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How to Lead and Keep “Big L” Leaders on your Team

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Great parents know that you don’t parent every kid the same way. Great leaders understand this principle, and because of it they don’t treat everyone on their team the same way. “Big L” leaders are a different breed. Not only have they been gifted with a greater leadership capacity, but they’ve worked at perfecting their craft. You can’t lead these kinds of leaders the way you lead everyone else on your team. If you do, you won’t keep them on your team. They need something different.

Leadership

This may sound obvious, but you can’t keep these kinds of leaders on your team without offering them serious leadership. They will challenge your personal leadership capacity more than any other person on your team. These kinds of team members crave a compelling and clear direction. They respond to strong leadership because they’re strong leaders. You can shoot straight with them because they’re mission focused just like you.

Empowerment

Don’t try delegating tasks to these leaders. If you do they’ll feel micromanaged and leave you. They need the position and authority to go and make real decisions and execute to objectives. Don’t tell them what to do, tell them where you’re going, and then let them lead there.

Coaching

“Big L” leaders are personally secure, and they can accept coaching. In fact, reviewing the game tape and looking for opportunities to improve the next play doesn’t bother them at all. They want to get better.

Resource

These kinds of team members need to have the resources to do their job. Don’t give them a big challenge, point them in a clear direction and give them the authority to execute without resourcing them to accomplish the vision. If you don’t resource them they won’t take you seriously.

Challenge

These kinds of leaders aren’t afraid of being challenged. They’re need something big to chase. In fact if you don’t give “Big L” leaders a steady diet of fresh meat they’ll go hunting somewhere else.

Posted in Staffing

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Why the Sky is NOT the Limit for Young Church Leaders

Sunday, April 15, 2018

The sky is not the limit for your church leaders, it’s just not. And we do them a disservice to feed them lines and fill their heads with ideas that just aren’t true. It’s one thing to tell a young leader that you believe in them and encourage them, it’s another to just lie to them. Sometimes in our attempts to encourage young leaders we move past encouragement into falsehood. In doing so we set them up for disappointment and sometimes failure.

In Proverbs 13:12 the Bible teaches us that, “Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick.” In other words, hope that doesn’t end in real results can destroy someone. So we need be careful what direction and expectations we set on young leaders, because if it doesn’t come to fruition we can ruin them.

We’d be better off to encourage them to understand that their limit is their limit and go have fun testing their limits. When young leaders find their limits and live within what Jesus has wired them up to do they’ll experience more peace and produce more fruit!

Truth is, the sky is not the limit for young leaders, there are real limiting factors that they are or will experience, here are just a few.

1. Gifting

The Scriptures are clear that not everyone gets the same gift (and leadership is clearly defined as a spiritual gift in the Bible that not everyone gets). There are different gifts, God seemingly loves diversity and has created a system that pushes us towards one another instead of away. For the Church to be its best we need to bring our best together and lean into each other’s areas of gifting and brilliance!

2. Capacity

The Scriptures are also clear that not everyone gets the same measure of gifts. Some have a greater capacity than others. It’s possible that two people may have a teaching gift, but one may have a great measure of that gift. You get how this works.

3. Approach

Now this is something that young leaders can actually control. They can control the approach they take. They can decide if they are going to have a great attitude or not, they can choose how much effort they are going to put forth, they can choose to submit to those in authority over them or not, and they can choose be teachable or not. They can choose their approach.

4. Opportunity

I’ve heard it said that luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. You can call it providence and blame all of your opportunities or lack of opportunities on God or you can take personal ownership of your life and go make your own opportunities. Now I’m not a “demon behind every bush” kind of guy, but I don’t want to not give credit to God when it’s due either. Some opportunities are self-made while others are God given. Whichever come your way take advantage of them because not everyone gets the same opportunities.

5. Resources

Some young leaders simply have greater resources at their disposal. These resources give them a disproportional leg up over their peers. Some have access to greater preparation, development and coaching. Some have access to more finances which allow them greater margin. Still others have access to deeper personnel bench to deploy. Recourses are a limiting factor for growing leaders.

