No matter if you are the head of a company, organization, or church the responsibility of leadership can weigh heavy with worry. You do not want to make a mistake. You do not want to look incapable. Often, leaders make more mistakes out of fear thinking they are avoiding an organizational misstep.
When I became the head of staff as a pastor, I was excited to be the leader to help a church take a new direction. I spent many long hours refining organizational procedures, developing lay leaders, and getting my sermon messages just right. I read all the books I could and attended the best conferences on leadership. I learned leadership best practices. After many years of spending an exhausting amount of time on making a vision a reality, I often became disappointed. Why were things not working as intended? Why is this taking so long? Why are there not more people jumping on board? Why are we not growing faster? These questions haunted me for years. I questioned my calling to ministry.
Then, I realized that I made the #1 leadership mistake:
Thinking that I had the sole responsibility of visionary as THE leader.
Lovett Weems, executive director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership explained it best when he wrote,
Much conventional wisdom about leadership has assumed a sole visionary providing primary leadership for a group. The temptation, likewise, is to think that the answer for our congregation is a single innovative leader… One leader, even one with a compelling vision, is insufficient for spirit-led innovative leadership. The innovative leader must create a community of innovation by developing both an atmosphere and the people capable of functioning in a more complex and chaotic environment.
We often think of great leaders as the sole visionary, such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but the reality is that great leaders create and encourage other visionaries. A great leader is someone who creates an environment of people who work together to innovate. In congregations, there is an expectation that the pastor takes all responsibility for turning around a church. That is the wrong way to view a pastor’s role. In my book, The Work of the Associate Pastor, I write that best practices among senior leadership is found in how they develop and equip, not micromanaging others
In reality, the person at the top is charged to inspire many visionaries in order to bring an organization into vitality. In congregational life, churches and lay people need to adjust their expectations that the head minister is the only one who will get the church to thrive. That is a pastor-centered church, not a shared mission-focused church. A pastor centered church helps breed the culture of the person at the top as the sole innovator. This leads to burned-out leaders who try to come up with and execute new ideas on their own. Mission-focused churches encourage everyone to take responsibility and discover their role in the church.
The more leaders can empower others and give permission to innovate, the more they will avoid committing the #1 leadership mistake
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