How Shall a Church Grow Its Own Leaders?

Ask any gathering of church staff what their #1 concern is, and the answer invariably sounds something like this:

How do I get more leaders to help in our church?

I've written about it before, but it's a question that keeps coming up. Interestingly enough, it's a question with a lot of history behind it, too.

The question is not just for today's fast-paced, multiple-ministry churches. It was also being asked back in the 1920s-30s. Gaines S. Dobbins, professor of religious education at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote the following in his book "Building Better Churches":

Varied places of leadership in the church call for a variety of leaders. In the main, types of leadership may be classified in four divisions:

• Promotional - a church has nothing to sell, yet it has that which it would commend to the people, a message and a service of supreme value. Someone must take the lead in promoting publicity, attendance, special activities, service, and good will.
• Administrative - a church needs men and women whose aptitudes and special training fit them to take the leadership in carrying out plans which have been made and approved. Such people know how to organize, systematize, routinize, delegate responsibility, prevent failure through wise counsel, check up on results, and utilize experience in making one effort contribute to the success of the next effort.
• Educational - leaders do not succeed by magic - they must be given continuous training and supervision. Churches need a combination of directors, teachers, sponsors, assistants, trainers, and counselors to fulfil the complex education program of a modern church.
• Inspirational - these leaders do not form an exclusive group, but emerge in all the other groups and from the congregation as a whole, furnishing the very breath of life to the total church body. Their spirt, zeal, devotion, loyalty, and character provide and sustain much of the motivation of the church.

Dobbins also suggests four ideas about discovering and developing leaders from within the church:

• Leaders are made as well as born
• Leaders emerge in response to need
• Leaders grow under the stimulation of study
• Leaders are inspired by confidence and appreciation

Some of the words and phrases may be a little dated, but the truths behind them are rock solid and pure gold.

If you are a leader in ChurchWorld, how are you producing other leaders?

Facing A Changing World

In researching and working on some leadership development material for an upcoming seminar, I came across the following:

Christianity is a religion of change. Jesus' call in Mark 1:15 (the kingdom of God is at hand) was a call to change - change of mind and heart, of conduct and character, of self and society. By its very nature Christianity is a religion for a changing world and has always had its greatest opportunity during times of upheaval.

The Christan leader has no option; he must face a changing world. If the leader is to render maximum service, he must both adjust himself to the phenomena of change and address himself passionately to the business of producing and guiding change. Here are some elements that constitute the changed world in which the Christian leader today is called to fulfill his ministry.

• Changed world outlook
• Changed economic philosophy
• Changed social consciousness
• Changed family life
• Changed community conditions
• Changed moral standards
• Changed religious viewpoints
• Changed conceptions of the church
• Changed media for molding public opinion
• Changed demands made upon the leader

Pretty good list, right? Dead on. Taken from today's headlines.

Nope.

The author was Gaines S. Dobbins, distinguished professor of Religious Education at my alma mater, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville KY.

Written in 1947.

As the introduction to the book "Building Better Churches: A Guide to Pastoral Ministry."

Dr. Dobbins retired before I was born, but I had the privilege of sitting under a couple of professors who were students under Dr. Dobbins. When I came across this book in a used bookstore recently, I bought it on impulse. After flipping through it, I realized it was a treasure of leadership wisdom.

Time to go back to school...

Roll That Film

It may be soccer-crazy right now following the USA's win over Algeria, but I'm thinking football.

Let me explain.

I'm working on a leadership training event for a new church plant that is launching this fall. Their marketing campaign for the launch centers around football concepts. Borrowing the theme, I'm structuring four sessions over two days that will use the metaphor of football and its associated "team" lessons.

In the middle of this preparation drops a great article by Dan and Chip Heath (authors of "Made to Stick" and "Switch"). Published in the June issue of Fast Company magazine, it's entitled "Watch the Game Film." You really need to check out the whole article, but here's a quick summary:

• Football coaches use game film to spot things they'd never see in real time. They have an entire week to review a 60-minute game.
• In the business world, every day is game day, and leaders don't take the time to "study the film" of their activities. It's unfortunate, because studying game film can yield unexpected results.
• Doug Lemov, a consultant to school districts, utilized film of top-tier teachers in the classroom to train other teachers - resulting in raising students a grade level and a half in one year.
• It doesn't have to be film - Jump Associates, a strategy consulting firm, uses trained observers to record client meetings. After the meeting, the Jump staff hold a debriefing, modeled on the Army's after-action reviews.

