Another cool link to checkout
By Linda Riddle, Awakening Coordinator
Hi everyone! Here’s another cool link I thought I’d share.
Pastor Stovall was recently asked by Catalyst to write an article in which he shared some insights into leadership. The article featured some of what he has shared in his recent blog series “Top 10 Leadership Mistakes I’ve Made”. Click here to read the entire article.
Mistake #10: Allowing myself to become too discouraged
By Stovall Weems
Some of you might be a little surprised by this one, but it’s true: If I am not careful, I can get discouraged really easily. In fact, I used to get depressed almost every Sunday night. I would joke with some of my staff and pastor friends and we would call this the “Sunday night abyss”. Because no matter how great services were, or how many people got saved, I would always be discouraged by something that didn’t go right or some part of my message that I felt didn’t connect with the audience. I’d go through seasons of feeling like I was not making the most of my potential and just felt generally frustrated. I’d start feeling like we were failing and not doing enough to reach people. I would get down on myself really bad, which is exactly what the enemy wants. Honestly speaking, there were a few times I felt like giving up, but God has taught me over the years to go to Him when I am feeling down and focus on His love for me.
It is ok to have feelings of discouragement when things aren’t moving forward at the speed you would like them to or when an area of ministry does not reflect the excellence you think it can reflect, but you have to balance that with contentment and thankfulness. Leaders are always going to focus on the few things that need improvement and can easily overlook all the improvement that has been made! God wants us to be thankful and rejoicing at all the great things He has done and will continue to do. If a few setbacks send us into a tailspin we will not be able to lead from a position of strength. Here is my rule-be thankful and grateful for all God is doing, and if you do get upset, just don’t ever let that carry over to the next day. Each day has enough challenges of it’s own and God is good!
I hope that by sharing these top 10 leadership mistakes I made in the first 10 years of our church, you have been strengthened and encouraged. I believe that it is important to share failures and mistakes so that we can all learn and grow from them. I want to let you know that if you are reading this I am praying for you and believe in you as a leader. Thanks so much for allowing me to speak into your life.
Stovall
Mistake #9: Not Resting
By Stovall Weems
This mistake can be an easy one to commit. Working in the ministry, (while it has it’s challenges and difficulties), is very satisfying. It’s exciting to see people’s lives transformed and help meet people’s needs through the love of Christ. There’s passion and purpose in knowing that what we do has eternal impact connected to it. So it’s no wonder that we can easily start “burning the candle at both ends” and put off taking time to rest, as there’s always so much to do. However, not taking time to rest is basically a violation of the principle of the Sabbath, and God’s principles cannot be violated without consequence. If we ignore this, and don’t take time to rest and get refreshed, this can lead to burnout very fast and it will be extremely difficult on us individually, as well as our families.
The bottom line is this- we can never finish all our “ministry work”. People have needs 24/7. Hell does not take a day off and there is always so much to be done for God. But we have to keep looking at the big picture and think long-term. We will be much more effective for Jesus in the long run if we take our proper rest.
Personally, I have found that this is something I have to be intentional about and work hard at protecting, but it always pays off.
Stovall
Mistake #8: Not leading at the right level
By Stovall Weems
Very simply put, this mistake had to do with me spending time and energy on decisions and details that I just quite frankly didn’t need to be spending time and energy on. I would allow myself to become focused on problems or challenges that our leadership team was very capable of handling, and I would give unnecessary time and energy to fixing or tweaking something that others could easily do. I would spend time on planning details and calendar meetings that I honestly didn’t even need to be involved in.
When I spend time with our staff, what they need from me is vision, encouragement, inspiration and creativity. Not my preferences on where to do the next water baptism service, what to put in video announcements, or how to make our connection card easier to read. We have incredibly creative, pro-active people on our team that carry the vision and the heart of our church very well. They are capable of doing all these things better than I can. By getting involved in these types of things, I would begin to lead at a lower level and become a bottle neck to things moving forward. Unintentionally, I was conditioning the team to rely on my input before they could move forward with something instead of empowering them to think through it and do it themselves.
