Developing Others Starts With You

— by Dr. Rob McKenna

While many would expect that a Faith-based organization would have the concept and practice of developing leaders and seeing people dialed in, it just isn’t so. I once told a mentee of mine who had sacrificed the high paying pathway of her peers to go and serve as a leader in a national church denomination, “Be aware that once you get under the hood of a church, it’s still run by broken people trying hard to do the right thing.” It’s not that I wanted her to come into the job with a bad attitude, but that I wanted her to have realistic expectations. When we associate something with Jesus, we so often expect it to run better, but that isn’t always the case. Organizations, faith-based or not, are filled with leaders trying to figure it out along the way. As Christ following leaders, the eyes of the world are on us, so the bar might just need to be even higher. 

Like many entrepreneurs, I’m a mutt. I’ve spent twenty-five years of my adult career as part university professor, part consultant, part pastor, and all entrepreneur. My focus has been on one thing - developing a highly trained generation of courageous and sacrificial leaders who would bring hope and conviction to a world where darkness is the default. I’ve had little desire to simply be another leaf of inspiration blowing in the winds of airports or Christian bookstores that come and go with the latest developmental fads. Instead, I wanted to provide an intentional pathway toward building up what I would consider Christ-centered leaders based on both a whole theological grounding and cutting edge leadership development research. It’s no longer good enough to let the greatest corporations in the world capture the best tools and practices. It’s time for faith-based organizations to reap the rewards as well. So, after twenty years of research and consulting with corporations, ministries, universities and all kinds of cool influencers in the world, I launched the WiLD Toolkit to take what we know from four decades on the developmental journey of leaders and put it into a scalable package for seeing our employees and leaders through a more accurate lens. More importantly, it’s about looking with them instead of looking at them. 

Based on that, here are a few lessons I’ve learned about leader and employee development:

Intentional, long play investments in people are hard - but so worth it.

Think of your last leader development offsite or experience. Most of what we think of are short term weekends away or keynote speakers whose messages don’t stick. As my colleague Dr. Daniel Hallak would say, this way of looking at leader development is like sending all our employees to summer camp for one week and expecting them to be transformed forever. Putting a structure in place for seeing each other is a good business decision, and the pay off for people seeing one another better is exponentially better than not. Can you even begin to imagine how different your organization would be if you and the people around you knew each other and knew each others’ motivations, purposes, strengths, and blind spots? 

The research on leader development looks like a Gospel story.

Unfortunately in many parts of the Church, a general distrust of anything scientific has been developed, and that is so unfortunate. Just because faith is our foundation, it doesn’t mean we can’t be informed by the best thinking when it comes to developing leaders. We do this in every other part of our life, but when it comes to developing people, we so often miss out. The amazing thing is that the research on the developmental journey of leaders looks like a story straight out of the Old Testament or book of John. Leaders, faith-based or not, are struggling to lead effectively, question themselves, and are just as broken as the rest of us. The greatest Gospel reality that all leaders face is that we are responsible for so much and so many, and vastly underqualified, while called to lead anyway. We’re broken but redeemable. 

Leader development is not a test they need to pass, it’s an investment we need to make.

When leadership development is treated like a training or a class to sit in on, we miss the reality that actual learning and growth isn’t like that. Classes finish with tests, while development finishes with progress and more questions. When we get over the idea that development is a test or a hurdle we leap over, we open up a world of ever-expanding developmental horizons. From that standpoint, you can’t fail to lead well and stop there. You can only fail to learn and move forward. 

We can’t develop an emerging generation of leaders unless we are willing to develop ourselves.

If you are a person who is attempting to model your leadership after the heart and attitude of Jesus, it starts with your heart first. When leaders apply to be a part of our programs, our first filter is whether or not they are willing to edit. If you want to know what an emerging generation of leaders is looking for, there are one of two ways to know - ask them or simply give voice to the questions you are asking now or asked in the past when you were in their shoes. When we dismiss away our own development or the questions that cause us to hesitate because we’re not willing to face them, we push the pause button on the value of our own investment in the leaders around us who need us to take an honest look inside. I know this is hard, but it’s not harder than the questions Jesus asked - and isn’t that the point? We can’t expect other leaders to learn the lesson we didn’t if we aren’t willing to face those moments for ourselves. Once we start with us, all the possibilities will open up for them. 

While we will likely develop unintentionally, that’s not enough for most of us. Here’s where my inner entrepreneur kicked in. I developed the WiLD Toolkit as a simple set of tools that leaders across the boundaries of business, ministry, and higher education are using to take a nice inspirational idea, and turn it into an intentional reality. Imagine what the future would look like if you knew where you are going next and more importantly, why. Imagine how things would be different if you were showing up better under pressure. Imagine what your next role would look like if you knew the experiences you feel called to have next and those you don’t want to repeat right now. Imagine the courageous and calculated risks you would take if you had a documented strategic network of people surrounding you. And now, imagine that for them - for all the people around who would benefit from that kind of intentionality. When we get purposeful about building organizational cultures where intentionally “seeing each other” is on the strategic agenda, everything changes. 

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[Special thanks to Perry Grone for the cover photo]