Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast
“Is Your Church Facing a Leadership Shortage? Here's How to Solve It“
August 21, 2023
Mac Lake
Intro: Do you have a strong leadership bench and pipeline that will facilitate your organization's future growth? Well, today on episode number 351 of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we discuss how to develop a leadership pipeline that will produce four generations of leadership in your organization.
Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.
Al Lopus: Hello, I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of the book Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.
I’m delighted to welcome Mac Lake to today’s podcast. He's the author of The Multiplication Effect: Building a Leadership Pipeline that Solves Your Leadership Shortage.
Throughout our podcast, you’ll hear Mac talk about a story of how he thought his first church was going to fire him, and why; Jesus’s model of leadership development, focused on relationships and care; the shortfall of thinking leadership development is a two-day workshop; the challenge for us all, are we discipling three leaders?; and the importance of creating a culture for developing people.
I know you're going to love this interview with Mac Lake, maybe even listen to it a couple of times. But before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by the Best Christian Workplaces Employee Engagement Survey. You can sign up today to discover the health of your organization's culture. This fall would be a wonderful time to listen to your employees with our easy-to-administer online Survey by going to workplaces.org. Being a certified best Christian workplace improves your ability to attract talented employees and keep them longer.
And by BCW’s new leadership and group coaching. We help you transform your leadership effectiveness with our stakeholder-based coaching process. Learn more by going to workplaces.org/coaching. Check it out today.
And hello to our new listeners. Thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time by creating valuable episodes like this one.
But let me tell you a little bit more about Mac Lake. Mac’s passion is growing leaders for the local church. Mac is a national consultant and training-director expert whose passion is growing leaders for the local church. He was instrumental in building the assessment and training process for the North American Mission Board of the SBC. Mac has been a church-planning pastor, a leadership development expert, and he's been featured in online training programs and speaks and leads seminars. Mac’s a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary, which happens to be a 2023 certified best Christian workplace. He and his wife, Cindy, live in Charleston, South Carolina. He blogs at www.maclakeonline.com, and you can see him on YouTube.
You know, having a leadership pipeline is so important, and I know that you'll get a lot out of our conversation. So here's my conversation with Mac Lake.
Welcome, Mac.
Mac Lake: Al, it's so good to be with you. I've been looking forward to this. I know you and I, we have a lot of similar friends and work with a lot of similar churches, so I've been excited to have this conversation with you.
Al: I am excited about this, too. We have run into each other by name, but never met each other, so I'm looking forward. I'm glad we've had this opportunity.
So, share with us one of your early experiences with leadership in the church. I know this is so true of so many church leaders, where when you're planning a church, you're getting started in a ministry, there's just too much to do and not enough of you. I think we have a lot of people listening that can identify with that. Tell us the story.
Mac: Yes. Yeah. I call this my leadership-development wake-up-call story.
Al: Yeah.
Mac: Al, I was an associate pastor in a church in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and I had learned to lead. I looked at myself as a leader, and I was leading a lot of people. I was leading all of our student leaders, all of our children's leaders, all of our worship leaders, all of our guest-service leaders. Every leader in that church reported to me. And I had been at that church—I was young—I'd been at the church, probably about a year, maybe a little more, and couldn't sleep one night. I told my wife, I said, “Honey, the church is getting ready to fire me.” She said, “They're not going to fire you. They love you.” I said, “No, no. They're going to fire me. They just don't know it yet.”
Al: Oh.
Mac: I said, “I'm leading so many people, I'm leading so many things, and it's all getting ready to crumble down around me, but nobody knows that but me. There's not enough me to go around.” And, Al, that night, I couldn't sleep, and I sat in the hallway with a legal pad, and I was like, “God, what do I do? What do I do?” And the Holy Spirit just whispered in my soul. “Write down the names of everybody that reports to you,”—88 leaders.
Al: Wow.
