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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the transformative power of seeking various perspectives in ministry leadership and decision-making. He shares practical strategies for gathering input and unpacks seven key advantages of group decision-making. Through personal anecdotes and biblical examples, Iorg emphasizes that while everyone should get their say, not everyone gets their way—ultimately, it’s about making the best decision possible and leading with courage and unity.
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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. That's what we do on this podcast. We talk about the everyday work of ministry leadership. And today, I wanna talk about the power of a variety of perspectives in decision making or a variety of views in the decision making process.
Jeff Iorg:Now, this has been a real growth point for me over the years because when I started out in ministry, was too much of a solo leader, really felt like it all depended on me, and frankly, didn't want a lot of other people knowing what I was thinking or what I was proposing because I, let's be arrogant about it, didn't want anyone to mess up my brilliant ideas. But over the years, I grew to understand that good decision making depends on having a variety of perspectives or variety of views expressed early in the process so they can help shape the decisions to be the best decisions possible. Now, this idea of a variety of views actually is modeled for us very beautifully in the New Testament. There are four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and they each one tell the same story of Jesus, but they each one tell a different story at the same time. Each of the gospel writers has a perspective, a point of view, a way of seeing the world.
Jeff Iorg:They each one have a context in which they're writing and an audience that they're addressing. They each one come to the process of writing their gospel with their own background, their own prejudices, their own opinions, their their own life situation, if you will. And so because of that, we have four gospels which brought together create a beautiful and powerful picture of the life of Jesus Christ. So even in the gospels, there is this modeling of the importance of different perspectives or different viewpoints in decision making. Now, I wrote about this in my book on leading major change in your ministry.
Jeff Iorg:Let me just read just a bit of what I wrote in that context. I said the best decisions in both quality and timing almost always coincide with a leadership team becoming unified. When this happens, for example, at the seminary, we propose better options, we have fewer questions from our board, and we have less opposition from our constituents. When we communicate unified decisions, it increases our confidence, which becomes contagious, and diminishes anxiety about publishing the decision since there are far fewer unanticipated questions when this healthy process has been followed. And then I continued, group decisions promote wisdom.
Jeff Iorg:Proverbs nineteen twenty, listen to advice and accept instruction that you may gain wisdom in the future. Group decisions lead to success. Proverbs fifteen twenty two, plans fail when there is no counsel, but with many advisers, they succeed. Paul usually traveled with a team and often wrote using the pronouns we are us, not just as a literary device, but as a statement of collective leadership, for example, in second Corinthians one six through 10, or in first Corinthians four one. In most cases where elders or apostles are mentioned in the New Testament, they are mentioned in the plural, focusing more on their group identity than their individual office.
Jeff Iorg:Learning to lead with colleagues accelerates leadership influence, improves decision making, and makes it possible to lead more effectively. With that in mind, I wanna talk with you about seven different ways that having a variety of perspectives or a variety of views expressed in your leadership process can lead you to better decisions. Now, when I talk about getting a variety of views, I wanna mention it that you can do that in at least three different ways. And I do these three regularly. Number one, you can seek out these views in one on one conversations, where you actually sit down with someone and say, here's what I'm thinking, or here's a direction I'm considering, or here's a problem I'm trying to solve.
Jeff Iorg:Give me your input on it. Give me your viewpoint. Help me understand your perspective. And in these one on one conversations, I'm able to have dialogue and ask probing questions and really think through and investigate what some different ways of looking at the situation might be. And then a second thing I do is, of course, I use meetings where I have people in a room talking about a problem or a situation or an opportunity, and I have the privilege of laying out some of my thoughts and listening to their thoughts.
Jeff Iorg:And in the context of the meeting, we're able to have a group opportunity to give input about a particular issue. And then a third one that I use is asking people to read things that I've written. Now, my work involves writing blogs, columns, articles, and speeches, and other kinds of public presentations. And so I often find myself sending those out to two or three trusted people and saying, would you read this and give me your honest feedback? I'm not asking for a hard edit.
Jeff Iorg:I'm not asking for them to tell me what to say. I'm asking for them to give me feedback on what I've written and what it means and how they perceive what I'm trying
Jeff Iorg:to communicate. And when I
Jeff Iorg:have done this over the years, it has been remarkably helpful to me, so much so that I I don't think I really publish anything anymore that I haven't had a couple of three people look at to just give me their input about it. You know, when you do this, in writing, it gives people opportunity to evaluate your words, but also your tone and your audience, and really think through the perspective of what you're trying
Jeff Iorg:to communicate, and give you feedback on that, from their perspective.
