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Building a Leadership Development Culture

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By Daniel Im: We hear the phrase “building leaders” all the time. What exactly does it mean for the church to do exactly this? Build leaders? Instead of asking how we should be building leaders, perhaps we should first ask ourselves how we can build a culture of leadership development.

If you look at the life of Jesus, He focused on building a leadership development culture from the very beginning of His ministry. He met everyone, interacted with them, and asked them to follow Him. But, He didn’t stop there. Jesus invested in 12 of those men, equipped them, and then passed the torch onto them. Essentially, Jesus set up His disciples to reproduce His leadership. He chose His 12 disciples with a long-range objective in mind—that they would become reproducing leaders.

Building a Culture for Tomorrow

If we don’t build a culture of leadership development today, we’re going to have a deficiency of leadership in our pipelines tomorrow. Every day, we should be investing in our leaders and equipping them to lead those underneath them. After all, when you focus on developing a culture of leadership development, you will be creating an abundant harvest of reproducing leaders.

If you only have one leader pouring into the other members of the church by developing them, what do you think would happen when that developer leaves? Obviously, the leadership development will stop because one person cannot be responsible for leading an entire body of church members. You need a culture of continual growth and leadership development so there will never be a shortage of leaders.

How do we develop others?

Knowledge transfer alone doesn’t develop leaders. You need to also have a conversation. Here are seven questions you can ask those you are developing to help them process what they’re learning.

  1. What stood out to you the most?

Whether the trainee is watching a video or reading a book, ask about the higher level thinking that they are experiencing. What is the big picture of what they are learning?

  1. What challenged your thinking the most?

Identify one or two of the most challenging things that stood out to them. Ask them why it was challenging and have them process it.

  1. What questions did it raise?

What questions did you have while reading? Have the trainees write down questions to help them process the information.

To read the remainder of this article, and to listen to the entire video training with Mac Lake, click here for the full videos and post.

These videos are part of Plus Membership. To get full access to them, and much more, I encourage you to become a Plus Member. Click here to see all the benefits of becoming a Plus Member.

Tweetables:

  • “Instead of asking how we should be building leaders, we should ask ourselves how we can build a leadership development culture.”-
  • “You need a culture of continual growth and leadership development so there will never be a shortage of leaders.”-
  • “If we’re learning the material, but not putting into action, a transformation will not take place.”-
  • “When you focus on a culture of leadership development, you are creating an abundant harvest of reproducing leaders.”-
  • “If we don’t build a culture of leadership development today, we’re going to have a deficiency of leadership in our pipelines tomorrow.”-
  • “Jesus focused on building a leadership development culture from the very beginning of His ministry.”-
  • “Creating a leadership development culture is imperative to having a successful church.”-

Source: Building a Leadership Development Culture