Mac: And then it was like God said, “Okay. Now draw a circle, put your name in it, and I want you to choose seven people around you that you're going to start leading through.” So that's what I did. I went back. I recruited these seven individuals. Said, “I'm going to put you over an area of ministry. My job is to make you successful, to develop you, to meet with you, to pour into you. Your job is to make the leaders underneath you successful.” And for the first time in my life, I started doing leadership development, and it was a game changer for me and my ministry and my marriage because I wasn't taking a day off at that point either.
Al: Yeah. Oh, that’s a great story, Mac. Yeah. It causes me to think of a couple of things. You know, first, maybe it was a Moses moment. You know, I think of when Moses was so overwhelmed, and his father-in-law, who was probably the first consultant in the Bible, said, “Hey, you need to develop some leaders to do this work.” And also, I think of the scripture in 1 Peter. It says, “Shepherd the flock that God has entrusted to you.” And we think of that as the first flock, the leaders that you have. As you said so articulately, if you develop them, then the work will be done through them and so much more effective. Well, that was an important shift in your thinking. There's no question about that.
Well, you connect leadership development and discipleship. Now, that's a fresh idea that's come out. Explain how leadership development and discipleship are not separate functions of ministry but part of your overall vision.
Mac: Yeah. I see discipleship and leadership development as working together. Back when I had my leadership-development wake-up call, one of the things I did around that same season was I studied through the life of Christ chronologically. I got real curious about, how did Jesus develop people? And so I thought, I need to look at the Gospels in chronological order to see what He did. And, Al, it was mind blowing to study that through the lens of development.
So Jesus began, depending on what date you use, but Jesus kicked off His ministry somewhere around the summer or fall of 26 A.D. And He met some of His disciples at that point, or what would be His disciples: Peter, James, Andrew, John, Nathaniel. He met some of them around that time. But it was a year later, a year later, He looked at them and said, “Come follow Me, and I'll make you fishers of men.” That was a call into discipleship, into followership, not into leadership. So that's when they began to follow Him consistently, and He began to really disciple them as followers.
It was nine months later, in 28 A.D., when Jesus looked at these guys. He went up on a mountain and He prayed all night, came down, and Luke says He calls His disciples to Himself, and from among them, He chose 12.
Al: Ah.
Mac: Now, I've got a chart of His life, and I put that box in red. It's at the exact midpoint of His public ministry. That's when He flipped the switch. That's when He went from basic discipleship to disciplining them as leaders. It's fascinating: from that point on, when you look at Jesus’ behaviors with the 12, there's a lot of withdrawing. There's a lot of taking them and being in homes and field trips for teaching, for intensified experiences. And so what you see is Jesus really beginning to develop them as leaders from that point up to His death and resurrection.
So, for me, both are essential. Basic discipleship, I'm teaching somebody to live like Jesus. But then with leadership development, I'm discipling them to lead like Jesus. And that's one of the core differences between the two. And the church, I believe the church does a decent job with discipling new and young believers. Where we tend to drop the ball is we go, “Oh, look. That person's living like Jesus.”
Al: Right.
Mac: “Therefore, they must be able to lead,” and we throw them into leadership, but we don't equip them for it.
Al: Yeah. Right, right.
Boy, amen. That’s exactly right. So, we start off with living like Jesus. Then, we lead like Jesus. That was also insightful, Mac, where you talk about, from among them, He chose 12.
Mac: Mm-hmm.
Al: Yeah. Well, we don't think of it that way, oftentimes, as well.
Mac: And what's fascinating, there might have been 100, 200 people at the foot of that mountain.
Al: Right.
Mac: After He chose the 12, He looked at the rest of the crowd and said you can go home. I'm hanging out with—these are my 12. And pastors are uncomfortable with that, to look at the people in their congregation and go, and from among that congregation, I have to make a decision. Who am I going to spend a disproportionate amount of time with? And we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time with the few in order to impact the many. It's the loving thing to do. It's the compassionate thing to do. Otherwise, we're hampering the vision and the mission that God's given us when we try to be everything to everybody.
Al: Yeah. Wow. Well, that’s a great explanation of leadership development and discipleship, how they go together.