Jeff Iorg:This is so helpful to me. I recently went through an exercise where I wrote a couple of things and I sent them out to a trusted confidant and said, Would you read through these and just give me your perspective back? And he did. He said, you know, I think most of what you're saying is right, but I think this is gonna be inflammatory. I think this is needlessly confrontational.
Jeff Iorg:I I think this isn't strong enough. It needs to the case needs to be made a little better. When I read through his comments in light of what I'd written, I thought, man, why didn't I see that? I mean, he's exactly right. He also made a couple of other comments that I had to say, you know, I just don't necessarily agree with those, so I'm gonna go with what I think about those because I I I am writing, after all, my speech or my paper.
Jeff Iorg:So I wanna emphasize that when I send out for input, I I don't have to use everything I get, but I do take it all very seriously, and it's improved what I do tremendously. So when I talk about getting different perspectives or different viewpoints, I'm talking about doing it either one on one interactions or talking about doing it in small group meetings, like with your elders or your deacons, or in my case, a staff or maybe the officers of the executive committee or in my past service, the officers of the board of the seminary. And then last of all, using it to send out to small groups of people, even in things that you're writing, so that you can get feedback on those kinds of things as well. So having said all that, a biblical example being the gospels and some practical ways we can do this through one on one conversations, small group meetings, and even asking a group of people to edit or read things that we're thinking about putting into print, let me now give you seven advantages of making decisions from a group perspective or with group input or with a viewpoint that may be different than just the one that you bring to the table.
Jeff Iorg:The first advantage is a decision with multiple perspectives or viewpoints creates more ideas than any one person can produce. Now, I'm a pretty active thinker, and I've got a pretty fertile imagination, and I can come up with a lot of ideas. But I've always been amazed that no matter how many ideas I have about something, when I walk into a situation and ask for input, there'll always be new ideas that I've not thought of before. Now, that doesn't mean that all the new ideas are good. Doesn't mean that all the new ideas are things that we
Jeff Iorg:have to use. But at this point, all I'm trying
Jeff Iorg:to do in decision making by seeking out other viewpoints and other other perspectives is to generate ideas. And a group of people can always generate more ideas than any one person can produce. I actually had one person that I worked with a few years ago who may have been the single most creative person I've ever been around. When I would have a particularly taxing problem, I would often go to this person and say, Here's the problem. Just give me every possible solution you could think of.
Jeff Iorg:I remember one time I went down to his office and said, Hey, look. I've got a problem, and I want to lay it out for you, and then I just want you to just brainstorm ideas for me and just make a list. He's like, Okay.
Jeff Iorg:So I told him
Jeff Iorg:my problem, he said, me a few minutes and let me think about it, and I'll bring you
Jeff Iorg:some ideas. I'm like, Okay. So I don't know, about
Jeff Iorg:an hour later, he comes up and he hands me a piece of paper with 10 ideas on it about how to solve my problem.
Jeff Iorg:10. Now I read through
Jeff Iorg:the 10, and most of them I thought, no, no, that's crazy. That'll never work. Then I got down to about number seven, I read this idea,
Jeff Iorg:I thought, wow, Why didn't I think of that? Man. Yes. So
Jeff Iorg:that's what I'm talking about when I say that one person can create ideas, two people can create even more, and super creative people can create a whole list of ideas. Now, the beautiful thing about this part of decision making is you're not really looking for the solution yet. You're just looking for the possibilities. Oftentimes, by seeking new perspective and new viewpoint, you generate a whole list of possibilities and ideas that you never had before and that maybe you won't even use all of, but it does expand your thinking into ways that you never had considered before. Well, here's another value.
Jeff Iorg:A value of different perspectives and viewpoints in decision making is that it helps edit out the bad ideas and keep them from doing harm. Edit out the bad ideas. Especially when I've come up with what I thought was a really good idea, or even when two or three of us have come up with a really good idea, it's been amazing how a group with their perspective can hear that idea and edit it out before we do it and make a bad decision. Let me give you a couple of illustrations about this. One of them, hopefully, you'll find kind of funny.
Jeff Iorg:The other one, a little more serious. Back when we were relocating Gateway Seminary and changing the name from Golden Gate to Gateway, one of the big decisions we had to make very early in the process was establishing a new domain name so that we could begin to build out our website and also begin to build out our email system and our servers and all the things that went along with transitioning from Golden Gate to Gateway. I gave this a lot of thought. And I went into a leadership meeting with five or six guys to talk about this issue, and I was really excited because I knew the domain name we should choose. So I go into the meeting and I said, all right, here's my idea.
