Guest contribution from Dr. Ryan T. Hartwig and Dr. Warren Bird

It’s no secret: Churches are more complex than ever.  As a result, key jobs in the church are more demanding than ever.  Pastoring requires more specialized skills than ever.  And the need to develop leaders is as crucial as ever.

As a result, many churches have adopted Senior Leadership Teams to address these challenges. Great Senior Leadership Teams involve more people in leadership functions and share the leadership burden, bring experts face-to-face to strategize, and facilitate leadership development.   In fact, Leadership Network’s recent “Team Collaboration Report” noted:

The structure is changing from a single leader calling all the shots to flattened-hierarchy leadership teams that share crucial strategic and directional responsibilities…Steps to broaden the leadership platform [have resulted in] leadership teams with multiple strategic and directional leaders who not only use their gifts, abilities and varied backgrounds to oversee important facets of decision making and execution; they also share the load for visioning, strategic direction and communication.

However, just slapping the “team” term on a group of senior leaders doesn’t make it a true team.   But there are many things you can do to help your senior leadership group become a real team that offers outstanding spiritual and strategic leadership to your church.  Based on Ryan’s two-and-a-half year study of one church’s transition to a senior leadership team and the current literature on senior leadership team effectiveness*, we know that… (more…)

Stressed? These strategies will multiply your time and free you to focus on your mission. (Image by Renjith Krishnan.)

It’s been more than three years since I launched leadership coaching and consulting services to help leaders and churches get unstuck. Since then, I’ve added several people to my team. As the demand for what we do has increased, so has the complexity of the business.

People have asked me, “How do you keep up with everything you are doing?” There are three key reasons I can pull it off.

1. My priorities come first. I view my time like I view my tithe. I’ve decided in advance that I’m going to give a minimum of 10% of my income to the church. I’ve already made that decision, so I don’t need to reconsider it every time I get paid. My time works the same way. I’ve decided in advance that my time with God, attending worship services with my family, dating my wife, and spending time with my kids are the priority over my business. These things go on the calendar first. That way I don’t need to reconsider my time every time a new business opportunity comes along.
2. My team multiplies my time. I practice what I preach. I have found people more talented than me to handle various aspects of the business. Yes, I still have to do many tasks. And, yes, I still delegate tasks. My ultimate goal, though, is to empower my team to take everything we offer to the next level. Sometimes that means empowering outside contractors like Ben, John or Peter. Many times it means empowering the people on my team. The team really does outperform the individual every time.
3. My systems shift my focus. Good systems free up more time to focus on what I enjoy most — serving church leaders and helping them take their next steps. Many people view systems as barriers. Healthy systems, though, create flow for the routine to maximize the time for the mission. Systems take discipline, but they also provide the framework for me to engage my team. Without systems, every decision and every task would end up on my desk. With healthy systems, my team is empowered.

In my next article, I’ll share some of the tools I’m using to prioritize time, empower my team and embrace healthy systems.

Are you maximizing your time? Of these three strategies, which one needs the most attention in your life? Join the conversation by sharing your comment.

With great intentions, I interviewed Jenni Catron, Executive Director of Cross Point Church in Nashville, earlier this week. I even have the picture below to prove it.

Yes, that’s a picture of me asking Jenni a question. Because I’m technologically-challenged, I have a great video recording of me asking questions and Jenni giving compelling answers without any audio. This is just another reason why I should stick to coaching and consulting.

I’m tempted to post the video because there’s probably someone out there who can read lips who might be willing to translate it for us. (Does Google have an app for that yet?) Jenni really did have a lot of great leadership insights to share. And, unfortunately, you will never hear them.

The good news is there’s an opportunity for the women in the crowd to redeem this regrettable situation. Jenni is offering her very first coaching network for women leaders. When we talked earlier this week, there were only about 3 spots left. If you are interested, make sure you apply before the May 15, 2012 deadline. If you do, tell here Tony sent you. (That way I won’t feel so bad for messing up the recording.)

Thanks again, Jenni, for your time. It really was a great interview…though only you and I will ever know it.