Other leaders get stuck trying to fill immediate needs and gaps, especially when working with volunteers. It seems like our churches will always need more people in children's ministry, for example. We always hear that call from the pulpit, “Volunteer for the children's ministry.” So how can leaders shift their thinking from filling gaps to training and empowering people?
Mac: Yeah. That's a great question because what most of the churches that I work with, that's what they're doing. They're identifying people, and they're plugging them in spots. And what I'm trying to help churches do is say, “No, no, no. Let's don't do that. Let's equip people for the role.” And what happens when you do leadership placement—because this is what happens most of the time. Most of time, let's say you've got a children's pastor, a children’s director, and they need a couple of new leaders, and they look around the congregation and go, “Oh, that person's not ready. That person's not ready. Ooh, they're not ready. Oh, here's somebody ready.” And they find somebody, and they place them in that position. Well, that's not leadership development; that's leadership placement. And there's a big difference between the two.
When we do leadership placement, what happens is people tend not to have the competency needed for that role. And if they don't function with the competencies they need, their confidence will begin to wane. When you first put somebody in a position, they're generally excited about it. “Oh, wow. God's going to use me. Wow, I can't believe you chose me for this.” And we mistake their enthusiasm and their excitement for competence.
Al: Yeah, yeah.
Mac: But it doesn't take them very long to begin to go, “Ooh, I'm not as good at this as I thought,” or “This didn't turn out like what I thought.” So they're low competence, and low confidence causes them to have short-term tenure in our area of ministry, because a lot of times what we do is we'll say, “Okay. Shadow somebody for two weeks.” It’d be like me saying, “Hey Al, I know you've never played baseball, so go stand in that batting cage. I'm going to throw you two pitches and give you two swings, and then I will put you in a game.” Well, in that case, you might be excited about baseball, but you're probably going to strike out. And so what I want to do is I want to train somebody in the competencies they need—
Al: Right.
Mac: —grow their confidence, and ensure that we're walking with them long enough to where they are getting a grasp on the role, feeling good about it, making a difference, and the longevity of their service is going to increase because of that very factor.
Al: Yeah. Leaders are so frustrated with the turnover—
Mac: Yeah.
Al: —where, as you say, they place people in jobs. They don't really train them for it. Then, the volunteer experience is low competence, as you say, and low confidence, and they get disappointed, frustrated. They feel like they can't really do the job, so they quit. Yeah. That’s—
Mac: But here’s the thing. They don’t tell us that. What they tell us is, “My life situation changed. I'm busy.”
Al: Yeah, yeah.
Mac: Not “I feel like a failure.”
Al: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, “God's called me to something else.”
Mac: Yes.
Al: Yeah. Right.
Well, your focus is a people-oriented leadership-development approach, not a program. That's also, as we've kind of looked at your information, your book. Share about the importance of this focus on people in developing a leadership pipeline. What do you mean by that?
Mac: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think has to change in our nation is when we think about leadership development and you look at the common practices of leadership development, it's typically what I experienced when I felt called to church planting. I felt called to plant a church. I called my local denomination, and they said, “Great. We want you to come to a two-day boot camp.” I sat through a two-day boot camp. I listened to a nice guy. He was nice. He lectured for eight hours one day. He lectured for eight hours the next day. I'm sure he went home and said, “Honey, I just trained 25 church planters.” But I went home and said, “Honey, I got a notebook with 273 fill in the blanks, but I still don't know how to plant a church.”
Al: Yeah.
Mac: And so the church defaults to a program-oriented approach to leadership development, which tends to be an old-school form of development of classroom-based telling versus asking. What I advocate for is a people-oriented approach. Let's go back to the way Jesus developed leaders. He taught leaders in context, not a classroom. He asked a lot of questions, not just telling. It was telling and asking.
Al: Mm-hmm.
Mac: And so when you talk to people and ask them about leadership development, they understand—they'll tell you, “Oh, it should be a relational approach.”
Al: Mm-hmm.
Mac: And that's common sense and common theory, but it's not common practice.
Al: Right.
Mac: So even though people would say leadership development needs to be relational, they don't use that approach. Because we want it to be fast, easy, and linear, it's easier to stick a bunch of people in a box, lecture at them, and go, “I just told them everything they need to know to lead.” But that doesn't mean they learned it.
