Building More Leaders

On this episode of the Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, emphasizes the importance of intentional leadership development in ministry. He argues against the passive approach of waiting for leaders to emerge naturally, advocating instead for proactive strategies such as 1-on-1 training and closed small groups. Iorg suggests that effective leadership development requires commitment and time investment.

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Host

Jeff Iorg

President, SBC Executive Committee

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Jeff Iorg: 00:00

Welcome to the lead on podcast. This is Jeff Orbs, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, carrying on our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. That's what we do on this podcast. We talk about real issues that leaders are facing in the day to day work of ministry leadership. Today, I wanna talk about the theme of building more leaders.

Jeff Iorg: 00:24

A number of years ago, there was a popular book entitled Leaders Are Made, Not Born. And the premise of the book was that while there are some natural born leaders, and there's no question about that, there are some people that are simply born and have remarkable gifts, special charisma, leadership capacity for organizational design, and other things that the rest of

Jeff Iorg: 00:47

us just didn't get. While some leaders are born, the

Jeff Iorg: 00:52

premise of the book was that more leaders are made than born. And so I want to talk today on the podcast about building more leaders. Some of you think that the way to get leaders is to hope they show up,

Jeff Iorg: 01:09

and you're waiting for them. You're waiting for them to walk in

Jeff Iorg: 01:14

the door, join your church, and become your leaders. You're waiting for them to suddenly materialize out of the membership of your church, having never demonstrated any real remarkable leadership capacity. They're just going to suddenly vaporize in front of you ready to go. Well, that's just not true. Not gonna happen.

Jeff Iorg: 01:34

You're you're you might have one occasionally that comes like that. But most of the time, if we're gonna have more leaders, we're going to have to

Jeff Iorg: 01:43

intentionally set out to make them.

Jeff Iorg: 01:49

The better approach, instead of just waiting for leaders to show up, is an intentional discipleship program that includes leadership development. Now the podcast is too short to talk about what it looks like to have a fully orbed intentional discipleship program. I wanna instead focus on just the one piece of that. You might call it the the the the crowning of that or the the outcome of that or the the last part of that, and that is leadership development. Now practically speaking, there are two primary methods that I have used for leadership development over the years.

Jeff Iorg: 02:31

The first method is a closed small group, and the second method is 1 on 1 training, which then turns into 1 on 1 coaching. So let's refer to these two methods as closed small groups and 1 on 1 relationships. Now when I talk about doing this, the first thing that usually comes up is leaders say to me, I don't have the time. Well, you have a choice to make about how you use your time. And if you don't invest time in leadership development, you will have to spend more time doing the things that other leaders could do for you or with you.

Jeff Iorg: 03:22

And so it's not a matter of if you don't spend time on leadership development, you're going to get more time. It's that if you don't spend time on leadership development, your time is gonna be consumed by doing things that other people could do if you develop them and gave them the responsibility and the authority to get it done.

Jeff Iorg: 03:40

And you're not gonna have any more time than you would have if you invested that time in leadership development. So you have

Jeff Iorg: 03:48

a choice to make. And that choice is, are you going to carve out some time for leadership development in your, I know, otherwise busy schedule, Or will you just continue to try to cover everything yourself and by doing so, find that you have even less time going forward? So you have to make the choice, and I'm gonna challenge you to make that choice to invest yourself in these two primary methods of leadership development, close small groups and 1 on 1 relationships. Now let's talk about these two methods for a few minutes. And then after I've done that, I wanna come back and talk about some best practices and some realistic expectations no matter which of the two methods you are using.

Jeff Iorg: 04:34

Let's first talk about 1 on 1 training. This is where you develop a relationship with one other person to train them for, leadership in your church or your organization. And then, when you finish the 1 on 1 training phase, you move into a 1 on 1 coaching phase where you continue to coach them along as they get established in the responsibility that you've asked them to take. Now, 1 on 1 training, let's keep some things in mind. First of all, these need to be, in most cases, same gender relationships.