When leaders step up and lead at the right level it causes everyone else to step up as well. Jesus modeled this very well. But we must also recognize that giving people authority and responsibility also carries with it accountability. This was also modeled by Jesus. (Matthew 25: 14-30)
Leaders love solving problems- just make sure you are solving problems at the right level.
Stovall
Mistake # 7: Not trusting my first instinct
By Stovall Weems
As I encounter situations, many times I have an immediate, instinctive judgment which directs me to go in a certain direction or evaluate that situation one way. However, many times I made the mistake of not following that instinctive judgment and I would allow myself to be talked out of it, or would even talk myself out of it for one reason or another. Nearly every time this happened, we had to suffer unnecessary energy drains and we’d actually end up circling back around to what I first felt intuitively.
Nearly all of our decisions are team lead and team oriented, and it’s important to have healthy discussion and get feedback. However, there will be times when things are moving so fast that the senior leader must make a decision based on his intuitive “gut instinct”. Let me be very clear – no team member carries the equal burden of moving the church forward like the senior pastor does. If there is a prompting of what lies ahead or of a potential challenge, it’s so important to follow that prompting. This is intuitive leadership that comes from following God.
Stovall
Mistake #6: Delegation Without Proper Training
By Stovall Weems
Whenever we had vision for an area of ministry, or simply needed relief in a certain area we would quickly put people in staff and leadership positions to help out. However, we often did this without providing proper training or even giving clear expectations of what was needed of them. For some reason, we just expected people to “get it” and jump on the train that is moving 200mph and figure it out. We would dump a ton of stuff on them along with huge responsibilities, but all without the proper coaching.
Fortunately, most of these people had high capacity and leadership potential, so eventually, they figured it out and everything fell into place. However, the mistake was not setting them up for a win right from the beginning with proper training and setting clear expectations. Even though it fortunately worked out, the loss was the amount of time and energy we spent on the back end because we did not spend the right amount of energy on the front end.
Delegation is so important and very necessary, but in order to set people up for a win it must be done with clear communication and some up-front investment.
Stovall
Mistake #5: Not Sharing Vision Enough
By Stovall Weems
God given vision brings with it such momentum and energy. It’s exciting to share vision, but leaders have to make sure the vision stays in front of the people and reinforce it constantly.
While I’ve always made it a point to share vision with the church, staff and key leadership, I didn’t do it enough. In our earlier years, I would share vision with the church twice a year, and maybe double that with staff and key leadership. I thought that was plenty. Every time I did, there was great benefit from it. Staff got refreshed, and people in the church got excited, and wanted to be a part of what was going on. We had an increase in weekend participation, serving team signups, group participation and so much life would just burst forth as a result. It was great, and I thought I was doing a good job at communicating the vision.
But what I’ve learned is that as a leader, I can’t just communicate vision every four or five months, I have to keep the vision out there in front of the people at all times, especially to the staff and leadership team. I have to seize every single opportunity I can to reinforce it. Vision should not have to be brought back to memory, it should soak in and influence even the simplest of day to day decisions. When shared in a simple way, it will be easy for others to know it, own it and easily share it with other people as well. (Habakuk 2:2)
Just when you think people are getting sick of hearing about vision, they’re most likely just getting it for the first time.
Stovall
Mistake # 4: Avoiding the painful and difficult decision to dismiss staff
By Stovall Weems
(Part 3 of 3)
This is the last part of Mistake #4 – The most dangerous kind of person you could have on your staff is someone who is gifted and talented but has a different agenda. This is someone who acts like a team player and says all the right things, but behind closed doors they are undermining leadership, speaking against decisions and violating Biblical and staff values. They bring strife wherever they go and usually cannot work with a team of peers. The people they have underneath them they draw to themselves and develop an “us and them” mentality. They are a tremendous source of pain and fatigue to the rest of the team.
