Over on Leadership Network’s Digital’s blog, I’ve posted a couple of brief pieces exploring how technology might helpfully inform a new model of spiritual leadership formation.
- Toward a New Model of Leadership Development, part 1
- Toward a New Model of Leadership Development, part 2
I’m on the Leadership Development Team in my church and we are in the second year of executing our own program for leadership development.
The heart of our approach is the Coach – Leader or Mentor – Protege relationship. Their one-on-one meetings are the most important thing that happens. Supplementing those meetings and relationships are workshops that we offer once a month for all the Coaches and the Leaders. The workshops are interactive and participatory and they should end with both practical and learning assignments that are to be executed by the leaders as they discuss them with their coaches. We aren’t doing much yet in the area of online training, though I envision a future where we’ll have both live workshops (only the ones that are really kick-butt) and online training as well.
We don’t have this down yet, but I do think we have a good beginning. The primary challenge for us in achieving excellence, in my opinion, is developing and nurturing a greater be one/make one leadership culture where everyone who is a leader is bringing someone alongside themselves. Along these lines, one element I’d like to see us add next year is role-based shadowing. And, finally, though we do have one theological cohort with both staff and lay leaders, I think that we need to be more intentional about theological education.
But I do think that we have made a good beginning at a more holistic approach to leadership formation than the typically nearly exclusive information transfer type training I’ve been a part of in the past.
Here are some one page summaries of our approach:
Stephen,
Great post…as this is a passion of mine as well. As we are in the beginning stages of launching our church I know that leadership development must be a priority.
How about a post on some of the challenges you may have incurred or do occur in your system if any.
What changes have you made along the way?
Even you ideas for future online.
Have your leaders struggled with the time commitment of the various meetings as well as their volunteer roles?
It sounds like they have 24 meetings per year just in their leadership training…do they feel the strain of this?
Just some curious thoughts.
Your church model sounds a lot like what Celebrate Recovery is doing. CR has a comprehensive model of development building from the ground up. The influences your church models has a lot of crossover, especially from Saddleback.
In our church, the CR program is developing and the next challenge is for CR to merge/or work with the church body. CR meets Friday as a large group and the small group meeting is Thursday or during the week. This small group is called a step-study group which is where the personal layers are uncovered.
As CR grows, how will it merge with the church body that meets on Sunday and during the week in life groups (small groups all over the city that reflect the Sunday message)? The life groups are good, but limited in a co-ed setting. The step-study group is deep and not co-ed. As one grows, dealing with core issues, will this cause a divide with he life group that deals with more surface issues? This is the challenge as I see it.
What makes CR effective is the organization of its program. This allows for lay leadership to start a CR ministry quickly. Yet, leadership training is a real need in our church and most of the leaders are female. It has been difficult to get men into leadership positions. Maybe this reflects Western church in general.