Building Healthy Leaders Part 5 - The 5C's -- Session 01

Summary

In "Building Healthy Leaders Part 5 - The 5C's -- Session 01", the speaker delves into creating a holistic model for developing leaders, emphasizing the comprehensive integration of the 5Cs: Christ, Community, Character, Calling, and Competency. They critique traditional leadership training's focus on competencies alone, urging a balanced approach to nurture all aspects. Discussions highlight the failure of leaders due to imbalances, and the necessity for self-reflection on personal shortcomings ("spill points") to ensure well-rounded development.

Highlights

• The 5Cs model aims to encompass all necessary qualities for effective leadership development. 📚
• The model's inclusivity helps avoid the pitfalls of traditional training focused solely on competency. 🚫📚
• Self-reflection and identifying personal blind spots ('spill points') are vital for authentic leadership growth. 💡
• Real-world examples show leaders failing due to focus on knowledge rather than character or spiritual development. 🔄
• 70% of Christian leaders fail or fade away due to neglected areas in their development. 🙈

Key Takeaways

• The 5Cs of leadership are essential: Christ, Community, Character, Calling, and Competency. 🌟
• Traditional training focuses too much on competencies, neglecting other critical areas, leading to leadership failures. 🙈
• Holistic development in leadership requires addressing all 5 areas to cultivate truly healthy leaders. 💪
• Leaders often reproduce who they are rather than what they know, emphasizing the importance of personal development. 🤔
• Reflecting on personal 'spill points' is crucial for growth and leadership effectiveness. 🔍

Overview

The session delves into a comprehensive approach to leadership development, introducing the 5Cs model, which includes Christ, Community, Character, Calling, and Competency. This model is described as a framework that can holistically foster effective leadership qualities in individuals, standing in contrast to traditional training programs that often prioritize competency alone.

The speaker critiques traditional methods of leadership training that overemphasize competencies—skills and knowledge—while neglecting vital areas like character and spirituality. They argue that this limited focus can lead to high failure rates among leaders, as many institutions assume the development of areas outside competencies happens naturally or without intentional effort.

Emphasizing the importance of reflective practice, the session encourages leaders to self-assess their 'spill points'—areas of weakness that could limit their leadership potential. By intentionally developing all five aspects of the 5Cs, leaders can enhance their effectiveness and reduce the alarming statistic that 70% of leaders fail or fade away due to undeveloped essential qualities.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction The introduction chapter begins with a musical note and an emphasis on revisiting the purpose of the discussion. The speaker reminds the audience of an exercise where they were asked to consider the qualities of leaders they admired. The objective was to develop a comprehensive model encapsulating all desirable traits to replicate in others. The chapter revolves around identifying and noting these qualities.
• 01:30 - 03:30: Five Categories of Leadership Qualities The chapter discusses the categorization of leadership qualities into five main categories, emphasizing that every item related to leadership attributes has been accounted for under these categories. It suggests that these categories are comprehensive and inclusive, covering all necessary aspects of leadership qualities.
• 03:30 - 05:30: Importance of Five Cs in Leadership The chapter discusses the 'Five Cs' in leadership, emphasizing their significance in defining exemplary Christian leaders. A 'test case' is mentioned, highlighting a consistent pattern observed globally in leadership qualities.
• 05:30 - 10:00: Analyzing Traditional Leadership Training The chapter discusses the importance of focusing on five key categories to develop healthy leaders. It emphasizes that concentrating on these specific areas provides a more structured and effective approach to leadership training compared to a random curriculum. The repeated affirmation of these categories underlines their significance in leadership development.
• 10:00 - 15:00: The Barrel Metaphor for Leadership Capacity The chapter discusses the concept of leadership capacity using a barrel metaphor. It focuses on a framework called 'the five C's', which represent the five parts of a leadership goal. The discussion is based on a diagram referenced on page 17, emphasizing a linear progression in understanding the sequence of the five C's in achieving leadership capacity.
• 15:00 - 30:00: Introspection and Addressing Spill Points The chapter titled 'Introspection and Addressing Spill Points' explores the idea that being part of the body of Christ involves interacting with others in ways that reveal and provide opportunities to refine one's character flaws. It emphasizes the necessity of developing certain competencies, knowledge, and skills to fulfill one's calling. While the process is often viewed linearly, the chapter suggests that spiritual progression and development do not always occur in a linear fashion, according to God's plan.

