpretation of them (below). These basic principles are what underlie the 80 pages of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) version—so, UUs who want elaboration on how you might do the things suggested in a UU context can then go to Assessing Our Leadership and Congregational Self-Assessment.

My redaction of these principles is as follows:

• Evaluate the minister in the context of the whole congregation's ministry. Evaluate the minister only within the larger context of an evaluation of the whole ministry of the congregation. When the minister (or ministers) is evaluated but the whole ministry is not, it invites the unstated and untrue assumption that the minister is responsible for everything that happens in the congregation. This ends up blaming the minister for all the congregation's weaknesses and praising her or him for all its strengths. Ministers don't need to be invited to see themselves as the center of the universe in this way!



• Evaluate against goals. Evaluate in the context of the congregation's goals for the year and the mission of the congregation. Evaluations that fail to evaluate against overall goals of the congregation and the minister's role in achieving those turn into beauty contests. Evaluations that ask how well people liked this or that (rated on a one to five scale), push ministers to please people and avoid offending people — and away from focus on achieving mission.



• Do not tie directly to determining compensation. Do not, do not directly link evaluation to compensation. While, in the business world, it is popular at present to find ways to link these directly by having evaluation be an immediate prelude to compensation discussions, it is far better in congregational life to separate the two in the year — perhaps with one in the spring and one in the fall.



• Collaborate. This should be a collaborative process. Agree in advance on what will be evaluated and how. This avoids a lot of misunderstandings.



• Take the time this needs. Evaluation done well takes time and attention — lots of intentionality and good discussion. Another reason to do evaluations at a part of the year that is a long way from the compensation determination and budget building process is to ensure that evaluation is not rushed. Evaluation is communication and good communication takes quality time.



• Agree what use will be made of the evaluation. Agree, in advance, on what will happen to the results of the evaluation: Who will receive them and what use will these people make of them? The single greatest failing of evaluative processes in congregations is that they are introduced as a means of dealing with emerging conflict or disagreement. The proper response to emerging conflict is conflict resolution, not an evaluation process. Evaluation not only tends to fail as a conflict management strategy. It also tends to undermine the institutionalization of evaluation in the life of the congregation. Use evaluation as a conflict management tool and you teach that it only should be and only needs to be used when there is conflict.



• Strengths and weaknesses. Focus on both strengths and weaknesses. No congregation was ever made great by a process of focusing on and eliminating weaknesses. Likewise ministers.



• No anonymous feedback. Build agreement in the congregation in advance that anonymous feedback has no role in the process. Evaluation processes are one of the key ways in a congregation that good communication is taught and learned. Good communication needs to be open, honest, and direct. The gain to the congregation and to the process of communicating in this way far outweighs anything that is lost by leaving anonymous comments out of the process.



• Less is more. For most of us, it is very easy to lists or our weaknesses, and fairly easy to list our strengths. The challenge is to choose the one or two improvements we might make that would be both most possible and salutary. Likewise on the side of strengths: which among any person's strengths is it most important to develop at any given time? An evaluation process is generally most helpful, not in its listing of strengths and weaknesses but in its collaborative discernment of where to focus attention. The committee that facilitates the evaluation process must have the courage to say that some feedback should not be given attention.



• Do it yearly. Most congregations at some point have done evaluations. Their failure is often in institutionalizing it into a yearly process. The last act in an evaluation process should be to put next year's evaluation on the calendar.



• Keep it simple. With all due respect to our 80-odd pages of UU documents on evaluation, committees charged with devising an evaluation process often devise processes that are complex enough that it pretty much assures that they will not be repeated. An evaluation process needs to be simple enough that it can be continued even in those years when other things must have higher priority. This advice may seem to contradict the advice to take the time it needs. It need not. Simplifying the process can also open space for better quality conversation.

Hope this helps.

For additional resources on evaluation, check out the "Evaluation" section of the Congregational Resource Guide!