And so what I tell churches is, let's make it relational. This sounds counterintuitive, but with leadership development, you have to think smaller and slower, not bigger and faster.
Al: Mm-hmm.
Mac: If you want it to be exponential, if you want to see a multiplication effect, think smaller and slower. So instead of me training 20 people in a classroom, I'm going to do a triad. I'm going to take three people, and I'm going to meet with them over not two days or two weeks but over maybe two to three months, slower, smaller, and then, that gives them time to develop the competence and confidence. And then I'm going to challenge, not all of them, but some of them, I'm going to challenge them to reproduce themselves. When you roll that out, it's smaller and slower beats faster and bigger.
Al: What do you call that? The Tortoise and the Hare approach, right?
Mac: Yeah, yeah.
Al: Yeah, yeah.
So, in your book, Mac, you talk about healthy spans of care. I like the word care; it’s not control, which we oftentimes hear when we talk about spans of control. In a number of people, one leader can effectively be responsible for them. And your wake-up-call story kind of speaks to this. So expand on this area for us, how it links to the need to multiply leaders, this healthy span of care. And you’ve kind of talked about triads, so smaller. But, yeah. Tell us a little more about that.
Mac: Yeah. So, when I'm working with a church, one of the exercises I do early on is to have every ministry take a giant wall Post-it and draw the organizational chart for their area of ministry: children, students, groups. I was working—this is a very common story, but I remember this one specifically. I was working with a church, and it was a big church. And I looked over at the wall Post-it, and the small-group pastor had his head down, and he was rubbing his head. He was obviously distressed. So I went over and I said, “Hey, what’s going on? What's going on? What are you thinking?” He pointed at his chart, and he said, “Mac, I have 101 small-group leaders that report to me.” I said, “Okay. What's the problem?” You know, obviously it's a problem, but “What's the problem? What are the consequences of that structure?” He said, “They don't feel cared for. They don't feel known. They don't feel equipped. I can't coach all these people. I struggle communicating with them.” I said, “Okay. Yeah, you're right. Now, let's help you build a healthy span of care.”
Al: Yeah.
Mac: And so that's what I'll do with churches. And it's very common when I do that exercise for staff members to look at me and go, “Mac, I've got 25. I’ve got 40. I got 60 people reporting to me.”
Al: Right.
Mac: And so a lot of times I'll be in a room with 40 people, and I’ll say, “Hey, now imagine all of you report to me. Do you feel cared for? Do you feel challenged? Do you feel encouraged?” And they go, “No.” I said, “Now let me divide the room up a little bit, okay? I'm going to break you into groups of five. And now I'm going to oversee eight of you, and each of the eight are over 65. Now, I can care for the eight. I can love the eight. I can encourage the eight. I can train the eight. And what I do with them they're going to do for you.”
And a lot of times staff members struggle with it because they go, “Well, wait a minute. I feel like my team needs to know me. I feel like all my leaders need that I need to be there for my leaders.” It goes back to Jesus again and His span of care. He chose 12 from among all His disciples.
Al: Right.
Mac: And near the end of His ministry, at the end of His public ministry, John 15:15, he said, “He looked at His 12 and He said, I no longer call you guys servants. I call you friends because everything the Father’s made known to Me, I've made known to you.” Jesus is looking at these guys near the end of His three years, and He's going, hey, listen, guys. You and I, we've been through a lot together. We've walked together. I've told you everything that Father’s downloaded on me, I've downloaded to you guys. I mean, You're my intimate 12. And if Jesus had a span of care of 12, then we need that or less.
Al: Well, we kind of even, I think about it, Mac, even the triad, going back to your triad comment. So we had Peter, James, and John. So those are three. You think that was kind of an intermediate level of care that those three might have had some additional responsibility for the other nine?
Mac: Yeah. And so, yeah. When the Gospel writers spell out the 12 names, they're always grouped in the same four—
Al: Mm-hmm.