Posted in Spiritual Formation, Staffing

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10 Articles that will Help your Church Make Vision Real

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

So January is behind us…how are all those New Year’s Resolutions holding up after one month? If you’re like most people…not so well. At least January went well here at Helping Churches Make Vision Real! It’s always good staying connected with you through social media and hearing that these articles have been helpful. So, thank you for connecting with me through the content on this blog! You made these the top posts from this last month. If you missed out on any of them, here they are all in one place for your convenience!

10 Insider Focused Ministry Names

This post came out of a conversation I had with a Leadership Coaching Network that I was facilitating back in 2013. So I wrote this post 4 years ago and it continues to be one of my top posts of all-time. Hope it’s helpful!

How Many People should your Church have on Staff?

Before you buy into the idea that you need another staff person at your church, think again. That just may be the worst decision you make at your church this year.

Why People Don’t Invite their Friends to your Church

If your church is serious about growing and reaching new people you’ve got to figure out what is keeping people from inviting their friends. While many church leaders blame their people for not inviting their friends because they’re not “spiritually mature enough” or don’t have a “deep burden” for the lost I’d suggest it may be less complicated than that. It may be your fault.

5 Core Issues that will Fuel Growth in your Church in 2018

This year your church can take a different approach. I’m not talking about trying harder, I’m talking about trying different. I’m also not talking about making some risk free small tweaks. If you want different results you’ve got to adopt a different strategy and employ different tactics.

6 Things I bet you Don’t know about your Pastor’s Wife

While leaders get all the attention and accolades their families and private lives are thought of very little by the public. In fact in a moment in church history where we are inundated with volumes of leadership ideas and training very little is written about pastor’s wives.

Are you the Type of Person that can Work in a Fast-Growing Church?

In fact, most people in ministry will go their entire ministry career and not get the opportunity to be a part of a fast-growing church. That’s one reason, by the way, if you’re serving at a fast-growing church you should thank Jesus, soak it in, and enjoy it while you can. You’re sitting in a seat that few will ever get to. While there are a lot of factors that contribute seasons of fast church growth one of the things I’ve observed in all of them is that the staff that work at fast-growing churches are different. Here’s what I mean…

Is your Church Designed to get Stuck?

Your church is perfectly designed to get the results you’re currently getting. You’ve probably heard that said before. That means if your church is stuck it’s probably because it’s been designed to be stuck. Now I know you didn’t do that on purpose, I know you want to reach as many people with the Gospel as you possibly can. But churches get stuck because they’re designed, by intention or neglect, to be stuck.

8 Reasons Why People Don’t Volunteer at your Church 

I’ve never worked with a church that has said they don’t need more volunteers. But I’ve worked with a bunch of churches that have trouble getting people to volunteer and stay engaged volunteering.

What if Home Depot Functioned like a Church?

After spending half of the holiday season in the local Home Depot, I started thinking about how different Home Depot is from the majority of churches I’ve visited over the years, and what it would look like if Home Depot functioned like most churches in America.

The Difference between Preparation and Planning

Do great organizations prepare for the future or do they plan for it? The answer is, “yes.” To be clear preparation and planning are not the same thing, and great organizations become great by doing both.

Posted in Family, Leadership, Spiritual Formation, Staffing

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Take Someone With You

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Take someone with you. It’s the most overlooked and easiest way to develop people.

I’ve never worked with or consulted with a church that believed they had enough leaders. In fact, most churches are looking for some off the shelf content or course they can take people through and then call them leaders. Content and concepts can be helpful to understanding leadership practices. But understanding leadership doesn’t make someone a leader. Leadership is best learned by leading and being around other good leaders.

It takes time to develop people. Great leaders are gifted to be great leaders, but they also develop that gift over time. One simple way that you can help young leaders develop their leadership gift is to give them access to you and to allow them to watch you lead up close and personal.

Take them with you.

Invite them into you Schedule

It doesn’t necessarily require a lot of extra time for you to invest in others if you invite them into your schedule. Seriously, just have them come with you wherever you go. It gives them access to meetings, conversations and decision making that they normally wouldn’t get the opportunity to see first-hand. Yes, even allow them to observe Sr. Leadership Team meetings, Board meetings, and coaching meetings you have with other team members. In those meetings just have them observe, literally don’t let them say a word. Just observe. Over time you can invite their input when it would be helpful to the conversation or helpful to them.

