Why is leadership development so important? One reason is because It was important to Jesus, so it should be important to His church and His leaders as well.
Jesus modeled it for us. Jesus could have done it all himself. He was God, but instead He called the unqualified, trained them, promised them the power of the Holy Spirit, and empowered them to carry on the mission when He was gone. Jesus had an intentional leadership development plan and a leader succession plan.
I want to share three reasons I believe leadership development is important:
1. First, as a leader you must always keep learning.
I’ve always said “leaders are learners” and if we plan to keep leading we need to have a plan to keep learning. We live in an ever-changing world, so leaders need to keep learning new skills and ways to understand and relate to the culture around them.
2. Leaders need to keep growing so we can develop other leaders.
You can’t giveaway what you don’t have. I’m thankful that as a young leader I had a mentor that taught me the value of leadership development. Leadership development was a priority in his ministry, and because of that he convicted me of the importance of making this a priority in my ministry too.
3. Leaders need to develop “potential-future leaders.”
These are the people who are not leaders yet, but they have the potential to be a leader, some day. Why is it important to develop this group of people? Because one day we will be gone. Who will lead when you are gone? Do you have a leader succession plan? Even if you have enough leaders now, it is always wise to be developing future leaders.
There is a lot more that can be said about leadership development, but for now I just want to encourage you to make leadership development a priority. If you need help developing an intentional leadership development strategy you can contact me at davidl@brnunited.org.