Are you committed to building healthy volunteer teams? (Image: KROMKRATHOG / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Last week I had the opportunity to teach a workshop at the Orange Conference for the very first time. Loved it! I am definitely not called to kid’s or student ministry, but I love hanging out with family ministry leaders.

In my session last week, we talked about building healthy volunteer teams. You’d think in volunteer intensive ministries like we engage in churches, that there would be more written and talked about on this topic. Yet, Simply Strategic Volunteers is still one of the few books I’m aware of that’s focused on engaging volunteers in the Church. (What other good resources do you know of on this specific topic?)

These are the five keys to building healthy volunteer teams that I offered to the Orange leaders last week:

1. Think volunteers before staff. It’s our responsibility to “equip God’s people to do his work.” When we’re overwhelmed, our first question should be “How can we equip more volunteers?” As I’ve shared before, the church I’ve worked with that had the fewest staff members per attendees also had the highest percentage of people volunteering. They are thinking volunteers before staff, and it’s working.
2. Teach shoulder-tapping. My friend Tim taught me this one. In the church, we tend to rely on promotions to recruit volunteers. We use platform announcements and bulletin ads and pleas for help. Volunteer recruitment is relational. It’s one friend inviting another friend to join them in serving. Four out of five people show up to church for the first time through an invitation from a friend. That same principle works for every next step people take at your church.
3. Stay focused. This is a simple math problem. The more ministry programs and events your church offers, the more volunteers you’ll need. Focused ministry means less competition for people’s time and attention. People are busy. Their church shouldn’t be compounding the problem. We should be helping people prioritize their time rather than making their lives more complicated.
4. Identify leaders, not doers. The church needs doers, or servants, too. But, as Jethro pointed out to Moses, we also need capable leaders. We need leaders of tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. (See the 4 Stages of Leadership.) And, this may surprise you, but you don’t have to be on paid staff to be a leader in the church. Volunteers have leadership gifts too. If you feel stuck, you probably don’t need another person to get tasks done. Instead, you need another person to lead.
5. Empower people to use their gifts. We need to remember it’s about the body of Christ using their gifts to fulfill God’s mission. It’s more about helping people be who God created them to be than it is about us finding people to get tasks done. I love this line from Tony Dungy, “I wasn’t there to be their boss. I was there to help the players get better.” That same philosophy of helping people pursue God’s potential applies in ministry as well.

Share what you’re learning about building healthy volunteer teams. What’s working? What’s not? Join the conversation by sharing your comment.

I’m going to be at the Orange Conference in Atlanta this afternoon to teach a workshop on “Simply Strategic Volunteers.” No notes today. You’re on your own.

Title: Simply Strategic Volunteers

In case you haven’t figured it out, you’ll never have enough money to hire enough staff to accomplish your ministry vision. The only way it’ll happen is if you engage volunteers. I will share five simple strategies to connect people in serving opportunities at your church. These proven principles will help you grow the impact of your ministry while reducing the need to hire staff.

Time: 3:45 pm

For further reading: Stayin’ Alive: Build a Legacy of Leadership and Simply Strategic Volunteers

Are you helping successful leaders take their next steps toward Christ? (Image: Ambro/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Recently I had the opportunity to connect with a group of marketplace leaders. These guys have been successful climbing the corporate ladder. Now, they’re reaping both the leadership and financial rewards of years of hard work.

I always find it interesting that churches have all kinds of ministries focused on helping people without means. (As they should.) We are rarely intentional, though, about reaching and connecting people who have found success in life. Both groups need Jesus. Frankly, I think ministry to up-and-outers is much harder, so we tend to shy away from the challenge.

I asked these successful executives what questions pastors need to address if they’re going to help people like themselves take their next steps toward Christ. Some of their responses may surprise you. Here’s what they offered:

1. Are you willing to take a risk and challenge me in a way that may cause me to walk out and never come back? What’s the risky question? Are you willing to shake people?
2. Are you willing to ask for my opinion? Leaders want to be heard. You don’t have to embrace every idea, but you better give leaders the opportunity to engage the conversation.
3. Are you going to push me? One of the executives said, my pastor took the position that “I’m going to do whatever it takes to get this guy involved.” And he did.
4. Can I trust the pastor? They wanted to know is the pastor real. They acknowledged this authenticity needs to come through from the pulpit as well as in person.
5. Does someone know me? Is someone willing to take the time to know my goals? Will they invest enough to know my struggles?
6. Does the church have clarity on the “why”? These folks invest their lives in businesses that have clarity of purpose. If they’re going to connect with a church, they want the church to have clarity on it’s vision as well.

