Systematized leadership development is a phrase that’s uncomfortable for most leaders I’ve talked with. To them, leadership development is highly personal and requires discernment. Systematizing something often sounds like de-humanizing it.
That’s not what I’m advocating for. I believe that leadership development should be well-defined in every church, but especially in multisite churches where the senior leaders are further removed from lower level staff and volunteer leaders.
Multisite churches face several stages of growing pains as they expand from one location to two, then from two to three or more. At each expansion stage, they face a specific challenge: maintaining culture/vision.
In single-site churches with one teacher, the teaching time is the primary dispenser and maintainer of vision. This dynamic can easily be maintained in a multisite church with a single primary teacher, but when each campus has their own teacher it requires more intentionality to maintain vision consistency in the teaching time.