What insights might your team be overlooking because no one is observing carefully enough?

Maybe it's time to press the PAUSE button and start screening some game film. There are some things you'll never see unless you look.

All Aboard!

Onboarding is the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating, and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization ("Onboarding", Bradt andVonnegut).

There's actually another "a" word that is a perquisite: align. Here's how the authors of "Onboarding" define the key processes listed above.

• Align - make sure your organization agrees on the need for a new team member and the delineating of the role you seek to fill
• Acquire - identify, recruit, select, and get people to join the team
• Accommodate - give new team members the tools they need to do the work
• Assimilate - help them join with others so they can do the work together
• Accelerate - help them and their team deliver better results faster

Now that's a list of "straight As" I will take anytime!

Though this list comes from a business book, and I'm currently making this application in my department at work, I think there are great correlations for ChurchWorld as well.

For example, if your church values your volunteer team members, then they would make sure something like the process above is a part of your volunteer leader development program. The role of bringing new volunteer leaders onboard shouldn't be an afterthought.

My church considers my role (as a leader on the guest services team at one of our campus locations) to be a volunteer staff position. I may not receive a paycheck, but the importance of my role in the total scheme of what we do is not diminished one bit.

What's it like at your church?

If the Church Had a Draft System

Even though I like sports, I have the distinction of being the third true "fan" in our family of three still at home. My wife is a bigger sports fan (especially pro and college football) than either my son or me. My son has a wider base of sports interest and knowledge, and I bring up the rear.

So it was with great anticipation that we watched the first two days of the recent NFL draft in its entirety, and checked in throughout the third day. Being Carolina Panther fans, and living through the ups and downs of recent seasons, we wondered which way the Panther's organization would go.

As the entire first round went by, and 15 selections in the second, the improbable suddenly became possible. Jimmy Clausen, the highly rated quarterback from Notre Dame, was still available. Having recently released our quaterback from the last few years, and wanting to have a backup (and potential starter) in place quickly, the Panthers chose Clausen. Most fans were excited about the choice, and it seemed a solid decision for the immediate and longer-term future of the team. All the scouting, combine results, and just plain luck fell into place and allowed the team to draft a highly talented player for a critical spot.

What if church organizations had to "draft" their leadership?

Looking for Your Next Rock Star...

... or discovering the talent within your own organization?

That's the question that Chip and Dan Heath explore in the May issue of Fast Company.

The business world is oten obsessed with "talent" - hiring it, retaining it, rewarding it. People are pursued to come and work at a certain place, with high expectations of immediate success. If you move from one place to another, the high level of performance should stay the same.

Not really.

The Heaths discuss a new book by Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg - "Chasing Stars - the Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance." By tracking a group of professionals known for the portabilty of their talent - Wall Street research analysts - Groysberg demonstrated that the top analysts who switched firms paid a steep price for the move.  Their job performance fell off sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after the move.

Based on this study, talent is not perfectly portable. Yet how often do we expect to "hire" a rock star or gunslinger to come in and make everything great from day one?

There are certainly different levels of talent in individuals, and we should recognize that. But what if there were a way to take control of increasing the talent in your organiztion?

How about growing it from within?

What if the next great talent you are looking for is already in your organization, waiting to be discovered, nurtured, challenged, and encouraged. Could that be the answer?

Creating leaders by developing them from within is a worthy goal for your organization. What steps will you take today to create a culture that actively grooms leaders internally, and moves them into areas of greater performance and responsibility?

Great Adventure Road Show

Today I am taking part in the National Church Purchasing Group's "Great Adventure Road Show." The NCPG is hosting the event in 19 cities across the country, bringing tons of great information to churches and their leaders.

Charlotte is their third stop, and the event is being held at Huntersville UMC, one of our recent projects. I will be manning the JH Batten exhibit and making a presentation during one of the breakout sessions.

My assigned topic - "Creating Leaders" - is part of an ongoing leadership development series that I am continually updating. Last year, I wrote a series of posts that I will be referring to today at the session. Take a look here to start the 5 day series.

I close with this visual to remind us of potential leaders:

Ph.D in Leadership

from Dee Hock, founder of Visa:

Here's a short course for a Ph.D in leadership: Make a short list of all things done to you that abhorred. Don't do them to others. Ever.

Make another list things done to you that you loved.

