Lots of churches run leadership development programmes of one sort or another, but is that a good idea?
I used to operate graduate development programmes for Rolls-Royce, while there I was involved with redesigning the early career leadership development programme which was at the time award-winning and worked across eleven different countries. It’s been seven years since I was there so I’m sure things have changed, but I mention that to credential myself a little: I know what the best the business world has to offer is when it comes to developing leaders.
Most churches I know in the evangelical-charismatic space run some of ‘leadership development’ programme. We all want more leaders, so you try to do something about it. Some of these look pretty good, most of them are—if I’m absolutely honest—incredibly naïve. Not in the sense that the people designing and delivering them aren’t well meaning or that they don’t have some genuinely good information to deliver, but that they’re unfocused and won’t yield the results they want. When they work it’s incidentally, and when they don’t it’s by design.
The problem is that most pastors, who design these things, don’t know how training works. We tend to settle for information transfer, which isn’t development and would often be better delivered in a book.
I could go on, but for the sake of brevity, what should we be doing instead? Here are my seven basic leadership development principles to start you off.
1. Don’t run a course
It’s tempting to run a course, that feels like the way to get some more ‘leaders’. Don’t. Seriously, stop it. Put the pen down.
It won’t help you, as I’m hoping the rest of the principles open up, you’re stuck in the ‘information transfer’ paradigm, and often the tail (how often you can gather people and for how long) wags the dog of what you actually deliver.
2. Do design a programme
You want to develop people, not impart information, so you don’t need a training course—though this can be part of the picture you slot it in last once you know what training is needed. You develop people primarily through experience, secondarily through coaching and feedback, and then lastly through formal training.
What you want to do is create ways for the people you want to develop to lead the things that need leading so they learn by doing it, coach them through that, and give them feedback afterwards. Then repeat that loop multiple times. There is no point putting people on a course to ‘learn’ to do something you don’t actually have opportunities to give them to do.
Occasionally you might need to do some practice in a ‘dry’ environment before being let loose in the real world—preaching is a great example of this—but even then it’s the experience that we’re aiming at, and your dry environment should involve some experience.
3. Generic leaders don’t exist
To come from another angle, I think leadership development courses usually assume that it’s possible to train people in ‘generic leadership.’ In the business world this is true, I am not convinced it is in the church.
There are of course commonalities between different kinds of ‘leaders’ that could occasionally lead to the same resources or some economies of scale in terms of development. That’s great, you might run a couple of evenings once you identify these. But you aren’t trying to make leaders you’re trying to make kids work leaders or set-up team leaders or preachers or pastors or elders or deacons. You’re either building towards Biblical offices, or you’re talking about functional leadership that is differentiated by what you’re leading.
Of course, everyone needs to learn to delegate and to give feedback, but the primary goal if you need more kids leaders is going to be the skills needed in the room to lead teams and sessions.
4. Know what you need
Which leads me to the next point. You need to know what you need. You probably don’t need more ‘leaders.’ You need someone to lead this and to lead that. Or you have a sense that you should be developing men to be elders even if that’s in other churches (though realistically here you need those relationships to send those men—developing people for roles that don’t exist is draining and disillusioning for everyone involved).
What is it you need? Be as specific as possible, then…
5. Design something for this
Your development programme is now not generic but highly specific to your own needs. Most of it won’t look that fancy because it involves coaching these two people to have a go at doing these specific tasks. It’s much more likely to be successful.
This sort of leadership development we should all be doing all the time, who can we enable to replace us, who can we disciple to run past us, who can we pastor to be everything they can be in Jesus?
There’s also another way of looking at this, I’ve approached it from a task-perspective, but you can also think of people first. Perhaps there is no one obvious to lead that particular thing, once you’ve checked your blind spots and you’re sure about that, maybe you shouldn’t do it. Instead, who have you got? What could they do? What could you coach and encourage them into? Instead of thinking ‘what has God called us to do,’ this is attempting to think ‘who has God given us.’
6. Pray
The previous five points could be found in most leadership development manuals, these last two can’t. If you need leaders, pray for them (Matthew 9). Pray that God highlights who could do the thing that needs doing. Pray that the Lord helps you see who you should invest more time in at this particular moment—I suspect the answers will often surprise us. Pray that God changes your people to be more like Jesus.
Afterall, that’s what actually matters.
7. Character matters most
Don’t choose effective people to lead things. Choose people who look like Jesus. Even if that means your metrics won’t go as well. Even if that means it won’t be a ‘success.’ Of course we all want both, but when you find a man or woman of godly character you can do a lot with them.
We all nod to prayer and that character matters, but we don’t act like that’s true. If you think that everyone in your church has good and godly character then you should probably leave before you wreck the perfection. It’s not a tick box to move over because they haven’t committed an egregious sin. Do you know them? How do they suffer, and how do they endure? How do they do when stressed and when angry? What are their besetting sins? What are they doing about it? How do they love the Lord? How do they pray?
Of course, we aren’t looking for perfection here either. We want people that see their sin, are sorrowful, and repent. We want people who are making progress in godliness (1 Timothy 4), ideally in ways that are visible. These things really matter, and they matter more than confidence and competence.
That’s my potted attempt to outline some broad principles, most of which I hope were obvious. If you’ve got questions, do reach out as I’d love to talk (I do consultancy for churches as well if that would be useful to you), but I hope that gives you something to chew on as you’re considering how to develop leaders in your church.
Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash
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