Three Steps To Great Leadership In Your Organization

In an earlier post (Three great expectations for a leader) I’ve described some “best practice” leadership expectations for organizations that want to achieve real mission success:

• Expect your leader to dream – to pray down a vision from God for your organization.
• Expect your leader to design – to implement a strategy for mission fulfillment and dream realization.
• Expect your leader to direct – to be the supervisor of all ministry leaders or department heads so that all efforts are focused in a common direction.

Sounds good, right?

The burning question is: “How can we make this work in our organization?” or “How can we forge a leadership/followership relationship, in which the leader is leading, the followers are following, the mission is being accomplished and the dream is being realized?”

Consider the following three steps:

1. Procure a love-motivated leader who longs to dream, to design and to direct a ministry to missional success.

They are out there.

In the case of most smaller churches – and most churches are smaller churches – leadership is usually not what search teams are looking for. Those which look for God-gifted, motivated leaders are usually able to find them.

If your church has a pastor who is not currently able to dream, design and direct your ministry, offer to pay for the leadership education which he needs – it’s cheaper than procuring a new pastor.

2. Have real, honest, heart-to-heart conversations with your new or growing leader about what dreaming, designing, directing leadership is going to look like in your context.

Because a dreaming, designing, directing set of leadership expectations is so different from the norm, leaders and leadership teams must be assertive (not aggressive) and self-aware as they hammer out a new relationship.

“Minnesota nice” communication patterns must be left in the past. Assumptions and unexpressed expectations will derail this process. Written ministry descriptions, downloaded from the web, which no one has actually read, will not help either.

I recently challenged a church board and pastor (in his fifth year with the congregation) to start over and renegotiate everything. They had begun their relationship as mismatched as a pastor and congregation could be. The board needed to decide on what they wanted and needed from the pastor and the pastor needed to clarify what he wanted and needed from the church.

Nor will it work to wrap up a new leadership/followership arrangement with one discussion: it’s going to take a great deal of honest talk for an extended period of time to make the transformation happen, but it absolutely can be achieved.

3. Create authority limitations and boundaries for the dreaming, designing, directing leader.

Yes, I’m encouraging Christian ministries to give their leaders both directional and supervisory leadership responsibilities, a real step-up in authority for many Christian leaders – smaller church pastors in particular. This change involves faith in God and in the leader.

The alternative is mediocrity.

Small congregations which become effective growing ministries are those which make the traumatic change to dreaming, designing, directing leadership.

No, I’m not suggesting anything approaching a dictatorship. Board members are not abrogating their authority to move to this new leadership style for their senior leader. Their authority is retained while the responsibility for leadership is carefully delegated to a worthy individual who sees himself as a leader among equals.

Here’s how that looks:

Some organizations have multi-page documents spelling out these limitations and boundaries in detail. Others have a carefully crafted, highly detailed ministry description for the leader. Still others have a basic set of principles, or a list of promises made (in writing) by the leader to the board.

However the details are hashed out in your organization, the goal and the expected outcome is the same: The dreaming, designing, directing leader leads your organization to the realization of its God-given dream.