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How Leadership Coaching Can Change Everything About Your Church Organization
Oct 20, 2022
Have you ever preached an entire message with your fly-down? I have. It was worse than it sounded. We were about eight weeks into a new church launch and meeting in a movie theater. The stage was dark because we had zero budget for equipment, so our cost-effective solution was to shine the stark spotlights on me and my unzipped zipper. The metal teeth of the zipper were sparkling in the bright lights for 25 minutes before my message concluded. I was the last to know what everyone else had already noticed.
Even though my message was Christ-focused and well-delivered, only one thing mattered, the awareness of my issues. My zipper problem would have been easy to fix if I’d been aware. I share my embarrassing moment with you because I think it illustrates what you and I know to be true about leadership coaching. People around us can see our constraints before we do, and a great leadership coach is an effective way to grow in leadership–– they are empowered to bring attention to our constraints.
You and I are not doing ministry in a vacuum, your ministry has a culture. It might be unnoticed, but it's fully realized. Your ministry culture involves how you lead, how your teams interact with each other, how you handle conflict, and how everyone communicates with each other. Combine all those organizational elements and you have a culture in which you’re immersed. One you might not even notice.
After years of vocational ministry as a church planter and lead pastor, I’ve benefited from a leadership coach. So much so, I’m coaching ministry leaders myself because the tools I’ve learned catalyzed our church for greater impact.
Here are the top three reasons a leadership coach helped me as a pastor.
1. A great leadership coach can quickly identify your strengths and constraints.
Great leadership coach has read the books and had their teeth kicked in a time or two in ministry trenches. Their lived experience could be the reason you avoid the pitfalls they survived. Plus, a great leadership coach's outside perspective enables them to easily diagnose the problems and issues that need to be addressed in our ministries. When serving as a pastor, my focus was usually on preaching better. My time as a church leader would have been more effective if I’d spent less time in sermon prep and more time inviting wise counsel into my life to illuminate my real constraints.
2. A great leadership coach provides diagnostic tools to reveal your leadership limitations.
Whether we realize it or not, we all have limitations that hold us back from our full potential in leadership. One of the main reasons I struggled to identify my limitations is that I could only view things from my perspective. Our teams and churches are experiencing our leadership differently. For example, you may truly appreciate your team and feel humbled at the way they serve and lead others, but your team may not know you feel that way. A great leadership coach will have the tools and processes to easily assess your leadership while simultaneously showing how others are experiencing your leadership.
3. A great leadership coach creates insanely practical action items unique to you.
I love practicals, but I have found leadership development to be very vague and impractical. I have read hundreds of books on leadership, but I'm rarely clear on what to do next. How do I implement the information, or do my church team or I even need this information to be implemented? A great coach can give you actual steps, things to start doing and stop doing immediately that will change the trajectory of your leadership and your church, ways to think differently, and ways to behave differently. After all, leadership is our influence on others, and our behavior is the number one factor in how we influence others.
Let's Wrap This Up
A good executive coach has walked a mile in your shoes and can lift your arms when you need extra support.
The most effective leaders are devoted to relentless growth––a passionate commitment to consistently add knowledge, skills, and perspective. Leaders with this are unstoppable.
Relentless growth is not just about attending a seminar or listening to a podcast. Real, true growth happens through executive coaching. The best leaders are aggressively pursuing new strategies and then apply those strategies so that they can influence the people they care so deeply about.
Integrus executive coaching programs make all the difference because the skills that got you where you are now likely will not be enough to make you thrive in your next season of leadership. As you are entrusted with greater roles and responsibilities, you must continue to sharpen and develop your knowledge, skills, and perspective to be as effective as possible.
The reason someone is a high-level ministry leader is not because of a special calling but because of their uncommon commitment to growth.
If you would like to get started with executive leadership coaching, we're here to help.
Click here to contact our team today.
Let me ask you, what are the non-negotiable behaviors in your organization? Have you defined them, and clarified them the way Jesus has? Let me offer three potential non-negotiables your team could adopt.
Lyle Wells President
Lyle Wells President
Lyle Wells President
Brent Monogue Director of Strategic Engagement
Developing team chemistry by intentionally building relationships is crucial for success.
Reduce risk, improve the health of your culture, and set your team up for success!
Greatness demands intentionality. Ministry has always been challenging, but these past few years have been the hardest for many of us. Becoming the leader God called you to be will require more intentionality because of the significant challenges ahead of you and your teams. Here at Integrus we engage daily with top-level ministry leaders who are experiencing: Extreme fatigue Burn out Harsh criticism Polarizing divisions Lack of encouragement
Have you ever felt overwhelmed and underresourced as a ministry leader?
Leadership is a behavior that influences others and drives outcomes. A biblical example of someone who influenced those around him and drove outcomes is Nehemiah. He had a task in front of him in that the walls around Jerusalem were down. Nehemiah could have sulked about this, but he chose to influence those around him which yielded an outcome of the walls being rebuilt.
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