Do them to others.

Always.

Skills to Make the Future, Part 2

It's a VUCA world out there, according to Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future. We live in a time of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity - and it will only continue to increase in the future.

In his recent book "Leaders Make the Future", Johansen lists 10 new skills that leaders need to develop in order to help make the future. I listed the first five yesterday; here are the final five.

• Constructive Depolarizing - the ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down - and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.
• Quiet Transparency - the ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you - without advertising yourself.
• Rapid Prototyping - the ability to create quick early versions of new innovations, with the expectations that later success will require early failure.
• Smart Mob Organizing - the ability to bring together, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social-change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.
• Commons Creating - the ability to stimulate, grow, and nurture shared assets that can benefit other players - and allow competition at a higher level.

Nobody can predict the future, but the four-decade long track record of forecasts of Johansen and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future are plausible and consistent views of what might happen. I found the book (and additional research of the Institute) to be a fascinating journey into a new land of leadership skills - one that all leaders need to be making.

Johansen wrote the following in his introduction: The space between judging too soon (the classic mistake of problem solvers) and deciding too late (the classic mistake of academics) is a space leaders of the future must love - without staying there too long. Leaders need to reflect on the future, but they must also make decisions in the present.

Where do you find yourself in that continuum? Do you want to be somewhere else?

Then create your own future!

Skills to Make the Future, Part 1

It's a whole new world out there - and it's changing more rapidly than ever. The dilemma we confront, the workforces we lead, the technologies we use, and our organizational lives will continue to change sharply in the decade ahead.

Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow with the Institute for the Future, has written a fascinating book on the development of a new set of new skills that are uniquely suited to the "threshold" decade ahead. It's called "Leaders Make the Future". Here is a summary of the first five skills; the remainder will come tomorrow.

• Maker Instinct - the ability to turn one's natural impulse to build into a skill for making the future and connecting with others in the making. The maker instinct is basic to leadership in the future.
• Clarity - the ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot yet see. Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how they get it made.
• Dilemma Flipping - the ability to turn dilemmas - which, unlike problems, cannot be solved - into advantages and opportunities.
• Immersive Learning Ability - the ability to dive into different-for-you physical and online worlds, to learn from them in a first person way.
• Bio-empathy - the ability to see things from nature's point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from nature's patterns. Nature has its own clarity, if only we humans can understand and engage with it.

Johansen places the development of theses skills in what he labels the VUCA world: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It's a world that has both danger and opportunity, and one that requires learning new skills in order to make a better future.

Can you find room in your busy schedule to learn these new skills?

Capacity

Is your glass half-empty – or half-full? That tricky question has been around for a long time, and countless jokes and other comments have been made about it over the years. Rather than focus on the current state of the glass, what if we instead focused on its capacity?

The definitions of capacity are many and all are useful for this brief thought: Are we living up to the capacity God designed into us?

• Do we have the ability to perform or produce something that will honor God?


• Are we always doing the maximum amount of activity possible for God?


• Do we understand a specific function that God has gifted us for?


• Are we exercising our brains to increase the ability to store information for Kingdom purposes?


• Do we have the power to learn and retain knowledge that will help us understand the facts and significance of our behavior?


• Are we a vessel, continually being filled up, and then emptied out, for His service?
  
  

My initial thoughts about capacity always go to the last definition: What’s my capacity for receiving the gifts and blessings of the Holy Spirit? If I continually only receive, then eventually I am satiated, and can receive no more. But if I am continually pouring out, then there is always room for God to invest and indwell in me.

For me, it’s the process of filling and emptying I seek – I don’t want to be satisfied with the status quo of half-empty or half-full.

Identifying Catalyzing Leaders

Following up on yesterday's post, Alan Nelson, former editor at Rev! magazine and now a leadership development consultant, says the primary reason that churches find themselves stuck is because they’ve marginalized or run off their catalyzing leaders. These are the people who have the God-given ability to sense where organizations are stuck and are able to strategize ways to move them forward. So how do you find these types of leaders? For the full article, read this post. Here's a quick look:

Here are 5 traits for identify catalyzing leaders:

1. They currently supervise at least 10 people in their work; 20 or more is even better.
2. Interview the person and listen for past experience in terms of being in charge of clubs or groups.
3. They’ve successfully established ministry teams at church. When you give a catalyzing leader a task, he or she will round up a group of people and "git r done".
4. They’re talked about when absent or are looked to when in a group.
5. Look at those in your church who get things outside of the church. Catalyzing leaders can’t not lead.

