DELEGATION
I attended Sarasota Baptist Church last Sunday and the pastor's sermon was about Leadership Models from the Bible. That morning he spoke on the model of Barnabas, the Encourager and Moses, learning delegation. He said Moses learned that delegation is not "dumping" onto others what he didn't want to do. Delegation for Moses meant he needed to delegate and teach other men to do exactly what he himself was best at, "counseling" the people. His job had gotten too big for one person. Can't you just hear Moses wife complain that Moses never had time for her, because the line of people needing his attention was longer than the hours in a week?
An older person needs to train a younger person to take the mantel. How does he find the time? Maybe the easiest way would be for the younger person to go everywhere with the Delegator, and then eventually the younger person would do the job while the older person follows him around. Delegation is not about giving other people jobs we don't want to do, but teaching them how to do exactly what we do best. Perhaps pastors would retire more gracefully if their goal was to make the new young pastor successful in God's business.
It occurred to me that I ought to have a younger person assisting me as a Sunday School director. Last year I had an assistant helping in my classroom. When I was gone, she would teach me class and get another assistant to help her. It provided security for the children.
Recently when expressing some frustration about the difficulty of training staff, Larry Chupp reminded me that: "People learn from inspection, not from direction."
2 comments:
Chupp is right: what gets measured gets done.
However, I would not define delegation as training people in the areas of our gifts - that's called mentoring. Delegation might often have a mentoring subset, but in those areas of our job that we stink at, we ought NOT mentor people, but instead ought to simply hand it over to people who do have the requisite skills and/or learning potential.
Again, delegation and mentoring are distinct.
Delegation and mentoring are two huge issues since we are only one person, we have gifts and weaknesses, and we'll soon be decaying in the dirt!
Moses was good at what he did, but his work was becoming so large, that he needed to teach other people to help him do what he was good at. That is delegating as well as mentoring.
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