I had the unique privilege of speaking to a Consortium of Seminaries. My discussion topic was to illustrate the Leadership Training that Pastors and Leaders need to be effective in the future. The context of our discussion was to focus our time on training events covering skill needs of our Pastors and Leaders.
The time for the weekend presentation didn’t allow an extensive analysis of world ministry trends. However, we used a unique process that worked. I needed something simple, not necessarily statistically valid but would provide a discussion starter for the Seminary Board members. Here’s our process. In the space of a day, we white-boarded the names and skill deficiencies of the Pastors and Leaders who had been fired or encouraged to resign among the Pastors and Key Leaders in our churches covering four Provinces. This very simple and unscientific process yielded results almost immediately. I’ve used these themes for 7 years in Interviews, Leadership Coaching, Healthy Church Consultations and Conflict Resolutions activities. It has been one of those days that is still producing fruit in my work.
The five themes are individually very obvious but until the details were white-boarded, the consistency of the themes had eluded us. The consistent themes that caused the Leaders to be let go were:
- lack of Accountability
- questionable ethics
- unwilling to be a Servant Leader
- lack of Results Orientation
- inability to be a team player
These five themes were consistently absent in all the Pastors or Leaders who had been fired or asked to leave in our Region in the previous 6 years.
“Recently, Google commissioned their internal human resources team to identify and rate the attributes of their best leaders. They were surprised to find that technical knowledge ranged dead last. Instead, attributes like listening well and letting employees make relevant decisions attracted and kept the best people. Google may not realize it, but these are attributes of leading with love.” Leading with Love by Alexander Strauch
Leadership is serving those who look to you for leadership.
Yours in Service
Laurie D. Kennedy
Leadership Coach
Jethro Group