One of my favorite inside jokes with my husband while driving around our city, is spotting a restaurant, and asking him who he had a date with there. I ask him this because I know that he most likely did take someone on a date there! No, my husband was not a serial dater. But he knew that he wanted to get married someday and have a family.

Whether you are a pastor or leader, the process of finding the right person for a position is one that causes stress across the board. Many of my clients worry that they won’t be able to find the best person for a position.

If you’re pastoring a church or leading a team, chances are you’ve felt the effects of delegating gone wrong. It can cost you time, energy, resources, and even people. For example, delegation done poorly can have you spending extra hours and lots of emotional energy fixing a massive problem created by the person you delegated a new responsibility to.

When I first started out as a pastor, I imagined preaching engaging messages and leading Bible studies that saw people bringing their friends to join us. The reality? Just because I did it didn’t mean they’d come.

So, what do you do when the person you give a task to doesn’t follow through…do you let them drop the ball or not?

Until March 2020, most leaders and pastors were comfortable leading in-person and from upfront. So, when we abruptly found ourselves leading remotely and from behind a screen, it became a bit disorienting, even humbling if we’re willing to admit it.

Let me be brutally honest with you, if your team’s success hinges on you being involved in every single detail and decision, it’s simply not a team effort. You’re not working with and through your team; you’re simply using individuals on your team to do tasks that you don’t want to do. This doesn’t require trust, it doesn’t require creativity on the part of others, it doesn’t require a team.

The first time someone asked me if I was going to go into ministry, I literally laughed out loud and confidently shook my head and said, “no.” I had just spoken to my home congregation of 5,000 over two days and three services having just come home from spending time visiting our sister church in rural Tanzania. In fact, the first time I spoke to an audience that wasn’t in a classroom setting (aka that wasn’t part of a school assignment) was while I was in that rural Tanzanian village. I was 21 and had an interpreter next to me translating my message into Swahili. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I now know that I didn’t think I would be a good fit for ministry because truthfully, I didn’t see examples of women like myself in leadership roles.

Newly in my position I was standing in front of a group of parents whom I didn't know very well yet. I was giving them all the details about a week-long canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) for their high schoolers. After I shared an enthusiastic and detailed vision for everything the week would entail, I confidently asked if there were any questions. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any as I had laid out all the details and now it was simply time for their kids to sign up!

Let’s get a little nerdy today and dive into servant leadership. I’ve heard too many off the wall things said about it that I know many of you will appreciate some clarity. Servant leadership is not a preference thing like ice cream or cookies, it is a specific leadership model with specific behaviors associated with it. I’ve literally had to refrain myself from running up to a stage to take the mic when hearing servant leadership being encouraged as a means for keeping people from leaving a particular organization. It couldn’t have been further from the essence of servant leadership, which is all about serving others for their sake, not the organization’s (in fact, a servant leader would encourage someone to leave if their current assignment wasn’t the best fit for them). So, let’s dive in.

Without leadership development, visionaries can bulldoze the very people they have a heart for, as seen by the early lives of Joseph and Moses. Joseph is an excellent example of the visionary leader Baldoni writes about in his book Great Communications Secrets of Great Leaders. In their research, Taylor et al. found that with their ability to create and communicate their visions, visionary leaders can energize their organizations by "providing meaning and purpose to the work."