Jeff Iorg: 05:06

So men training men, women training women. But you may say, well, I have some responsibilities in my church and some potential leaders in my church that are a different gender. Men women, women to men.

Jeff Iorg: 05:20

What would we do about that? Well, you can still do 1 on

Jeff Iorg: 05:24

1 training, but you may need to convert it to 1 on 2 training so that you're meeting with 2 people at a time. No more than 3 because if you get more than that, we're gonna move into that later. That's that's called a closed small group. So that's one thing to keep in mind. These need to be same gender relationships.

Jeff Iorg: 05:41

But if they're not, they don't need to be 1 on 1 relationships, they need to be 1 on 2. Now, I'll go ahead and say this. I was gonna add it at the end as well. Another way to handle this, if you're dealing with, mixed gender 1 on 1 and 1 on 2 leadership training,

Jeff Iorg: 05:56

is to just make sure you always do it in a public place. Leadership training is not particularly confidential. It can be

Jeff Iorg: 06:02

done in a conference room with a glass door. It can be done in a coffee shop. It can be done in a public place. And so that also helps to decide or determine how to handle these gender situations. Some one on one training, examples of what I mean and how you might use it.

Jeff Iorg: 06:19

For example, you might say, well, our church needs a new preschool director. Someone direct our preschool Sunday School program or our preschool childcare on Sundays. So in order to do that, I need to select someone that I think has the potential for doing that. And then, once I've selected that person, I wanna say to them, hey, I'd like to for you to consider the possibility of being the the preschool ministry director for our church. And I'd like to train you to do that and help you to understand the responsibilities and then see if we could coach you into fulfilling them.

Jeff Iorg: 06:51

And in order to do that, I've got this book that I picked up. It's on how to lead a preschool ministry. And I'd like for us to meet once a week for the next 3 to 5 weeks or whatever it is, how many chapters are in the book. And I'd like for us to go through this together and let me train you on what it means to be the preschool director for our church. And then if you do that and the person agrees to do it, then you say, then we'd like to go into a coaching mode, like for the next 3 or 4 months.

Jeff Iorg: 07:14

I'd like to meet with you once a month just to help you get established in the position and to coach you into the job. 1 on 1 training turns into 1 on 1 coaching in these 1 on 1 relationships, and that's how you create a new preschool director for your church. Now some of you are thinking the way you create a new preschool director is you you just pick out someone and you say, hey. You know, I think you'd be great at this. Would you like to be the preschool ministry director of our church?

Jeff Iorg: 07:40

And they say, well, I

Jeff Iorg: 07:41

I don't know. Well, you know what? Why don't you read this book and and

Jeff Iorg: 07:45

why don't you why don't you think about it and and then and then if you wanna do it, I'm sure you'd be great. And then they come back and they say, well, you know, I maybe might be interested in this. Oh, good. You start next week. And then that's leadership development?

Jeff Iorg: 07:58

No. That's that's not leadership development. That's a recipe for a failed person and a discouraged person pretty quickly if that's all you do for them. You could also do this for things like a vacation bible school director or an adult Sunday school teacher or a person who's gonna direct your security on your parking lot or the person who's gonna be your head usher. I mean, all of these things require someone to lead them in a church ministry context.

Jeff Iorg: 08:22

And in order to get a person into one of those leadership roles, one way to do it is to do 1 on 1 training, which turns into 1 on 1 coaching. Where you go to a person and say, I would like for you to consider this responsibility and I'd like to train you for it if you have interest and then coach you into it as you get started. And in doing this, you're going to meet with them once a week or maybe as 3 to 6 weeks, get them ramped up and ready, and then move them into the responsibility. And you say, well, you know, that's that's not a long period of training. Well, the training is to get them started.

