A few years ago, Leadership Training became all the rage in churches. Suddenly if you weren’t training leaders, you weren’t really accomplishing much. “Everyone is a leader, so everyone must be trained as a leader,” we were told. We read all the leadership books, went to all the leadership seminars, and we worked every leadership mantra we came across into our sermons:
Everything rises and falls on leadership
Leaders are readers (Except for the illiterate ones)
Leaders never eat alone (Which means introverts aren’t leaders. Wait, everyone is a leader. Hmmm)
To make sure that all of the leaders that we had to train got a steady diet of these leadership nuggets, we began herding the sheep through a variety of leadership classes. Small group leader training, ministry leader training, team leader training, cheerleader training. (Maybe not cheerleaders) Everyone needed to go through our leadership classes. Everyone’s a leader, so everyone must be trained. Our job is to do the training.
A couple of challenges have popped up, however, on the road to 100% trained leaders. First, we discovered that maybe not EVERYONE is a leader. When we started our parade of leadership classes, the same somewhat dysfunctional people kept showing up. And the funny thing is that they were often the only ones who completed all 36 weeks of the Leadership Basic Training course we had so carefully crafted. At the end of the course, we would give them a graduation certificate, but there was no way on Earth we were going to trust them to lead anything. It turns out some people don’t make good leaders. Not everyone is a leader.
The second, and bigger, discovery is that leadership classes don’t develop leaders. At the end of six weeks (or nine weeks or two years), students become graduates, not necessarily leaders. I know that you will toss up examples, but I will counter with 30 years of watching, writing, and leading leadership classes both here and in other countries. I can point to few, if any, leaders who were primarily (or even secondarily) developed through a class. Physical and virtual classes are equally ineffective. Classes and training programs look great on paper. We can create milestones and markers and spreadsheets and dashboards. We can have meetings to evaluate progress and reward according to quotas and goals.
The only challenge is that this approach doesn’t produce leaders.
At best, classes convey concepts, but those same concepts are available in books around the world. Small group leaders don’t come from small group leader classes, campus pastors don’t come from campus pastor classes, and worship leaders don’t come from worship leader classes. Classes don’t harm leaders; they just don’t produce leaders.
Last week, I had this theory confirmed from two directions. On Thursday, I participated in an online gathering around the topic of campus pastor development. I shared the fantastic campus pastor class we created at Seacoast that didn’t develop a single campus pastor. The other consultant in the meeting shared the exact same experience. Her church had, simultaneously to Seacoast, developed a brilliant educational program for potential campus pastors. Their success rate was also zero. Two programs developed separately by two successful multi-site churches with a net outcome of zero.
The second confirmation came from Marcus Buckingham at the Chick-fil-A Leadercast. I wasn’t able to attend, but my wife shared that Buckingham’s research shows that leaders aren’t developed through leadership training classes. Concepts are shared, but leaders aren’t created.
So here’s my plea to church leaders; let’s stop pouring time and resources into leadership training classes. Let’s pull the plug; stop the madness. The more time we waste herding people into classrooms and force feeding them leadership platitudes, the less time we have to actually discover and develop and deploy leaders.
Next, we’ll look at how Jesus developed leaders. (Spoiler alert: He never created a workbook or had a sign-up sheet.)
