The vast majority of churches struggle to recruit and keep volunteers and even staff. As a result, they can’t grow or expand.
Todd Adkins explains why most church leaders struggle to develop leaders and explains how to turn that around.
Welcome to Episode 133 of the podcast.
Guest Links: Todd Adkins
Todd on Twitter
LifeWay Leadership on Twitter
5 Leadership Questions Podcast with Todd Adkins and Barnabas Piper
New Churches Q&A Podcast with Daniel Im
Happy Rant Podcast by Barnabas Piper
The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company by Ram Charan
Pipeline Conference Nashville, TN; October 11 – 13, 2017
Free ebook: Developing Your Leadership Pipeline
Todd’s Recommended Reading List:
Spiritual Leadership: Principles of Excellence For Every Believer by J. Oswalt Sanders
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by
Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development by Eric Geiger
H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle. by Brad Lomenick
Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein
Simon Sinek website and books
Links Mentioned
ReThink Leadership Atlanta, Georgia; April 26 – 28, 2017
The Canadian Church Leaders Conference Barrie, ON; June 8th – 10th
Barnabas Piper on Episode 50
David Kinnaman on Episode 125
Jeff Brodie and Jeff Henderson on Episode 110
Les McKeown on Episode 112
3 Insights from This Episode
1. Leadership development requires intentionality.
If you think that leadership development is going to naturally happen over time, you’re wrong. Todd tells us that in a study conducted by LifeWay, they found that 92% of pastors believe in the importance of leadership development and training… but only 1 in 4 actively practice it. Why? They don’t have the time, expertise, framework or resources.
Usually leaders are also ambitious doers, and striking a healthy balance between doing and developing is only something that happens with intentionality.
2. Self-audit your development time.
Todd walked us through an exercise you can do today that will help you self-audit your time developing vs. doing.
Step One: List out the top 20 things you spend time on in your job.
Step Two: Create two columns, label one “doing” and one “developing.”
Step Three: Go through your list and determine where each task falls.
If most of your tasks fall into the “doing” category, it’s time to tweak your list of priorities and get intentional about leadership development.
3. Are you building people or buying them?
If you look at your staff and realize that you bought most or all of them, then it’s time to reevaluate your leadership development culture.
There is a time or a place to buy staff, but a healthy leadership culture also produces leaders from within. Another sign that there isn’t a healthy leadership culture is when the church is growing to new sites and adding new initiatives, and there’s nobody internally who can staff or guide the growth.
There is power in multiplication instead of addition. Addition looks like “I need one more volunteer” where multiplication is “I’m building up a volunteer.” Todd challenges every leader to choose two people who you see leadership potential in and start there.
Quotes from This Episode
CNLP 133: Todd Adkins on Why Most Churches Do a Bad Job at Leadership Development and How to Turn That Around Click To Tweet CNLP 133: Todd Adkins on Why Most Churches Do a Bad Job at Leadership Development and How to Turn That Around Click To Tweet CNLP 133: Todd Adkins on Why Most Churches Do a Bad Job at Leadership Development and How to Turn That Around Click To Tweet CNLP 133: Todd Adkins on Why Most Churches Do a Bad Job at Leadership Development and How to Turn That Around Click To TweetThe podcast releases every Tuesday morning.
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Next Episode: Warren Bird and Carl George
What does it take for churches to break through the 200, 400 and 600 attendance growth barriers? Carl George and Warren Bird literally wrote the book on it, and share some of the surprising obstacles church leaders face and outline how to overcome them to reach more people.
Subscribe for free now and you won’t miss Episode 134.