How are you doing? Would you say you’re more intentional about reaching the down-and-outers than the up-and-outers? What could you do differently today to help successful marketplace leaders take their next steps toward Christ?

Join the conversation by sharing your comment.

Mark Miller

I recently visited the Chick-fil-A corporate headquarters and had the opportunity to connect with Mark Miller. Mark is the Vice President of Training and Development for Chick-fil-A.

TONY: You have been around Chick-fil-A for quite some time. Share a little bit about your leadership journey.

MARK: I joined our corporate staff in 1978. I worked in the warehouse and mailroom and was the sixteenth corporate employee. Since then, I started our Corporate Communication department, the Quality and Customer Satisfaction department and most recently, our Organizational Effectiveness group. It’s been a great journey.

TONY: At Chick-fil-A, corporate values drive the organization’s culture. Can you give our leaders some practical advice on how to do this in their organizations?

MARK: Leaders must first decide if they are going to articulate current values or aspirational values. The real work begins once this decision is made. We encourage our leaders to take three action steps to bring their values to life:

• Know your values – Values must be known and understood before they can be communicated
• Share your values – Don’t make people guess at what’s important, tell them
• Live your values – Leaders are doomed if they say one thing and do another

TONY: How does Chick-fil-A approach leadership development?

MARK: Our leadership point-of-view can be summarized as: “Great Leaders Serve.” We are convinced that Jesus had it right in Matthew 20:26 when He said, “Those who want to become great (leaders) must be willing to become servants.” We built our leadership competency model around the word SERVE. We believe that great leaders…

• See the future
• Engage and develop others
• Reinvent continuously
• Value results and relationships
• Embody the values

TONY: Can you share a story of how Truett or Dan have modeled this?

MARK: Dan and Truett both model servant leadership. Truett taught 12-year old boys in Sunday School for over 50 years. Dan is the champion for second mile service in our organization. Both of them are very gifted at seeing the future and they continuously strive to reinvent the organization.

TONY: If you could only share one bit of advice with the next generation of leaders, what would it be?

MARK: Your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead. Dan actually taught me this principle over 30 years ago. If young leaders commit to become life-long learners, they will never regret the decision. Ken Blanchard and I just released a new book about this topic called, “Great Leaders Grow.” The book is a helpful resource for anyone who wants to grow their leadership capacity. All of the proceeds from the book are donated to charity.

Mark asked me to serve our readers by giving away 50 free copies of  ”Great Leaders Grow” to the first 50 people who comment on this post. Make sure to include your mailing address in your comment.

UPDATE: Looks like we have 50 people, so thanks for participating. There aren’t any more books available.

By Regi Campbell, contributing writer

If you’re a ministry leader, you’re a mentor. If people are under your charge then you are charged with mentoring them. In the church world, this is typically called “leadership development” and the words are usually translated as “send people to conferences when they ask to go.” This is not really mentoring.

Mentoring is also not just randomly spending time with your leadership team. It is more than task oriented conversations or time spent on coordinating calendars. There is a difference between these actions and mentoring.  The key difference is intentionality.

Mentoring requires intentionality. Mentors first have to decide that they care enough about the person they are mentoring to truly help them grow and fulfill their potential. It is a mindset. This is a decision that has to be made even if it is not communicated early on in the mentoring process. Mentors should see great potential in the person they are mentoring. They always strive to find ways to help them grow.

Making the decision to mentor other leaders may be one of the most important decisions that you will ever make. Here are three reasons that you should mentor others:

1.  You will model Jesus - When we do what Jesus did for the same reasons He did them, people will respond. The disciples knew that Jesus loved them (He chose them over His own family). That’s why most of them died martyrs’ deaths…not for teaching His stuff, but for telling His story. Jesus was selfless. He thanked God for “those you gave me” (John 17:6). He always looked for opportunities to teach them, stretch them and grow their faith and confidence.

