Leadership is a Skill
Whether you are trying to lead your team, a staff, a group of volunteers, your family, or yourself, everyone can be a better leader.
Leadership is a skill that can be practiced and developed.
Even if leadership isn’t in your job title or written in your job description, you can leverage your influence to a greater degree. And if leadership is expected of you, it’s even more important to develop these skills.
For yourself.
And in others.
You can get better as a leader and you can help others in your sphere of influence get better as a leader.
The Importance of Leadership Development
As you look to help others get better, there are two big decisions you need to make. You need to decide about the cadence and the content.
Determining a cadence is important because, while important, developing leaders may not feel urgent. That’s why you’ve got to put it on your calendar. You need a clear cadence that gives you the right time with the right people. This won’t naturally develop…you must intentionally carve out that cadence.
Second, you need the right content. President John F. Kennedy said, “Leadership and learning are inseparable to each other.” Leadership is strengthened when conscientious, consistent learning is taking place. So when you get together, you don’t just need to talk about life or hope that organic conversations lead you to where you want to go.
You need to know when you’re going to talk about what—that’s what nailing down the cadence and content will do for you.
The 12 Core Skills
While leadership itself is a skill, we find it helpful to be more tangible and tactical. You don’t want to stay at the 30,000 foot level all the time. You need to be more specific.
- What specific skills would be helpful when it comes to self leadership?
- What specific opportunities should be developed when it comes to leading others?
- Where should I get better in in order to better lead projects?
We surveyed hundreds of pastors and church leaders and asked them what specific skills they wanted to develop in their teams. We talked to leadership development and church staff experts and whittled the topics down to 12 of the most important lessons.
We created a recommended cadence and developed all of the done-for-you content in a product we call LeaderPulse. It’s a great solution to help you implement a total leadership development system in your church.
Inside LeaderPulse, you’ll find a leadership development curriculum that walks through the 12 Core Skills. These 12 lessons are broken into primary categories: leading yourself, leading others, and leading projects. Here's a free lesson.
The 12 Core Skills are:
- Integrity – consistently choosing to do the right things
- Self-Awareness – looking at who you were created to be
- Work Ethic – bringing your best to whatever you do
- Time Management – leveraging your limited time for maximum impact
- Unity – a shared effort toward a common goal
- Communication – sharing what needs to be said so people do what needs to be done
- Casting Vision – painting a picture of a preferred future
- Delegation – trusting and empowering someone to act
- Innovation – exploring a new perspective on an existing problem
- Resilience – bouncing back from setbacks
- Planning – deciding and documenting what needs to be done
- Evaluation – looking back with purpose
As you answer the question “What does my team need to know?” you might have different answers. But these common skills would certainly help your team take big steps forward.
Imagine what would happen if you took some time at one of your existing meetings and talked through these skills and used the curriculum and exercises we created with your existing leaders. Imagine what could happen in your church if your leaders developed new skills in each of these areas.
Here is one of the lessons that you can download and use however you want.
If you want the rest, as well as team devotions, meeting retreat agendas, staff development exercises, and even more, check out LeaderPulse.