Jeff Iorg: 08:55

The coaching is to get them established. And so the whole process might take may may take 6 months, but the training phase is the phase that you meet with most intensively. In the coaching phase, you just keep them moving and keep them going until they feel established in the role. So 1 on 1 relationships is one way to do leadership training. A second way though is what I refer to as closed small groups.

Jeff Iorg: 09:21

Now, this is when you wanna train 3 or more people for something and you wanna meet with them in a different capacity. You're gonna meet with them, for example, a general leadership training that might take maybe 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, something like that. You're gonna meet with them to work through something that just is more generally related to leadership in your church. It doesn't have to be a specific title or a job. Now, it could be.

Jeff Iorg: 09:43

You could say, well, I'm gonna do a close small group of just men that were thinking about becoming deacons or just people that were thinking about, you know, staffing up our summer vacation bible school program or something like that, where everybody in the group's being trained for essentially the same thing. But that's typically not how these small closed small groups work. Instead, closed small groups typically are more general. They're just general leadership development and then out of this general leadership development closed small group, you may develop some 1 on 1 training and coaching relationships or you may, in some way, take the person into a higher level of training to get them ready for a specific job that you want them to do. Now a lot of examples of this, but, one of my favorites was by Jim Henry, the longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church of Orlando, Florida.

Jeff Iorg: 10:33

Jim and I were teaching a doctor of ministry seminar on leadership development, and I heard him tell his story. He said for 30 years for 30 years, he taught something called the pastor's leadership class. It was a 12 week class. It met in the fall, 12 weeks

Jeff Iorg: 10:51

in the spring, and,

Jeff Iorg: 10:53

it was repeated every semester, these 12 weeks of study. He only accepted, I think he said, something like a dozen or maybe 20 people in it. It wasn't a huge group, but it was it was, you know, he's in a very large church, so it's gonna be a little larger group than most of you would have in a very in a smaller church. But Jim said that he would, have these groups meet for these 12 weeks in the fall, 12 weeks in the spring, and, every 12 week cycle, he covered the same material. And he said the the goal was to produce people who had an understanding of leadership from our church's perspective, understood the mission, vision, values of our church, understood the needs that were in our church for leadership and in the areas of ministry where we had openings or we had where we had, opportunities.

Jeff Iorg: 11:38

And he said what would happen is as I would take people through my 12 week pastor's leadership class at the end, again, this isn't a large church, staff would be watching to see who came out of that and recruiting leadership out of that leadership class. And the staff would then recruit people and take them into this 1 on 1 training and 1 on 1 coaching that I've already previously previously described. So that's just one example. Now you may say, man, I'm in a small church. I can't do that kind of 12 weeks.

Jeff Iorg: 12:06

I can't go that long. I I don't have that many people. I understand all that. Maybe you just need to get 3 people together and say, you know what? I wanna train you guys on leadership.

Jeff Iorg: 12:15

And after we've gone through this 10 or 12 weeks together, then we'll think about where you might fit or where you might see yourself being useful and where we might place you on the team in our church. It can be something as small or as simple as that. Now, so

Jeff Iorg: 12:29

far, I've said today that leaders need to be made, not born. We're not waiting for people to come into, the leadership of our church already made. We're saying, no. We have a responsibility to find a way to create more leaders.

Jeff Iorg: 12:51

So if we're going to make more leaders through 1 on 1 relationships, meaning 1 on 1 training, 1 on 1 coaching, and close small groups, what are some best practices for both methods? Well, first of all, as I already mentioned, these need to be private meetings, but not secret meetings. If you're doing 1 on 1, do it in a coffee shop. Do it over lunch. Do it in your office, but with a door with a window, especially if you're doing 1 on 1 with men and women or different genders.

Jeff Iorg: 13:21

These are private meetings, meaning that you need to have some opportunity to just talk together about what you're dealing with, but they're not secret meetings. They they they don't need to be held in that kind of context. 2nd, leadership development relationships need to have limited duration. I suggest that most of these relationships need to go on for about 4 weeks to no more than 3 months. Now, you you need more than one meeting.