Building Healthy Leaders Part 5 - The 5C's -- Session 01 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] one point and again go back as bill reminded us what was the whole purpose here i asked you to think of qualities of leaders you admired because we were trying to develop a model that could contain everything we would want to replicate in building others so what do you notice every single quality of yours
• 00:30 - 01:00 found some place in this model now some of them found more than one place right where was the other half of this one where did i put that did it fall under character here okay so every item found a home what does that suggest to us about this these five categories yeah go ahead and say it it's inclusive
• 01:00 - 01:30 or we could say comprehensive now it would be problematic if you were listing qualities of people that you admired as exemplary christian leaders and then we had and they didn't fit that would mean our model was lacking but by virtue of the fact that everything fit and again this is just a test case and it's a fairly small sample but let me share with you when we do this we do this multiple times all over the world we have found that everything finds a
• 01:30 - 02:00 home and it suggests and it's affirmed over and over again that these five categories seem to capture everything that's important about building healthy leaders and that if in fact in effect if we build people in these five areas we have the potential to build a healthy leader and that helps us focus so much more than if we just have a random kind of a curriculum this tells us what our big our big goals are
• 02:00 - 02:30 this shapes our sense of the goal our circle and it tells us that this goal has five parts these are the five c's and i want to just go back to our diagram let's see if i go back to our diagram that we have whoops i'm going the wrong way and i want to ask you to look on page 17 again i'd like to label these i explained these as a sequence did you notice i moved in a linear fashion that being in christ we're now part of
• 02:30 - 03:00 the body of christ and being in the body of christ we have interaction with others that reveals our character flaws but gives us opportunity to refine those character flaws and then as those character flaws are refined we're ready for our calling and yet we need certain competencies knowledge and skills to fulfill that calling i presented it in a linear fashion but the reality is that god doesn't always work in a linear fashion and in our progression and development as
• 03:00 - 03:30 mature followers of christ god is always working on all these five together he is able to work in this in an organic fashion and for that reason i think the target is a really good depiction of the development of this goal that he seems to be working on all of them at the same time in the same way our curriculum can work on all of them almost at the same time so let's label these i don't have it on the overhead but i'll let me just speak it to you
• 03:30 - 04:00 the outer ring is the same as the inner ring okay the very center is christ because we want to be centered in christ so at the very center you can write christ and the outside ring you can also write christ because christ is both the source of everything but he is also the goal the end the scripture the greek is the word telios he's the end we're moving towards christ and we know of him as the alpha and the omega the beginning and the end it's from him
• 04:00 - 04:30 that we do all things and for him that we do all things that's why we put him at the beginning and the end the second ring in from the outside is community the full ring there's only two full rings the outside ring is christ the second full ring inside is community because community helps shape some of that context in which we learn and develop the others the segmented ring the three-part ring includes character calling and
• 04:30 - 05:00 competencies put them wherever you want it really doesn't matter character calling and competencies the segmented ring okay that's just outside of the very center so our idea is then to develop in all of these together now here's a question for you a couple questions to consider in our traditional training where do we emphasize in discipleship discipleship training or leadership development whether it's formal in a bible school or
• 05:00 - 05:30 informal in in the local church where do we tend to focus on which of these five goals do we spend most of our time and energy what'd you say i hear the i hear some people saying competency yeah all right this is typically the answer i hear as we share this around the around the
• 05:30 - 06:00 world is that by and large our default mode whenever we think discipleship or leader development we default to a training in knowledge and skills you know as i first began to reflect on this model i i said okay is that true so i ran it through my grid and i want you to do this think about how you were built up i thought about how my seminary was organized let's just run my seminar through the grid and i went to a great one
• 06:00 - 06:30 there really was very little emphasis on growing your relationship with christ there was a class and was called spiritual formation it was probably that class alone where we focused on spiritual disciplines and worked on our relationship with christ so it was assumed that you had a relationship with christ and it was assumed that you knew how to build your relationship with christ and that the seminary wasn't necessarily there