You may find one or two of these indicators in people who aren’t catalyzing leaders, but most catalyzing leaders will have at least four of them, if not all five. When you ID them positively, do your best to cast a personal vision. Better yet, find three or four of them and get them all together at one time. They’ll recognize the trait in each other and when they realize they’re not alone in the church, they’re more apt to hope things really can change. Then, turn them loose, and watch what happens.

Developing Leaders, Part Two

Use “World Class” as the Standard – the average leader is, by definition, average. Consider your leader development task as a challenge to get people to perform at a world-class level. Define what that level means for your organization, and then continually compare current levels of action with that level.

Coach and Train – coaching refers primarily to one-on-one, face-to-face, day-to-day developmental activities. Coaching improves, extends, refines, or redirects behavior where a person already has some knowledge and skill. Training refers primarily to individual or group learning activities to teach or instruct people in knowledge and skill they do not already have. Exceptional leaders use a combination of the two approaches to develop others as leaders.

Polish the Whole Diamond – your ultimate success in developing others as leaders demands that you cultivate the full range of a person’s potential. You must polish all facets of people’s potential to prepare them for any leadership possibility.

Developing Leaders

My leadership library consists of hundreds of books accumulated over the years. I use them on a regular basis, but one in particular seems appropriate for highlighting in this series of posts. Warren Blank’s The 108 Skills of Natural Born Leaders provides some very solid leadership principles that you can readily adapt to your own situation. Here are some excerpts from his chapter on leadership development.

Attract Rising Stars – Ultimately, the best leaders focus on developing everyone's leadership skills. However, they also recognizes the limits of their time and energy resources. A good place to begin your efforts to multiply yourself is by attracting the rising stars - those with raw talent and the desire to turn it into real results. Identify those who have attracted your attention as “rising stars” by using questions like these:

• - Who has already demonstrated a desire to grow?
  - Who typically steps up and tries to lead?
  - Who has directly indicated an aspiration to improve their leadership capacity?
• Identify those who rate at the the highest end of this scale. Focus your first efforts on them, then expand your rising star search into other areas within your organization.
  
• Focus on attracting those with potential as opposed to only focusing on those with experience. Use a personal touch in talking with them about becoming a leader.

Skillful leaders apply their developmental effort where it can do the most good in the fastest manner possible.

Have you been doing any "star gazing" lately?

What is a Leader, Anyway?

The answer to that question would fill the pages of this post many times over – and many more! Noted church leaders from John Maxwell to Andy Stanley to Bill Hybels all have their definition of leadership. They are all good, and should be a part of your understanding on this journey. But to me, leadership is simple: If no one is following, you are not leading! While you may find that simplistic, it illustrates the foundational truth of leadership: you have to have those qualities, skills, and influence for others to believe in you and the direction you are going. Under this definition, I believe that many, but not all, people on your team could become a leader in their own right.

Solving the Leadership Shortage

The United States generates more energy than any other country in the world – and wastes more than half of it. Rather than focusing on inventing new sources of energy, there is a growing trend to concentrate on a vast source of existing energy – by increasing the efficiency of current operations.

Church leader, sit up and take notice: what works in the business world can provide help in your world too. Your “leadership engine” is probably not working as well as you would like. If your church is like most churches, you are always looking for more leaders. How about looking right under your nose: your next, and best, leaders are probably already working in a ministry at your church. All you need to do is become more “efficient” at discovering and then transitioning these individuals into ministry leaders.


Transitioning a Volunteer into a Leader
The word “leader” and any derivative of it are sure to capture the attention of those responsible for the vision, direction, and operation of the church. Pastors especially are always looking for the latest help in providing more resources to help guide the ministries of their churches. Even the smallest church needs many leaders to effectively minister to their members and the community.

How does a leader go about developing other leaders? There is certainly no shortage of books, conferences, and courses on the subject. Web resources also provide a wealth of information for the leader interested in setting up such a program.

In over 30 years in church leadership experience (as a volunteer, leader, staff member, and consultant) I would suggest three starting points:

• Not everyone on your team will, or should be a leader
• Develop resources from your own experience to begin to develop others
• Always look to the Scriptures for guidance

This week I want to invite you to spend some time looking at leadership development from a new perspective: developing the leaders who are already in your church.