Jeff Iorg:We want something that's catchy, something that really gets people's attention, something that has like some double or triple levels of meaning to it. So here's what I propose. I think we should be thegate.edu.
Jeff Iorg:There was stone cold silence as everyone just sort of stared at me, so I doubled down.
Jeff Iorg:I said, No, listen. This is a great idea. The gate. Do you get it? We're we're gonna be the gate for people to enter electronically into our world.
Jeff Iorg:We're gonna be the gate for people to enter into the educational experience of their lifetime. We're gonna be the gate. And still the team just sat there looking at me blank faced, just shaking their heads. I realized they're not liking this.
Jeff Iorg:I said, Listen, don't you
Jeff Iorg:guys think this is a great idea? One of the vice presidents said, Well,
Jeff Iorg:Jeff, it would be a good idea if you were naming a junior high youth group.
Jeff Iorg:The whole room just broke up laughing, except, of course, me. I'm thinking,
Jeff Iorg:What are you talking about? Junior high youth group. He said, yeah. The gate. Sounds like a junior high youth group.
Jeff Iorg:We're a graduate school. We're not
Jeff Iorg:the gate. I looked over at my other vice president who was for over academics, very methodical, very brilliant, very academic, very focused, and he's just looking at me with a smile on his face.
Jeff Iorg:He said, Jeff, it's gs.edu, gatewayseminary Edu. That's our domain name. I said, That
Jeff Iorg:is so boring. He said, Exactly. I looked around the room, and everyone was nodding their head like, Yeah, exactly. We're going with gs.edu. That's gatewayseminary.edu.
Jeff Iorg:Well, that's what we
Jeff Iorg:chose, and man, was that a good decision. The gate got edited out and in a funny way, a junior high youth group. Well, same group of
Jeff Iorg:guys we're meeting a few weeks later about another but much more important issue. We were talking about what we were gonna do about housing people who moved to Southern California. And we were coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas about going down to Southern California and buying a bunch of houses and then reselling them to people or buying a community of houses or maybe finding a place where we were building new houses and trying to buy them. We were trying all these different ways to think of to make it easier for people to move and relocate and go through the trauma of all that we were doing in moving to seminary. Another vice president wasn't saying much, and finally he said, Guys, just stop.
Jeff Iorg:Then he said, We're not buying any houses, and we're not gonna try to tell people where to live, and we're not gonna try to micromanage the move process for individual families. And then he made this very insightful statement. He said, you are all going to be surprised at where people choose to live, the kind of houses they choose to live in, and the factors they use to make those decisions. And we can't manage that for people. They've got to make it on their own.
Jeff Iorg:Friends, that's exactly what we wound up doing, and it was the right decision. All those ideas we had about buying houses, building a community, controlling the outcomes, telling people where to live, all of that was blown up because as we shared different perspectives and then finally heard one that made the most sense, we were able to edit out a lot of bad ideas and keep them from doing harm. You know, I could give you example after example after example of when I have proposed a good idea, so so called, or when other people have brought ideas to the table, but through the dialogue, the conversation, the offering of different viewpoints and perspectives, we were able to prevent a situation that would have done more harm than good. As I said, I could give you so many illustrations of this. I've had one even since I've been here at the executive committee where something was proposed at the Southern Baptist Convention.
Jeff Iorg:When I heard the proposal, I thought, that sounds pretty good to me, actually. It got referred to the executive committee. We brought it back here. In the very first meeting where we had the team assembled to talk about this particular issue, a person raised one thing right at the beginning of the meeting, and we all looked at
Jeff Iorg:him and said, wow. There's no way we can do this. Because what he raised, none of us
Jeff Iorg:in the room had thought of, but because of his background and his perspective and his training, he knew to ask the question, and it caused us to see this problem or this really situation from a fresh perspective and know that we could never go down that path. We edited out some bad ideas that would have done real harm because we heard different perspectives. So creates more ideas than any one person can produce and edits out bad ideas and keeps them from doing harm. Here's the third advantage of getting multiple perspectives or viewpoints on a decision, and that is it can turn good ideas into great ideas. There have been so many times in meetings where someone in the room has proposed an idea or even I've proposed an idea, and someone else or sometimes I will say, well, that's a good idea, but what if we took that and then did this as well?
Jeff Iorg:That good idea then gets turned into a great idea. That happens when you have different viewpoints because you begin to share ideas, and then those ideas produce more conversation, more discussion, more opportunity for insight. And someone says, well, that's a good idea. What if we went to this level and made it a great idea? So a third way that different perspectives and viewpoints help is that they turn good ideas into great ideas.