Jeff Iorg: 13:47

You you need 3 or 4 weeks of meetings at least to really train someone to do a particular task or responsibility. And then to coach them up to get them moving into that may take a few more meetings over a period

Jeff Iorg: 13:57

of 2 or 3 months. But you don't wanna

Jeff Iorg: 14:01

make an open ended commitment to a person for this kind of relationship. There's no need. You're training them for a task or a responsibility. You're saying, I wanna train you to be the vacation bible school director. I wanna train you to supervise security on the parking lot.

Jeff Iorg: 14:15

I wanna train you to run the the, van pickup service for our church on Sundays. I wanna train you to do this. And I can train you to do that in a few weeks and then coach you a few times, and then you're off to do the responsibility. And so, limited duration. One of my real mistakes that I made early on in leadership development was I made a commitment to a person that I was gonna shape them, train them for leadership in our church, and I committed to meeting with them for a year.

Jeff Iorg: 14:49

It was far too long, and it was especially far too long when I realized about halfway through the process that they did not have the leadership capacity I thought they did. And when I was actually training them to do, they were not gonna be able to to accomplish. It would have been so much better if I had said to them, I wanna meet with you for 6 weeks to train you on the initial aspect of this ministry and get you started in it. And then over time, I would have learned where their maximum ceiling was in their leadership capacity, and I wouldn't have tried to elevate them beyond what they were really capable of doing. So I advocate leadership development relationships whether it's a 1 on 1 or a close small group, these are relatively short duration.

Jeff Iorg: 15:32

You know, like 4 weeks to 3 months. Think in terms of that time frame. 2nd, they need to have a specific purpose. Now the specific purpose can be general. Okay?

Jeff Iorg: 15:44

So in other words, you can say, I'm gonna get these 6 people together, and I'm gonna take them through a leadership book, and I'm gonna see what emerges from that. And so that's general, but your your purpose is specific enough because you're trying to cover this one particular book or one particular curriculum. That's what I mean when I say it has to have a specific purpose and can still be general. That's especially true if you're doing a closed small group. But now let's talk about being very specific, and that is, I think leadership development is done best when it's done toward a specific purpose, especially when you're dealing in a church context with volunteers who have a limited amount of time and who are gonna be asked to make an investment into a specific area of ministry or responsibility where you already think they have passion or interest and you simply wanna hone that and raise them up into a higher leadership level.

Jeff Iorg: 16:35

So for example, you wanna have one on one training with someone to be a preschool director or a children's Sunday school teacher or an adult, a discipleship leader, or you wanna train someone to be a life group, leader or a hospitality leader or someone who's gonna be in charge of the ushers on Sunday or who's gonna be in charge of the parking lot security. All of these responsibilities are very important and you need to train leaders for all of these kinds of things. But you really can't do that in a group setting because the skill sets are very different, the requirements are very different, the materials are very different. And so, that's why I say it needs to be specific purpose. And that's why in most of these responsibilities, I would advocate that you have a 1 on 1 relationship.

Jeff Iorg: 17:14

1 on 1 training turning into 1 on 1 coaching. Because you wanna 1 on 1 train a person to take on your, security responsibilities and then a 1 on 1 training responsibility to take on your preschool responsibilities. Those people are completely divorced from each other in terms of their responsibilities and of their their commitments and their leadership needs and their, the kinds of skill sets that are required for these jobs. And so doing them together probably isn't going to work. Another best practice is to use an already created curriculum and, if possible, something that can be a repeated

Jeff Iorg: 17:48

curriculum. That's why I advocate when you're training someone

Jeff Iorg: 17:52

for the for a specific leadership task, find a printed piece or a web page piece that is on that specific issue and use that as the basis of your training. So back to the preschool ministry director. You don't have to write a curriculum about that or come up with a training tool. All you have to do is secure a book on how to lead preschool ministry and say, hey, this booklet on how to lead preschool ministry is 6 chapters, and I'd like to meet with you for the next 6 weeks. And each week, we'll talk through a chapter.