• 06:30 - 07:00 to help you do that secondly community there was talk about community and students would tend to make friends but there was no organizational approach necessarily to help them build community the only exception again was a class that i took in small groups in that class on small groups we were put in small groups purposely and we built community in small groups but if you didn't take that class
• 07:00 - 07:30 any community you built was at your own initiative okay i i took in the initiative to find a mentor they had i found i wanted to have a mentor among the faculty and i i found out they had a program where they matched faculty members with students i thought oh how exciting i wonder if all the professors are taken i wonder if there's room for me so i went to the office where they made these arrangements and you matched you up
• 07:30 - 08:00 and i said oh i'd like to you know i'd like to have a mentor from the faculty and i said you know are you overrun and they said no actually only three students have asked for a mentor i mean i went to a school where there were hundreds hundreds of people and yet only three students asked to be linked up with another member of the faculty for the purpose of mentoring it was amazing character no one ever checked into my use of internet pornography no one
• 08:00 - 08:30 ever checked about my greed no one ever checked about my ability to forgive my neighbor or never never checked to see how my wounds were holding me back how my wounds let's say inner issues unresolved issues were holding me back whether i had godly ambition or human ambition no one checked you know what why did you ask about that [Laughter]
• 08:30 - 09:00 no obviously no one checked about my anger you may not heard what he said that's why i reacted that way no no no one checked about my anger issues either isn't this isn't it strange calling now because this particular seminary represented 60 different denominations they didn't feel it was their job to help make placement in the church they deferred to the to the domination that you were with but if you weren't with a denomination
• 09:00 - 09:30 who helped you in terms of the discernment of your calling where did they focus right here they were very good in the building of biblical knowledge and ministry skills very good and this was a leading seminary in the united states now am i being harsh i'm going to be harsh on myself now that wasn't fair let me point the
• 09:30 - 10:00 the magnifying glass at myself so i'm a pastor now i've graduated with distinction i've got all a's so that must mean i'm a good pastor right right say yes yes thank you all right great okay good i thought you were asleep you know i'm kidding right okay okay so uh now i'm in the pastorate and i have this role to build the body of christ to make disciples
• 10:00 - 10:30 so i set up a small group program and i want to involve as many people in the congregation as i can in small groups and i diligently establish a pilot group where i train the small group leaders so they can be prepared to lead others to christ to make disciples so i'm discipling them training them so they can disciple and train others right i got a pilot group really good approach isn't it so i looked at my training i looked back at it and you know what i saw
• 10:30 - 11:00 yeah yeah yeah we we did some we did some prayer times together we did some worship times together yeah that's good yeah we shared one of those burdens i don't know about character there were some things uh we were all aware that so-and-so was arrogant and so and so was greedy but i didn't really want to talk about it you know calling okay let's we're all called to serve ministry how i don't know i was surprised to look
• 11:00 - 11:30 back that the majority of my training focused on biblical teaching let's teach the bible isn't that what you do in discipleship teach the bible and teach them how to share their faith what is that knowledge and skills now again maybe i'm being harsh on myself i i kind of have that tendency to do that yes we did do some other things touched on these but by and large i found even in my small group training this is my default anytime you do
• 11:30 - 12:00 biblical teaching you're working in competencies unless you take it further okay so if we really want to change people's lives we can't live in the development of a competency-based approach a study was done to examine why do christian leaders fail in ministry it's a very interesting study and incorporated leaders missionary
• 12:00 - 12:30 leaders actually christian leaders from 14 different nations and those that did not complete their ministry assignment when they returned home they went through a process of evaluation for discernment to determine why they failed and they tried to sort that out and what they discovered was the primary reason that they were failing
• 12:30 - 13:00 did not relate at all to a lack in competency in the words of the study they didn't use our language because they didn't have our model but in the words of the study this is what they said the three main reasons were not in this order in any order but these were the three main reasons the failure came because of problems of spirituality relationality morals and ethics so what are those three categories compared to our model relational or spirituality would relate to christ
• 13:00 - 13:30 relationality would relate to and ethics and morality would relate to character these are the three main reasons that these leaders failed from 14 different nations he says it's logic he says why why is it logic yes we were trained and we were done it was done successfully we have the competency maybe right but this was left really assumed i'm
