One of the most important things you can do as a leader is to develop others around you. Whether you’re a senior pastor leading dozens of team members or a ministry lead with a few volunteers, you have a duty as a leader to help others unlock their leadership potential.
5 Ways To Unlock Leadership Potential
- Treat them as leaders. Many people fail to see themselves as a leader. Be sure you use language that helps them understand the influence they have. Respect their perspective and viewpoints, especially as it pertains to their area of ministry. Ask for their opinion when making some decisions.
- Defer to them in conversations. People naturally gravitate toward and seek information from people they perceive to be in charge, not realizing that someone else may be more of an authority figure on the topic. When engaging in conversation with attenders, defer to other team members as the go-to person for information. A simple, “That’s a great idea. Have you met Shane? He’s an amazing key volunteer who leads that ministry. Let me introduce you.” allows you to transfer some of your authority and leadership to others on your team.
- Allow them to make decisions. A phrase we like to use here at Life.Church is “You decide.” Leaders make decisions every day. Start shifting decisions down and allow your team to make the call. If it’s not a decision you must make, allow someone else to make it. Be sure they know it’s okay to experiment and try something new. What if it wasn’t the “right” decision in your eyes? You have two choices: live with it—not everyone has the same perspective as you do—or seek to understand what factors went into making the decision. Using the information you gained, coach your team member about other opinions that could have made sense in making the decision.
- Create an environment where it’s okay to fail. Let your team members fail—relieve the sense of fear or panic that they might feel if they make a mistake. Let them know that failure is part of growing. To be a leader, we must embrace failure, learn from it, and push ahead.
Creating an environment where failure is embraced is key to developing and growing leaders.
- Give them the stage. If yours is the only face your attenders see from the pulpit each and every weekend, consider allowing another team member the opportunity to speak from stage. Here at Life.Church, we have Developmental Weekends once or twice a year. On a developmental weekend, team members from different areas of ministry get an opportunity to prepare and deliver a weekend sermon at their campus. This past weekend, 88 different speakers taught, some for the first time, across 25 campuses. Learn more about how we prepare for Developmental Weekends.
We’d love to know, what are some of the ways you are unlocking your team’s potential? Let’s continue the conversation in our Life.Church Open Network community.
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