Jeff Iorg: 18:18

We'll talk about what it means, what it means for our church, what it might mean in your life, how you might have to adjust your expectations, or what you might be learning that would help you to do the job. And let's work through this together, and over the next 6 weeks, complete this task and then you'll we'll we can make a decision if you're really ready to go forward in this responsibility. And so, repeated curriculum or a curriculum that can be repeated means that you select something that's already been developed that's in print. If you need to, you can customize it a little bit or mark out a page that doesn't really fit your setting or whatever. But having something like that is so much more time effective than you trying to create material for all of these positions.

Jeff Iorg: 19:00

That is virtually impossible to do with most scheduling and calendar challenges that leaders are dealing with. And finally, the last best practice is that leadership development should cost the candidate something. Now I know we like things to be free in church, and I I understand that. We like things to be low cost and low commitment. But when you're talking about leadership, there's nothing wrong with asking a leadership candidate to make an investment of something in the process.

Jeff Iorg: 19:32

Going back to the Jim Henry illustration, Jim said that he had this 12 week class that he did every fall and repeated every spring, And he had one investment commitment that the candidates had to make, and that is they couldn't miss more than 2 weeks of

Jeff Iorg: 19:48

the class. And he was pretty firm about it. He said, when you committed to being there, you had to be there every week. And if you missed 2, when you missed the second one, he sent you

Jeff Iorg: 19:59

a letter that said, hey. Thank you for coming, but you can't come back, and I hope you'll sign up again in the future if you feel like you'll have the time to come to appropriately complete the class. Now you may say, well, weren't people offended by that? No.

Jeff Iorg: 20:13

Not if they're leaders. Not if they really wanna be leaders. They would have understood, you know, this is serious business. This took a commitment. I wasn't able to

Jeff Iorg: 20:22

make it right now. I'm okay with that because I want this training to matter, and I want the people who come through it to have actually learned something. Therefore, if I wasn't able to, well, that's okay with me. Now would someone ever get upset? Well, of course, people can get upset about anything.

Jeff Iorg: 20:38

But most people will understand if you're gonna lead something, it's gonna require a higher level of commitment. And if you're gonna be trained for it, you might as well go ahead and start modeling that commitment by the by what you have to do to receive the training. And this having the candidate invest something could be time, like I just illustrated. It could also be money where you charge them and say, we're gonna do this together and the curriculum cost $39 and you have

Jeff Iorg: 21:03

to pay for that. That's not wrong to do, to ask people to make an investment of some amount of money to get them the training that they need. So whether you're

Jeff Iorg: 21:14

asking a person to put in time or money or something else that you can ask of them, it's okay to do so in leadership development because you're asking them for a higher level of commitment. And if they won't make the commitment to the training, then they definitely are gonna make the commitment to the responsibility. So these best practices, a private but not secret meetings, limited duration, 4 weeks to 3 months, specific purpose, and even if the purpose is general, it's still the specific purpose of having a general group, a curriculum that's repeatable and that you don't have to create, but that can be used over and over again and is standard in some way and then cost the candidate something. They have to put in time or money or some other investment of themselves to demonstrate commitment and show that they are ready, not only to be shaped for leadership, but to lead. And then finally, let me close out with some, what I call, realistic expectations.