• 13:30 - 14:00 going to say assumed i don't want to say it was unaddressed yet it was unaddressed because it was assumed this was in place now what percentage of christian leaders do you think fail to achieve their goal now this could include those who fail miserably catastrophically or those who just fade away being burned out or just being ineffective what percentage of christian leaders do you think fail in this regard total total number from just fading away to failing catastrophically what
• 14:00 - 14:30 percentage you just say 90 someone says okay another study was done this was an informal study by a man named robert clinton uh who was a professor uh on a seminary in the west coast this is the percentage seventy percent failed seventy percent failed so remember our original problem remember that eighty-five percent of our churches worldwide do not have a a christian leader call them a pastor an elder a deacon call them whatever you want
• 14:30 - 15:00 don't have a leader that's trained and on top of that we exacerbate the problem by the fact that 70 percent are either fading away or failing miserably so we're only contributing to the problem that we talked about first because we haven't trained adequately our quality problem affects adversely our quantity problem and it's just getting worse and why do they fail again the study from those 14 nations tells us here's a
• 15:00 - 15:30 quote from a christian leader this is an actual quote from one of the people that we work with i'll read it out so that you can all hear it he said he told us this in the past developing competencies was our emphasis and as a result we have made students who are full of knowledge and proud but who can't solve practical problems in real life they have bigger heads but smaller hearts i think what he was saying is that not only did they focus on competency but they focused on one half of
• 15:30 - 16:00 competency not skill and knowledge just just knowledge so they had half a category so again many traditional programs don't even do competency well because they just focus on biblical knowledge and because they're focusing on the bible they think what they're doing is biblical this is really confusing you mean teaching the bible is not enough now i'm going to sound like a heretic what i found i was a biblical teacher i
• 16:00 - 16:30 believe i was a biblical teacher i taught the bible i focused on the bible but what i learned was that i wasn't a biblical teacher because i wasn't teaching as jesus taught i was teaching biblical content but i wasn't teaching for a biblical goal you follow me and if we're going to be biblical teachers preachers evangelists counselors church planters
• 16:30 - 17:00 directors managers whatever we need to have an eye on building people in all five areas competency is not enough let me illustrate that with a diagram okay what does this look like anybody want to hazard a guess okay somebody's saying a barrel i think i heard someone say a barrel right
• 17:00 - 17:30 that's not a very good drawing is it okay all right would you like to buy this barrel from me anybody want my barrel it'll come cheap anybody want it any buyers michelle surely you want my barrel don't you anybody why don't you want my barrel you don't like it what's wrong with my barrel
• 17:30 - 18:00 it looks like it's broken yeah it's kind of lopsided it's broken it's limited capacity you know we use a barrel to hold something right we we may transport oil i like oil i mean that's oil man all right uh sugar what water what else what else can we transport in this barrel apples okay the barrel has a capacity to carry a carrying
• 18:00 - 18:30 capacity but this barrel has a limited capacity because these are called staves the wooden part pieces are called staves the staves are not all of equal length so the capacity is limited if we put water in the sparrow it's going to spill out at the lowest point this we call the spill point this is the limiting factor to the barrel's carrying capacity now what i'd like to
• 18:30 - 19:00 do is use this barrel as a picture of our own capacity as leaders each of us is hopefully working to improve our capacity as leaders but we too have spill points so i'd like you to think about your life first of all in terms of the barrel and let's label the staves using the model
• 19:00 - 19:30 so the first one would be christ second community character calling and competency so if this barrel represents a leader where is their weakness it's a character weakness and because their character has not been addressed fully they're they're not able to
• 19:30 - 20:00 develop the capacity that's called for in their leadership role they're somehow limited now what do we tend to do again we tend to use a factory approach in our training and we get people that have various various spill points and but we put them through pretty much the same kind of training assuming oh let's give everybody the same biblical training the same knowledge the same skills and we said earlier that we tend to
• 20:00 - 20:30 focus on competency what do we do we just send them through that course of study whatever it is formally formal and we build their competencies okay so we sent them through that program their training and now of course we've eliminated their spill point and we've improved their capacity right jackie you don't like my training but but but they know the word of god they they they know how to counsel now
