Leadership is a mixture of both poetry and plumbing, but unfortunately a lot more is written about the former than the later. The leadership systems and structure of a church are the major pieces of plumbing I am referring to today. For better or worse, they are defining factors in developing a leadership pipeline. Whether the church is small, mega, or multisite, it requires real work. Developing a leadership pipeline is not just reorganizing your org chart and implementing a clear training strategy. You are going to turn over some rocks and deal with whatever is underneath. Let’s look at systems then talk a bit about structure.
Systems are not ungodly. Your systems actually reveal your stewardship and how intentional you are with the people God has placed under your care. Systemization begins with auditing and documenting how you do what you do. Mapping out specific church processes and how they interact and overlap reveals more than you dreamed and maybe more than you feel comfortable exposing. These processes show what you truly value as a church and the gaps between your actual and aspirational values.
Take a look at your processes, forms, training,
and so forth. In my previous church, I spearheaded the multisite ministry. By the time we launched our third campus, I had learned that if we didn’t have simple systems in place then we were headed for trouble. Nearly every time our pipeline got clogged and we had to take it apart to see what was wrong, the root cause was a systems issue.
Structure determines the working relationships between pastors, staff members, leaders, and volunteers as well as the relationships between peers at each level. Structure provides the foundation on which the systems and standard operating procedures rest. Analyze your church’s ministries. This analysis will determine what type of structure is best for your church. Study the dependency between different ministry areas.
Assess your church’s methods of communication. How your staff members and leaders communicate with
each other is a key factor in aligning systems and processes. Regardless of how you decide
to structure your leadership pipeline, alignment must exist across the organization. Some ministries will require more layers of leadership or more volunteers. However the levels, titles, and basic job descriptions should contain a common language.
This will be difficult for many of your people to handle. The upfront investment is time consuming, you are sure to uncover issues that need to be addressed, and the keepers of the status quo will be crying foul. However, if you persevere and walk your team through a full audit and realignment, you will be well on your way to creating a true leadership pipeline and the payoff brings you five key advantages:
- People identify their next steps.
- Provides systems clarity for development.
- Creates pathways for growth and development.
- Enables diagnosis of where and why your pipeline is clogged.
- Aligns language and positions across the organization.
In October, our team at LifeWay Leadership is hosting Pipeline, a conference to train church leadership teams how to develop and implement your own leadership pipeline. We want you and your team to join us. You can find out more and take advantage of the early bird registration discounts for you and your team at the website. Pipeline will be a rare opportunity to be trained by leading church practitioners and come away with an actual leadership development plan you can implement in your church.
Tags: Leadership Pipeline, Leadership Pipeline Conference, Todd Adkins
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