Jeff Iorg: 22:10

For most of us in leadership, we are only able to meet with 1 individual at

Jeff Iorg: 22:14

a time for leadership, development and 1 closed small group at a time, and that's the most. So if you can meet with 1 person, 1 on 1, say 3 or 4 times a year, then that's sufficient. And if you

Jeff Iorg: 22:32

have a closed small group that meets once a year or at most twice a year for maybe 6 to 12 weeks each time, that is absolutely sufficient. You don't have time as a leader to spend 40 hours or even 20 or even 10 hours a week on this. That's why I think a 2 to 3 hour a week commitment in leadership development is both legitimate and impactful for

Jeff Iorg: 22:56

most churches or organizations. So you're gonna meet with 1 individual at a time. You're gonna meet with 1 small group. You're gonna try

Jeff Iorg: 23:06

to invest about 2 to 3 hours a week at most in leadership development. Now if you do this, think about it. Let's say that you do meet with 3 or 4 people over a year's time in this 1 on 1 relationship, And then let's say you have a a close small group that has maybe 3 or 4 people in it, and you meet with them in the in maybe this fall and maybe the spring, something like that. You have 2 different groups. Well, if you had 3 to 4 or, let's say, 3 to 5 in each of these closed small groups, that's 6 to 10.

Jeff Iorg: 23:38

And if you met with 3 or 4 or 1 on 1, that's another 3 or 4. So now we're up to 9 to 14, maybe 15.

Jeff Iorg: 23:44

Think about it. Think about it. With this simple methodology of 2 to 3 hours

Jeff Iorg: 23:49

a week, always meeting with a small group, investing in 3 to 4 people a year 1 on 1 and 3 to 5 people in a small group twice a year, you could produce possibly 10 to 15 new leaders for your church or organization. Wow.

Jeff Iorg: 24:11

That's how you build more leaders. You do it in small bites of time, 2 to 3 hours

Jeff Iorg: 24:21

a week, 1 on 1 and in low small groups,

Jeff Iorg: 24:24

and you produce maybe 8 to 15 new leaders every year, people who step up to a higher level of responsibility, people who do things like direct to bible school,

Jeff Iorg: 24:39

be a children's ministry director, teach in an adult department, supervise the security on the parking lot, manage the ushers on Sunday morning,

Jeff Iorg: 24:48

deal with the counting of the offering and the tellers and all that takes place there. These are the kinds of things you train people to do. Put them in place and let them lead out in those responsibilities. And then if you do that, you will have discovered that intentional progress beats wishful thinking every time. Intentional progress beats wishful thinking every time.

Jeff Iorg: 25:17

So you can say, oh, I wish we had more leaders.

Jeff Iorg: 25:19

Well, I wish more people would come to our church that are leaders. Well, I wish more leaders would walk in the door. Well, I wish some of

Jeff Iorg: 25:24

my members would suddenly spontaneously morph into leaders in front of my eyes. That's wishful thinking. Instead,

Jeff Iorg: 25:34

focus on intentional progress. Say, god, I'm gonna carve out 2, maybe 3 hours a week at the most to build it to build more leaders, And I'm gonna start looking at the needs in our church and looking at the people that we have and saying, alright, who can I move into some leadership responsibility that's geared to their capacity that does meet legitimate needs in our church, and how can I do that? Well, with some of them, I'm gonna need to meet 1 on 1 for 3 to for 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 10 weeks, depending on the job, depending on what needs to be covered, depending on their capacity. And then after that, I'll have to coach them a little bit, Maybe even once a month for a few months until we get them fully operational. But I'm gonna start putting people into place.

Jeff Iorg: 26:22

I need to form a class of some kind, a leadership development class, which is gonna be small, 3 to 5 people. But I'm gonna run that class on a continuing basis, and I'm gonna buy a book or borrow a book or find a book that really fits my leadership perspective. And I'm gonna do something simple as just saying we're gonna get together and read a chapter in this book every week for 10 weeks and talk about it. We're gonna watch these videos that I found on leadership that I think are really helpful. We're going to use this material to raise your level of leadership capacity, and at the end of this, we're gonna talk about where we could then put you into some training to get you moving into a specific leadership responsibility in our curve.

Jeff Iorg: 27:00

That old book, Leaders Are Made, Not Born, that book is true. There's a few leaders that are born. No doubt about it. But most leaders, at most levels in most ministry organizations, are made, not born. Replace wishful thinking with intentional progress, and do it now as you lead on.