Jeff Iorg:And then a fourth advantage is that objections from leaders in a small group context where ideas are being discussed and possibilities are being dreamed, objections in that context are usually the same as will be heard later in public venues when the idea is rolled out. And so getting various perspectives and viewpoints early on in the process helps us not only to shape a better decision, but to understand the kinds of questions that will be raised about that decision, the opposition we may face when the decision is announced, and the kinds of responses that we can practice even in our decision making process that we'll be able to give when we get into the larger context of explaining the decision that has been reached. Now, it's very common when you're looking at a decision or an opportunity or an issue with different perspectives and different viewpoints to have a lot
Jeff Iorg:of debate about it,
Jeff Iorg:to raise questions, concerns, issues, opposition, and learning how to answer those, deal with them, explain them doesn't necessarily mean you can't make a decision or make any particular decision because there's some kind of opposition to it. It just means that in the process of getting to that decision, you've surfaced the kinds of issues you need to address and the kind of questions you're gonna have to answer and even the kind of opposition you're gonna have to deal with as a part of the decision making process so you're better equipped to handle it when it comes up. I know many times, many times, I will announce a decision or a recommendation, and someone will say, Well, yeah, but the problem with that is, and I will be able to legitimately say, You know, you're raising a very good point. It's one that we discussed as we were coming to this decision, and here's how we addressed it and why we still think this is the best way to go. Being able to address things in that context, you're able to do it more effectively because you've already addressed it in the context of the decision making process itself.
Jeff Iorg:So these objections that arise in the process itself are commonly the objections discussion or the issues or the questions that will come up later, and you'll be better equipped to solve them when you've heard from different perspectives and different viewpoints along the way. A fifth advantage of getting various viewpoints and various perspectives on a decision is that a group decision has greater gravitas or greater weight than a decision made by an individual. So for example, when I stand up and say, the president says this, or I say this, well, that carries some weight with it, certainly. But if I'm able to stand up and say, when I was at the seminary, for example, you know, this particular issue has come before us, and the faculty have agreed to this solution, and the board of trustees has agreed to this solution. And now I'm here today explaining the solution to you and helping you understand why we made this decision.
Jeff Iorg:Person sitting there listening says, wow. The faculty is in agreement with this. The board is in agreement with this. That's a lot of really smart, capable, spiritual minded people, so I'm probably gonna be for this too. That's what goes through the minds of people as they hear that a decision has been made more than just by an individual.
Jeff Iorg:Same way in your church context. You're able to stand up and say, over the past few months, the elders have been considering various perspectives on this problem, and we've come to this conclusion, and we'd like to announce it to you this morning. Well, people are still gonna have questions and perhaps some concerns, maybe even some lingering opposition, but they will more likely accept the decision because of the weight that comes with knowing that it was a group decision, that your deacons or your elders, that some group have processed through this decision, come to come together around it, and now are announcing it to you as more than just the decision of one person. So a group decision, if it's by a board or by a staff or by a team or by a faculty, a group decision has greater gravitas, greater weight, carries with it a little bit more authority, if you will, than just that one one made by an individual.
Jeff Iorg:Now, a sixth
Jeff Iorg:good advantage of different viewpoints and different perspectives on a problem or problem solving or decision making is probably the hardest one of
Jeff Iorg:these for me to talk about, and that is this kind of process often keeps a decision on God's timetable. Now, I like to go fast. I don't like to wait. I don't like to wait on anything or anybody, and
Jeff Iorg:I don't like to be bogged down in slow decision making. I want my organization that I lead to be able to move and move fairly quickly. What I've learned over the years is that when I bring up a problem or bring up an issue or bring up something that needs input and the group starts working on it, that oftentimes the process itself slows us down and gets us in step with God's timing on the issue so that we have more time to process, to pray, to think and talk, more time for the leaders to embrace an idea or to own a decision. And because that sometimes even takes months, it can be very frustrating to a leader who likes to simply get moving. What I've learned over the years is that sometimes my zeal or haste leads to bad
Jeff Iorg:decisions. And on many occasions,
Jeff Iorg:God has slowed my process enough to get me and the organization I'm trying to lead on the same timetable so that we can make the best decision at the best time
Jeff Iorg:and move forward together. I'd go back
Jeff Iorg:to an old illustration about this. When I was in my very first church, I saw very early on that our church needed to relocate. Now, even I had the good sense as a young pastor not to propose that too quickly, but the church started growing, and as it grew, it became very evident that we had to have more space. We kept trying different options, different ideas, different possibilities, and finally, we exhausted all of those. This was a multiyear process.