Mac: —which is very, very interesting. I don't know if Jesus gave them special responsibilities or not, but this I do know: He did take Peter, James, and John and did intensified training with them that He did not do with some of the others.
Al: Right.
Mac: And so when I refer to triads, generally what I'm saying is, hey, always be mentoring three people.
Al: Yeah.
I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.
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Al: Welcome back with Mac Lake.
Mac: Always be discipling three leaders. You may have more people that report to you, but be raising up the next three. When I worked for North American Mission Board, I had four guys over four regions, trainers, and one of the questions I would ask them two to three times a year, who are your three? And I would tell them, “Guys, I never want to lose you. I love you guys. I love you being on the team. I love working with you. But if God calls you to do something else, I need you to bring to me three names of people that you're training to do what you do.” And if everybody had that mentality, oh, my goodness, what a difference it would make in the culture.
Al: No question. Wow. Yeah.
Well, let’s talk about culture for a minute. You know, you've helped many churches thrive by multiplying leaders. You know, can you share an example of how you've seen a church culture go from struggling to flourishing as you've embraced leadership development as a core to their discipleship efforts, or maybe embraced discipleship and then encouraged their leadership development?
Mac: Yeah. Here's a recent one. I took a church through the process. It's a small church, a church plant four years old in Kansas City. They went through the process last year virtually, because I do it virtually or on site, and they went through the virtual experience. And this is a church plant of about 250. Sean Petrie is the church planter. He's the pastor. Very, very beginning, he was like, “Mac, our church is growing. Even during COVID we're growing. We don't know what we're doing with leadership development. We get all of these people coming, and we need more leaders. We’re desperate for leaders.” And he had some people that he considered, you know, volunteer staff type of thing. They're all just so busy. We're all so busy because of the whirlwind of ministry, Sundays coming every week, you know?
Al: Yeah.
Mac: I worked them through the process. And when I work with a church, I help them articulate a leadership-development strategy. It's a threefold approach to developing leaders. We articulated that. We helped them identify the competencies needed at every level of the pipeline. And then, we identified the content that they would apprentice new leaders in. And Sean sent me an email, probably two or three months ago. And I've received emails like this from him before. And he said, “Mac, most recently, we have 20 brand-new leaders.” This is in a church of 250 people. “We have 20 new leaders. Think it was, like, 12 new people apprenticing. We have two new people at the coach level. We have a couple more people apprenticing at the coach level.” He said, “I've got staff members now who are just”—I used to tell him, one of his staff members who is just like, “I can't believe this. I've never experienced this. A leader I developed is now developing a leader.”
Al: Yeah.
Mac: And he said, “It is literally changing our culture.” And this is what happens many, many times. Churches, regardless of the size, their staff members are doers, not developers.
Al: Right, right.
Mac: At best-case scenario, some of them are leader developers, but they're the one doing all the leadership development. And the big paradigm shift that I try to help churches with is your staff's job isn't just to develop leaders; it's to develop developers.
Al: Yeah. Uh-huh.
Mac: That's what changes the culture. And with Sean, I think they're in third generation, and probably pushing fourth generation of replication. And it takes four generations of multiplication to have a culture of leadership development.
Al: Four generations of multiplication. That’s something to think about. Yeah.
Mac: People ask me, “How do I know when I'm there?” Well, you know, Paul told Timothy, the things you have heard from me—that word heard means, in the Greek, it means to have heard something and received it and put it into practice—entrust to reliable men—entrust is a Greek word used to mean to serve up a meal. So I'm going to serve up some leadership development to some reliable men. I can't make them eat it, but I can make that leadership development enticing enough to where they want to eat it—who will equip others also. So Paul's showing Timothy four generations of replication there. He's teaching this young pastor, Timothy, in Ephesus, if you want to build a culture of leadership development, you have to have this four generations of replication to have that culture that you desire. Once you hit the fourth generation, it takes a life of its own. It's just the way we do things around here. Most churches don't have the discipline to carry it to the fourth generation.
Al: I can see that’s where you really want to get to. And it becomes the way we do things around here, which is my slang definition of culture.
Mac: Yeah.
