by Dave Miller, Co-Founder
New Rules for Leadership Development. If you’re over 30 you need this.
Embrace Boring
Develop the Whole Person
Stay Curious About Them and You
Value Time Differently
The secret of success to emerging young leaders on your team is NOT their talent. Nor is it yours. It’s not what they walk in the door with that you get the benefit of…it’s YOU and your willingness to learn how to coach them.
You already have a full plate. Adding development to it feels like one more program to run. It isn't a program; it's a relationship, and that's actually good news, because you don't need a curriculum to have a leadership conversation with someone.
The curriculum is your time.
Think about whoever developed you. If a professor comes to mind, it’s true they handed you a syllabus, but really what made the difference was the time out of the classroom, right?
That sports coach on a long road trip after the game, or after the long practice. They asked how you were really doing, then stuck around long enough to see you fail and watched what you did next. That's the whole method. It costs time, not budget.
We talk a lot about the “teaching church model” similar to a teaching hospital. They have a saying, see one, do one, teach one…that takes time. It takes talking. Talking doesn’t scale.
You can scale their education and training. You can even scale the spiritual formation. You’ll never scale leadership development.
“I want to develop leaders like Jesus.” That’s a great statement, but Jesus walked everywhere with His people. What do we imagine was happening on the 12-mile walk between towns?
This new rule is about you as much as your team. If your idea of development is squeezing in one more meeting after an already full week, you're not developing anyone; you're modeling burnout and calling it dedication. People copy what you do, not what you say.
Just because that young leader is a driven workaholic doesn’t mean you are developing or coaching at all.
Are they crushing it in the first month? Don't be fooled. That’s a mirage. It isn’t real. Give it time. You are just setting someone else up for a crash. We’ve done that for a few generations.
This is leadership malpractice. We don’t talk about malpractice much in the church. But if this is you, you are breaking a rule, and we need to do something different.
Protecting your own capacity isn't selfish; it's the only way what you're building outlasts this season. And what you are building is the next leader.
The value of time goes up every year. Invest it. If your coach looked at your to-do list and your calendar, is “leadership development” for you and others even on there? Is it reflected in your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual plans?
Wisdom doesn't download; it rubs off. Bring someone with you. Let them sit in on the hard meeting. Debrief the conflict in the car on the way home instead of alone in your head. You already do the work; the only shift is doing some of it with someone watching.
The highest-leverage development tool you have costs no budget: it's proximity.
It's your time, and the cost just keeps going up.