leadership development

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Extended Webinar Q&A

Last week, my team hosted a webinar focusing on leadership development. We had a great conversation, and I’m thankful to get to lead The Unstuck Group with such great leaders alongside me.

We had questions pouring in, so we couldn’t get to them all. But, the questions were so good we wanted to share them with all of you.

1 | How does one develop better “self-awareness” to be a better leader (and help other leaders we are working to develop to do the same)?

From Lance Witt

I think the journey of “self-awareness” begins with paying attention to your soul (your inner life).  All of us carry internal scripts that drive our lives and those scripts can negatively impact our leadership.  Most of those scripts find their way back to our family of origin and things we learned early on in our life.

For example, a script that has driven my life is, “Work hard, be responsible, achieve… and that’s how you find success, and that’s how you get loved.”  Well, when that is the story you are constantly telling yourself, you are only as good as your latest success. And it can lead to over-functioning, drivenness, workaholism, and finding your identity in your performance.

To dive into some of these issues further, you might pick up my book Replenish.  Some other books you might find helpful are Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero, The Gift of Being Yourself by David Benner and Daring Greatly by Brene Brown.

I think the journey of “self-awareness” begins with paying attention to your soul (your inner life). @Lance_Witt Click To Tweet

2 | Can you expound more on “lowering the bar” of leadership?

From Lance Witt

What I mean by “lowering the bar” is making it easy for people to take their first steps of getting into leadership.  Sometimes we have so many requirements and so much preparation, that it can be intimidating and difficult for people to even get started.  

When I was at Saddleback Church and we were recruiting small group leaders, one of the things we discovered is that even the word “leader” could be intimidating.  People didn’t feel adequately trained or theologically equipped to be the “leader”. So, we changed the title to Small Group Host. We gave them just enough training to get started.   Then, once they were hosting (leading) their group, we came alongside them and provided additional training.

I believe that people develop the best when we give them opportunities to start leading and then provide “on the job” training.  So, my encouragement and challenge is for you to provide easy first steps for people to engage a leadership opportunity.

My encouragement u0026amp; challenge for church leaders is that you provide easy first steps for people to engage a leadership opportunity. @Lance_Witt Click To Tweet

3 | Can you expand on how to track leadership development in a database system? What types of things do you find useful to track/measure? What leadership development “vital signs” should we be tracking on our dashboard?

My thoughts

Here’s something I shared with a pastor recently:

“Leaders—that should include all volunteers and staff who lead teams or groups or coach team leaders or group leaders. In your database, you should assign every person to a group or a team along with their role. So someone serving on your Guest Services team would be attached to that team along with their role–team member, team leader (because they lead the team) or coach (because they lead other leaders). Then you can run a report across all ministries to identify how many people are in leadership roles without double-counting people who are serving in multiple leadership roles.”

The key metric I help churches monitor on their dashboard is leaders to attendees. Obviously, the smaller the span of care, the better.

If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out on social media using the hashtag #unstuckchurch.

Or, if you’d like to download an overview of the webinar, fill out the form below.

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