3 Things to Remember When it Doesn't Work
You wanted to launch a leadership residency at your local church. AWESOME!
You envisioned your church, you got the funding, you launched, you recruited, you interviewed (several times!), you onboarded, you invested, you coached, you prayed, consulted, trained, prayed, coached some some more, addressed all sorts of wellness and spoke in to every area of their life…and that resident STILL didn’t work out.
Painful.
You either wanted to keep them and they’re moving on, OR you just can’t wait for them to leave and it’s not finishing well.
This happens sometimes.
We’re not manufacturing brake pads that hardly ever fail. We battle not against flesh and blood…we are dealing with humans and humans have had a pretty high failure rate since Adam and Eve.
So what do we do:
1.) Don’t give up. Insert the most inspired paragraph AI will write for you here! Seriously…one thing that might help you is to not be at this all alone. Have someone who’ll tell YOU on a Monday “don’t give up,” and then YOU are telling THEM on a Wednesday, “don’t give up!”
Mutual encouragement with mutually passionate people will go a long way on this walk.
2.) See the bigger picture. Did you have any part of your life where you acted out, didn’t listen, didn’t take the coaching, quit too soon, etc etc? Did you remember those lessons a decade or three later? We are all praying that this will happen in this situation, too!
Sometimes there’s nothing left to do or say. You can’t say “you’ll thank me in a decade for this!” that wouldn’t have worked with you a decade ago, and it won’t work in this situation either.
3.) Understand. Even overpaid D1 athletic coaches have failures and bad days. And just think…they have millions of dollars and several thousand people cheering for their team! It still doesn’t work sometimes! They quit, and they transferred out to something different to chase something shiny. Or the blow it spectacularly and are the lead story on ESPN.
The topic of leadership development is as much about averages as anything. If people are like stock prices they can be up or down given the day.
Is the trend line good? If you do residency for 5 years and you’ve had 15 residents come through your program are most of them better off having done it? Did most launch to something better? If you are only “9 for 15” we should talk, but you must understand that some are going to fail. Some will not turn out to be high performers with you forever.
There were 12 disciples, right? Even one of them didn’t make it! One completely failed and their story has been told for two thousand years.
The real issue becomes if the first one, or the 3rd one, fails. Understand that this will happen, but you must keep going. This calling of finding, supporting, and developing the next generation of potential leaders is worth it.
And always…if you need to talk about it we’re here!