The day in and day out of a leader’s life can become a bit monotonous. The routine of the weekly meeting schedule can leave you a bit deprived of inspiration and ideas to move your team forward. The urgency of pending projects and Sunday programming squeeze out moments for dreaming and planning.
Can you relate?
Overcoming this resistance is a leader’s great challenge. Adding time for planning and dreaming seems like a pipe dream. Other teams with more time, more staff, more resources have the luxury of staff trips with guest speakers. You hope someday you’ll get to that place, too.
I’ve wrestled with all those things, too. Here are three excuses I’ve allowed myself to believe over the years:
1) We don’t have the time. There’s never a good time. Seriously. No matter how far in advance I plan and strategically arrange the calendar, it never fails that staff development always lands at a terrible time. Do it anyway.
2) We don’t have the money. And there will never be enough. In fact, I actually have fewer dollars per person to spend on staff training and development than I did five years ago when the staff was 75 percent smaller. Ministry dollars are lean. Get creative. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be fun and meaningful.
3) I have to do it all myself. For years I naively and rather pompously believed I had to create all the content myself. We already discussed how we don’t have time, so don’t add extra pressure for yourself. Involve others in the planning and use tools that already exist.
This week the WCA Leadership Summit Team Edition releases, and it’s one of my favorite tools to solve at least two of my three excuses. It’s an inexpensive way to take great content (that you didn’t have to create) to inspire and motivate your team.
