Developing Leaders – 10 Core Skills You Need

Before we jump into the outline, let me offer these three principles for developing leaders:

1. 1. If it’s a skill, it can be learned. The 10 skills I will outline can be taught and learned.
   2. You may already have a good grasp of all 10 skills, but that doesn’t mean you maintain those skills at a higher lever or larger church. You need to continually learn them as you grow and the church grows.
   3. They are listed in a sequential fashion. They begin more basic and get more nuanced. However, leadership development rarely runs in a straight line. It’s not linear. This is just the best way to learn and teach it.

AMPLIFIED LEADERSHIP
A Relationally-Based Process of Leadership Development

Developing Leaders – 10 Core Skills You Need

1) Connect

Leadership begins at the place where we connect at a heart level. Connection is the beginning of all true influence. Authenticity is at the core of connection and is essentially about you being real as a leader, it’s about being yourself. You will never connect if you self-protect—(attempt to hide the real you.)

2) Appreciate

The ability to appreciate people as God made them is the foundation for seeing what they can become. Appreciating people the way they are can seem like a tension for leaders because we want to help people grow, improve and realize their potential. So we challenge because we care about them. But we need to be careful not to push so much that our intentions are misunderstood. It’s important that we love and appreciate people the way they are.

3) Encourage

The ability to encourage attracts people to you and builds their self-confidence. Encouragement is the emotional fuel that enables people to hold longer, reach farther and dig deeper than previously believed possible. If you’re an encouraging leader, people move toward you simply because you help them think, feel and believe better about themselves.

4) Inspire

Inspiration connects people with the vision and lifts their sights to new possibilities. All leaders must inspire, not just the senior pastor and senior staff. The cool thing is that you get to inspire by your own style and there are several common styles that you might identify with such as relational, strategic, passion, competence and coaching.

5) Invite

The ability to invite with conviction gives people the opportunity to serve in distinctive areas of meaningful ministry. The skill of inviting people into ministry is another way of saying recruiting. Your invitation extends an opportunity to be part of something bigger than they are, one they could not accomplish on their own. Be careful not to dismiss “recruiting” as a management technique. Jesus was a master recruiter. When he said to Peter and Andrew, “Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people,” He wanted a yes.