There’s a whole lot of talk about developing leadership in the church world. Unfortunately, more talk than action.
Your own leadership style has more of a determining factor on your ability and inclination to develop others than their willingness to be developed. The ‘run and gun’ leader is motivated by results and usually looking for people to recruit that will help them accomplish the objective. This results in deploying leaders instead of developing leaders. The ‘run and gun’ leader usually does a great job of plugging the right people into the right areas. This doesn’t mean that they are great at developing people. Usually, these newly recruited leaders have been developed by someone else and then recruited and then plugged in.
I once worked for a man who worked on the assumption that development happens by osmosis… just being the the environment. There is some truth to that. It really does help to be in the environment. However, if osmosis is the chief development technique, there will be no long term success.
Developing others requires us to:
1. Be focused on their growth, not our goals.
2. Be willing to grow them and let them go.
3. Understand that not everyone will grow like we know they could.
Developing leaders takes time and energy. It is, quite frankly, much easier to hire a person of competence and let them run. It’s easier to find a leader that to develop one. What has God called us to do?