Al: So, Mac, your work has been leadership development within the church context. And we have a lot of nonprofit ministries, even Christian-led businesses that listen to this podcast. So how do these principles apply when the emphasis is on staff rather than volunteers? And you've talked about that a little bit, but maybe some of the similarities and differences for these nonprofits and Christian-led businesses.
Mac: Yeah. It very much applies to nonprofits, to businesses, because the leadership-pipeline concept is a progressive development for individuals in your organization. Most churches, organizations, nonprofits, and businesses, they structure for function. Who reports to who. Leadership pipeline changes it. You're structuring for development. What's every individual's next step that if they have the potential to go to that next level, what's the next level of development that we can take them to? This is really important because now when you identify that, you can have succession planning at every level of your pipeline, not just the CEO level of your pipeline. So that's one reason the leadership pipeline or the multiplication effect would be important for a nonprofit organization.
Al: Yeah.
Mac: Secondly—and I'm sure you preach this all the time in what you do—if you create a culture where you are developing people, their loyalty to you goes up. Here's the thing I see so many businesses especially doing. They're asking the question, how can I get more out of my people? That's the wrong question.
Al: Right.
Mac: The question is, how do I get more into to my people? If I pour more into them, more will come out of them. And so leadership development is crucial not just in the onboarding process, but in the ongoing process.
Sometimes we will train somebody when we onboard them into our nonprofit or into our business. But what about the ongoing development that's necessary to help them reach their fullest potential? Rather than just saying, “Here's your job description. Go do it,” how do we use their job responsibilities to leverage their development? How do we utilize the goals that we're having them establish for the sake of development? And so leadership development and leadership pipeline is crucial for nonprofits and organizations for the sake of development, but also for the sake of scaling and multiplication. If you want to have multiple sites, multiple locations, multiple expressions, then the leadership pipeline is how you get there.
Al: Yeah. Right. Yeah, that leadership is the key, and without leaders, you really can't expand. Yeah. We call, in our FLOURISH model, where FLOURISH is an acronym, for eight keys to the employee engagement, uplifting growth as the “U,” and it's all about developing. And of course, one of our questions is, our supervisor cares about me as a person, is key. And you know, this is really one of your themes that you’ve said, is do people feel cared for?, and that's really important.
So, as you think about leaders now in their twenties and thirties, as we're seeing this next generation come in and millennials are now a majority of most churches and workplaces, how do the principles of multiplication for this next generation of leaders, what's timeless or maybe what do we need to flex with for this next generation?
Mac: I love that question. And I think the bigger flex is for people—I'm 60—for people my age. For people 35 and older, I think, is going to be the big adjustment, because I was speaking to a large group of pastors one day, and after I spoke, I said, “Any questions?” This young man raised his hand. He was 24, and he said, “I've got a question.” He said, “I want to grow as a leader, but yet the church I'm a part of, I'm only 24, so I don't get a lot of opportunity. And I don't feel like anybody's believing in me, giving me opportunity.” And he was a sharp, young guy.
Al: Yeah.
Mac: I looked at him—and this room was mostly older pastors—I looked at him and I said, “I want to apologize to you for the sake of my generation. We've told you you have to earn your stripes, that you have to wait your turn, all these sort of things. But here's the truth. You're growing up in a world where information is at your fingertips. You can find a podcast, YouTube, blog post, whatever. You can accelerate your learning because you have access to learning that I didn't have when I was 24 years old.”
Al: Right.
Mac: So older leaders, let's accelerate the younger leaders’ development because they have access to it. So what I think we have to do is we have to give young leaders tasks before we give them title, give them stretch assignments, get comfortable with failure, and recognize that failure is the best fertilizer for development that you can have. Jesus was so comfortable with the failure of His disciples. It's funny. When you look at His life chronologically, late and even in 28 A.D., He looked at these guys. They'd been with Him two—He said, “Are you still so dull? You're not understanding this.”
Al: Yeah. Right.