Debrief later

With all of that shadowing they’re doing, there’s going to be natural moments walking or driving from one thing to the next for you to debrief them. Simply ask them what they observed and coach them to observe and understand the right things. Take a moment to answer any questions that they have about what they observed.

I know this post may seem over simplified…you may be reading and thinking, “That’s it?” Well…yea…that’s it. You don’t have to over complicate what it means to develop other people. No, taking people with you isn’t the end all, be all method of people development. But based on my interaction with churches, if church leaders just took this step it would net much better results that what they’re getting.

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation, Staffing

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What do I do with that One Particular Person the Team?

Sunday, January 21, 2018

I’ve talked to all kinds of church leaders serving in all kinds of churches across the country about building the right teams with the right people to make the unique vision that God has given them for their church become reality. Inevitably the conversation seems to always drift towards talking about this one particular person on their team. The question has come up so frequently that you probably have this person on your team as well.

The conversation usually goes something like this, “I’ve got this one person on the team. They’re really talented, they’ve produced some good results but there’s something about them.” Sometimes the church leader will be courageous enough to be really honest and say, “I’m not sure I even like them being on the team anymore. Sometimes I even find that I make excuses to myself and others for their behavior.”

They seem to do just enough to stay around. They’re dysfunctional but not overtly so. The fear of exiting them from the team is heightened often in a church because they have relationships with some important people and letting people go in a church setting seems to always be messy, sometimes even risky. Then there’s the energy and time that would be spent to find someone new and get them up to speed. Many church leaders in this situation end up feeling stuck.

Then the final question comes, “I’m not sure what to do with them. What do you think?” Well, you’re not alone, everybody has this person on their team…and I’m glad you asked. But one of the things that separates good teams from great teams is great teams deal with these people instead of letting them stay around forever and hold the team back.

The key indicator that you have this person on your team is that they don’t take personal responsibility when the conversation comes up.

Denial 

When you’ve tried to talk about this with them in the past they just deny it. It’s not just that they see things differently than you do, they refuse to see what you see. Often in church world we do this to ourselves. We do a better job of letting stuff build up over time and not coach specifics in real-time so we’re left to discuss vague generalities instead of measurable specifics.

Deflection

Another common response when the conversation comes up is deflection. They start rattling off a list of excuses that deflect responsibility of their behavior to their circumstances or other people around them. The tough thing is that if you listen to them long enough there is often a shade of truth in their deflection and some of their excuses begin to make sense. Which usually leads to them staying on the team a little longer.

Anger

Another way people respond poorly is by “shooting the messenger.” When confronted with feedback they aren’t ready to hear or are unable to accept it’s not uncommon for people react in a manner that is disproportionate to the conversation. That often comes out in anger.

Talking to this kind of person won’t help the situation. Many of you have tried and it hasn’t gotten you anywhere. You can’t coach this kind of person because they don’t want to receive any coaching. So, what do you do when you have this kind of person on your team?

Specific consequences

When dealing with these kinds of team members you’ve got to come to terms with what they actually need from you as their supervisor. They need you to provide clarity and specifics on what it is you expect them to change, as well as clarity and specifics on what is going to happen if they choose not to make those changes. They cannot be successful unless you provide that to them. That’s your job. There a number of natural consequences that they may experience including being placed on a 30-day performance improvement plan, a suspension, or it could even be as severe as losing their job.

Give them a choice

Once you provide them with options you’ve given them the power to make a choice. At that point, they get to choose whatever they want. That’s their part. They can change their approach and their behavior and avoid discipline or not. Whether they choose door #1 or door #2, it’s their choice, and you’ve given them the opportunity to be a part of the team or leave the team.

Follow Through

If they don’t follow through, you need to. Simply put, do what you said you were going to do. If they choose to continue their poor behavior and approach, they are communicating to you that they no longer want to be on the team. So, give them what they want.

Posted in Leadership, Staffing
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