Jeff Iorg:Somewhere along the way, I mentioned, you know, if we can't keep building or keep expanding or keep having more services, we're gonna need to think about a bigger building on a different location. The first time I proposed that, to say the least, it was not well received.
Jeff Iorg:But after we worked on it for a while and people had time to voice their concerns, raise their objections, think through the other possibilities, eliminate options, and finally come to a decision. When our deacons finally came to that decision that the church really did need to relocate,
Jeff Iorg:It was a unified decision with no coercion and high level of ownership, and even the senior leaders were saying, this is the direction we need to go. And when I stood up and announced that to the church, the response, while there were many concerns, was still overwhelmingly positive because we had stayed on God's timetable, worked together as a group, and finally come to the place where we had real unity about it, and that gave the sense that we were really onto the right decision and people were willing to embrace it more rapidly
Jeff Iorg:from that moment forward. Well, number
Jeff Iorg:seven. The last thing that a group of people bring different perspectives or viewpoints to decision making helps with is it enhances objectivity. One of the hardest things for me to admit is that I'm not always objective about people that I care a lot about. When I start making decisions about them, my judgment can be skewed. I had this happen to me once when I was at the seminary.
Jeff Iorg:I had a person there that had been my friend before I became president, and so after I became president, obviously, our friendship was even deepened. But there came a point where I had to
Jeff Iorg:make some really hard decisions about this person's employment, and frankly, I was making some bad ones. And one of our other leaders, vice presidents, had to say to me, Jeff, you you've gotta see this with more objectivity. Here's the situation as it really is. And, ultimately, I was willing
Jeff Iorg:to listen to that counsel and made a different set of decisions than I had originally been planning to make. And looking back on it, I realize now that I made the right decisions when I listened to the person who had more objectivity, whose relationship wasn't perhaps as colored by the friendship that I'd had for the years. You know, I have had to be careful about this with people that I care about, like my children,
Jeff Iorg:my grandchildren. I'm not very objective about them.
Jeff Iorg:So oftentimes they'll call me and they'll say, hey, dad, I wanna ask you about something, and I'll listen and we'll talk. And then I'll say, have you talked to your pastor about this, or have you talked to somebody? And I'll maybe mention a couple of mentors that I know each one of them have, because you really need to get some outside perspective on this before you go forward. You know, perspective viewpoint enhances objectivity. We sometimes need to hear from someone who's not really as enmeshed in the situation emotionally as we are.
Jeff Iorg:So I've talked today about different perspectives or viewpoints and the importance of them. The gospels illustrate it. Various aspects of the Bible describe it. I'm particularly interested in you developing the discipline of having different viewpoints or perspectives in decision making, so that when you have an issue or an opportunity or a possibility or even an idea that you have some different people look at it with you, that you have some different perspective on it before you come to a final decision. And I've given you seven good reasons today why it's valuable to have different perspectives, different viewpoints in decision making.
Jeff Iorg:But let me wrap it up with a couple of thoughts. Just because you seek out other viewpoints and look for different perspectives, you still have to make the decision, And you still have to lead your organization to embrace a decision, and you have to keep moving forward. I'm not talking today about perpetual conversation that never goes anywhere. I'm talking about being honestly open to different viewpoints and perspectives so that you make the best decision possible, but that you still make decisions. And then second, to quote one of my best friends at the seminary, he used to say frequently, in our decision making process, everyone should get their say, but not everyone gets their way.
Jeff Iorg:And I would say the same thing to you today. This process is about giving people their say. It's about really listening to what they have to say, but it doesn't mean that everyone gets their way. Getting different perspectives and viewpoints doesn't mean you dumb down the decision to the lowest common denominator to please everybody in the room. That's not what this means.
Jeff Iorg:What it means is you honestly take seriously what other people are saying and then you come to the best decision possible to facilitate the mission to accomplish what God has led you to do and you move forward with it. So not everyone gets their way just because you are eagerly asking everyone to have their say. Well, today we've talked about the importance of different perspectives and viewpoints on decision making. Don't go it alone. Surround yourself with a team, surround yourself with some good people, surround yourself with some mentors, surround yourself with some counselors or consultants, people around you who can give you input, and then have the courage to make the decisions and to make the boldest decisions you possibly can make to move your ministry and your organization forward.
Jeff Iorg:Getting more perspectives and more viewpoints will help you to make better decisions, but it doesn't make the decisions for you or alleviate your responsibility to step up and do what you have to do as the leader. So seek more viewpoints and perspectives as you're making good decisions to lead the organization that you're responsible for to fulfill God's mission as you lead on.