Mac: You know, they were still making mistakes, still not getting it. Jesus was patient with their failure. And so I think with young generation, they're willing, they're able. It’s just my generation, we have to say, how can I help accelerate that and not put a lid on it, because they're not going to grow at the pace I grew at? They're going to grow at a faster pace if given the opportunity, because information is not enough. They have to have the experience.
Al: Right, right.
Mac: That's what I’d say.
And then, not doing the information dump. They want hands on. They want mentoring. They want that type of relational development. And they would like to get it from older people.
I started mentoring a young guy a few weeks ago, and he sent me a voice message after the first session. He said, “I came home, and I told my wife this was totally different than I thought.” He said, “You sat there and asked me questions the whole time, and you were actually interested in what I had to say, not just telling me what you had to say.” It was such a paradigm shift for him because he's never experienced that, and that's what we have to learn to do.
Al: Yeah, yeah. Wow.
Well, Mac, this has just been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed so much. You know, as I look back over my notes, how we train people. We need to train and equip people, and using a relationship approach, to not have this as classroom based. I mean, so many of us have thought, well, leadership development, that's a week-long training course or a couple-days’ training course, or it's a classroom situation. But no, it’s more people and relational oriented. Let's be focused that way. Absolutely. And then creating a healthy span of care. I love how you described—I mean, all of us want to be cared for in the roles that we have. And you can't have a leader caring for 48 people or even 20 people or even 15 people, maybe not even 10 people. So having that span of control. And then, it's a process, and organizations have to realize this is a process. You talk about, first of all, developing a leadership-development strategy, identifying competencies. I mean, these are real—this is hard work, right?
Mac: It is.
Al: I mean, this is real work, you know. Okay. What's the philosophy? What are your competencies? And then, you know, what content are you going to use for leadership development? I think that's a one-two-three model to get started with. Absolutely. So this has been great. I love the analogy of if you really want to have leaders that are going to stay with you over time, they have to be both competent in their work and then feel cared for at the same time. And when they're not competent and they, then, are not confident, that's a real cause for short-term leadership, and they'll look for something else.
Boy, these have been great takeaways and others. But how about, is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't talked about that we should mention?
Mac: I would say for a church, a nonprofit, even a Christian-led business is you have to create a cadence for leadership development and calendar that cadence. So that's one thing. A lot of people will talk about it, but they never put it on the calendar. Leadership development—and they'll tell you, “Well, we just don't have time to do it.” Leadership development is not something you add to your schedule; it's something you integrate into your schedule.
Al: Yeah.
Mac: And then the second thing I would say is especially in the church and probably nonprofit as well, it's repositioning leadership development as discipleship. It's not a business concept. It's not a corporate concept. It's a biblical concept. Jesus discipled His leaders. And if we had time to go into, man, the second half of His public ministry, to look at how intense His development was as leaders for those men, there's no doubt it's a biblical approach. Let's start calling leadership development discipleship as well.
Al: Yeah. Great.
Well, you can find out more about Mac Lake and his book The Multiplication Effect at maclakeonline.com.
Mac, thanks so much for your contributions today. And most of all, I appreciate your devotion and service to our loving God, the way you've taken the message of Jesus and His life and translated that into leadership development, as well as your passion for growing leaders for the local church. So, thanks for taking this time out of your day and speaking into so many lives and so many of our listeners. Thanks, Mac.
Mac: Al, it was great to be with you today. Thank you.
Al: Great. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Mac Lake. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
And you can find ways to connect with him and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.
And if you have any suggestions for me about our podcast or have any questions on creating a flourishing workplace, please email me, al@workplaces.org.
And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership, expand your organization's impact for good, and see greater faithfulness in our entire culture, help us achieve our goal to see more flourishing Christian-led workplaces. To help, please share this podcast with another leader or rate it on the Apple Podcasts app. And if you're interested in learning more, go to workplaces.org.
Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.
We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.
Al: You know, next week will be the climax of our summer series. You'll love the passion of my guest, Kevin Enders, as we talk about how a flourishing culture leads to greater ministry impact. Kevin is the president of 4Kids, located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. You're going to love his deep personal love and compassion for forgotten children as he leads the flourishing 4Kids organization.