2.  You will shift back into growth mode - We always teach what we need to learn the most. You won’t help someone learn how to manage his or her time better without focusing on time management yourself. You know so much more than you think you do; it’s just buried. Intentional mentoring will lead you to search it out, dust it off, share it, and maybe even reuse it yourself. Check out this 35-second video from John Ott at North Point Community Church.

3.  You will catch fire again – Nate Larkin, in “Samson and the Pirate Monks,” said it this way, “When we make another man’s progress our concern, giving him a listening ear and a caring heart and opening ourselves up as a conduit of God’s grace, we find OUR walk propelled to a whole new level.”

Too many of us have become comfortable playing roles but not taking any personal interest or responsibility for the growth of the individuals under our leadership.

Change that.

Make the decision to become an intentional mentor to those you lead. Think and pray about what you could teach them. Instead of just assigning a task, put the assignment in the context of who they are and where you want them to grow.

_________________________________________________

Regi Campbell

Our guest post today is from Regi Campbell, author of Mentor like Jesus and founder of Radical Mentoring. Regi is a business man who has served as an elder at North Point Community Church, has been involved in starting a bunch of businesses and ministries, and has personally mentored over 100 men over the past 25 years. His latest, The Mentoring Manifesto (B&H Publishing, 2012) can be downloaded FREE at www.radicalmentoring.com/ebook.  You can also follow Regi on Twitter @radicalmentor.

In working on another project, I just compiled the ten key statements that have shaped my ministry to leaders and churches. It’s possible that everything I write and teach boils down to these key thoughts:

1. “It’s possible to do the ministry of God but not the ministry God called you to do.”
2. “Great leaders will leave your ministry if you focus on the execution instead of the outcomes.”
3. “God’s people don’t do the leader’s work — we equip people to do God’s work.”
4. “Mind the gap between your vision and your execution.”
5. “Stop promoting programs and events and start developing relationships and environments that lead to life transformation.” (The Giant Inflatable Blue Monkey)
6. “Think people before tasks. Think strategy before structure.”
7. “Churches continue to use their same systems, but they hope and pray for different results.” (The Leisure Suit Trap)
8. “Systems without purpose will keep people busy. Purpose without systems will keep people guessing.”
9. “Your message has the potential to shift thinking. Your systems have the potential to shift behaviors.”
10. “Leadership isn’t leadership if it isn’t released to others.”

You’ll probably hear and see me repeat these statements over and over again. (And then, just to make sure you heard me, I’ll probably share them again.)

Have you ever tried to capture your personal mission in phrases like this? If so, what would be on your list?

Last week I started a brief series on seeking advice from other people. We talked about the trap of the Moses complex. We also discussed the importance of listening to experience advisors. Today I’d like to talk about the questions we should ask.

If I was God, I’d just tell people what to do and expect them to do it. In my world, it would be very easy to determine right from wrong, but we’d miss out on the joy of learning from the experience and wisdom of those around us. We’d miss out on the reward and the sense of accomplishment of the learning process. We wouldn’t experience the relational benefits from leaning on others. We wouldn’t reflect the nature of God, because we wouldn’t be creative. We’d be rule-followers. Following rules is easy, but that’s not the way God designed us.

Does wisdom come from God? Yes, but God uses other people to impart his wisdom. And, for reasons we may never understand, he gives us the choice of deciding who we will listen to and who we will ignore.

Because of that, it elevates the importance of discerning who is in our circle of influence. It forces me to ask these questions…

• What does the Bible say?
• What does my wife say?
• What does my team say?
• What do the experienced experts say?

Here’s an important filter when it comes to gaining wisdom from others:

• I listen closely to people who know me or want me to take my next steps toward Christ. I place high value on their encouragement and their criticism.
• I don’t listen closely to people who don’t know me or don’t necessarily want me to experience my full potential in Christ. I don’t place high value on their encouragement or their criticism.

If Solomon was so wise, maybe we ought to learn from him. Rather than determining, “What should I do?”, we should focus on, “Who should I ask?” In other words, we need people in our lives who are smarter than us.

Why is that important? Because you’re not that smart.