I’m not talking about having disagreements with each other. As a richly diverse staff, we have lots of healthy discussion, and share different points of view. This is a very regular and productive component of our lead staff meetings. I’m talking more about using disagreement as an instrument of division and undermining authority. It’s really more of a heart and behavior issue and is very serious.
When strife begins to enter a team things begin to go to another level in danger. The longer it is tolerated the more people will get hurt. The person who sows strife is blinded to the fact that they are hurting people. Many times they are deceived in thinking they are actually helping people, or even protecting them. For the sake of self-preservation and their own agenda they will defile and hurt anyone they can with their poison. (Hebrews 12:15) God hates strife, and He hates discord. (Proverbs 6:16-19) If this is present in the staff, it must be dealt with swiftly and decisively. I am very thankful that this has been very rare on our staff. However, if someone on our staff causes strife or discord, they are given one warning. Then, if it happens again they are immediately dismissed.
Thanks so much for all your great comments so far on this series. Next week I’ll continue with Mistake # 5.
Stovall
Mistake # 4, continued: Avoiding the painful and difficult decision to dismiss staff
By Stovall Weems
Today I’m continuing in my blog series on the Top 10 Mistakes I’ve made in the ministry. If you’ve missed any of the previous posts in this series, make sure you check them out because they build on each other and I qualify much of what I’m saying here about moving the church forward.
As I mentioned previously, I have found in the ten years of building our church, that there are going to be times when we must face the difficult decision to dismiss certain staff members. I really elaborated a lot on the “why” and “when” behind this in my last post. In the three situations where I have found it is necessary to dismiss staff, the second is when you have someone on the team who is quite simply, causing problems.
I’m not talking about a staff member that just makes mistakes. We all make mistakes and in a healthy work environment there’s mercy and grace to walk those through and learn from them. But once again, it’s important to not confuse love and kindness with purpose, fit and ability. What I’m referring to is a staff member who even after lots of coaching, vision, care, and clear direction is not only not improving but is actually causing problems. Maybe something has happened in their personal life, or they have allowed themselves to become offended. Maybe they have an authority issue, need attention, are insecure or are just prone to drama. These people many times are just complicated. It is interesting how sometimes people function great for a period of time in a certain role, but then really begin to have challenges. There are no warnings signs and then all of a sudden they hit a level or a season or a different role and some real unhealthy issues start to surface. They begin to be very problematic to the team and even hurt the people around them.
When you have someone on the team that is causing problems, they can quickly become a drain to the team instead of a lift. Avoiding the difficult decision to dismiss them will only begin to demoralize the rest of the team and will impact the overall effectiveness of the team as you will find everyone is spending energy and time trying to deal with them personally or handling the problems they are creating.
This type of dismissal can also be handled in a positive and productive way. The key again is having the proper systems in place to help, acting in love, and dealing with it early on and not avoid it.
Next week I will talk about the 3rd type of dismissal which is the most crucial of all, and how to deal with two deadly things to any staff or team; strife and discord.
Stovall
Moving the Kingdom Forward
By Stovall Weems
Thanks so much for all your comments. I’d like to elaborate more on my last post and qualify a bit of what I mean by the church moving forward.
What I mean by the church moving forward is reaching more people for Christ and making more disciples. What I mean by moving forward is more people going to Heaven and less people going to Hell. We have to remember what’s at stake – it’s people’s souls. If someone on the team has become a limiter in that capacity, it’s not right before God for us to overlook that and avoid confronting the difficult decision of that person moving on to a non-staff capacity. I am not talking about not being loving, gracious, generous and merciful. We should be Christ-like in everything we do. We should not operate like corporate America when it comes to love and truth and being like Jesus. But if we avoid dealing with that decision, then we’ve put our own comfort, or that person’s feelings above a lost world and we’d have to answer to God for that. So in essence it is actually more important for the church to operate this way in comparison to a business because so much more is at stake. But remember, we are not dealing with chicken burgers or office products. We are dealing with Heaven and Hell. We need to get as many people out of Hell as possible and that will not happen without the right team.
Stovall