• 20:30 - 21:00 they preach a whole lot better well why don't you like my training i still haven't addressed the real issue that they've got a real issue with lust and when they spend time with someone of the opposite sex their mind isn't on god their mind is pro something else and they may think it's a small problem
• 21:00 - 21:30 because it's managed now they don't realize that under stress of ministry when they get isolated in that counseling situation where they're working with someone from the opposite sex and they feel so isolated alone in the midst of that counseling they're going to be drawn together as they share their life their heart and all of a sudden they're going to develop an unhealthy attraction to one another even though they're married to different other people and that spill point
• 21:30 - 22:00 is going to lead to an affair and their whole ministry will be lost and not only are they tossed out of the ministry but the christians the young babes in christ who look to them as an exemplary leader are going to be dashed in their faith am i making this up the sad thing is we're not i'm not at all but this happened again and again and again in the united states just read the news just read the news from one state just read the news from one city my own city
• 22:00 - 22:30 we've just seen it in the last year two times just in the last year we can't assume that their character is being changed it's because we give them biblical knowledge we have to develop them in all five otherwise we are not even beginning to affect their capacity we're fooling ourselves when we talk about building competencies
• 22:30 - 23:00 and thinking we're improving their leadership capacity because in the end whatever is their spill point is their achilles heel and if we want to build healthy leaders we need to address them in a way that's comprehensive we need to build the whole person all five c's now here's one of the biggest misnomers in training
• 23:00 - 23:30 we think we reproduce what we know but in fact we reproduce who we are when we have a curriculum that's just filled with courses on theology and ministry skills we operate with the understanding that we're building people through knowledge and the assumption is we reproduce what we know in them through our wonderful curriculum illustrated curriculum developmental
• 23:30 - 24:00 curriculum but if we don't put people in their life we don't realize that those people have a bigger impact so let me say it again we don't reproduce what we know we reproduce who we are and i don't care what comes out of your mouth what carries far more weight is what comes out of your life and so we need to build a curriculum that is not just knowledge based we need to build a
• 24:00 - 24:30 curriculum that includes everything and this also brings to mind something else that's very important if we reproduce who we are then there's a really big implication and the implication is this it really matters what your spill point is before you even begin to consider building another leader because if we replicate who we are what are we going to reproduce we're going to reproduce our strengths along with our weaknesses because we
• 24:30 - 25:00 cannot give what we do not have so it becomes incumbent upon us if we want to build healthy leaders it's incumbent upon us to be healthy leaders and to embark on an intentional path of training in which we too are challenged to grow in these five areas and that's why i want to stop right now before we take another break and we will take another break just a moment but i want to stop and ask you
• 25:00 - 25:30 to use the five c's to look at your life use them as a lens to look at your own life and ask the very troubling question what's my spill point what's my spill point and i'm not going i'm not necessarily going to ask you to share this with someone so i'd like you to be utterly honest with yourself and god okay i'll just tell you in advance i hate that when somebody kind of leads you into the okay answer this question now down to this and
• 25:30 - 26:00 you're kind of led to do something you never intend to do i'm not going to ask you to share this i want you to be just as vulnerable as you can with god later on if you decide to share it that's your business okay but i'm not gonna compel you to share it with someone else i'll advise it but i'm not gonna compel it okay so here's what i'd like to do though before you do this evaluation if you're like me and i'm not suggesting you are but if you are like me you have
• 26:00 - 26:30 a tendency to either be too hard on yourself too critical to judgmental on the other hand too easy on yourself i always have a hard time just getting the right balance and so i find that i really need the help of the holy spirit who sees things all without bias so before we do this evaluation i want to pray for you and i ask you just to add your own whatever your own amen is to say god i need help to see myself as i really am
• 26:30 - 27:00 because deception takes hold over the last several years god's reminded me how prevalent deception is you know what a blind side is don't you right we all have a blind side in other words there's an aspect of our own life that we do not see we all have it and by inviting the holy spirit to help us we're inviting him to shine a light into our blind side and to illuminate something for us
• 27:00 - 27:30 that we do not see so can we pause to do that for a moment and if if the holy spirit wants to work through another individual or another circumstance let's invite him to show us what our spill point is because as leaders we cannot afford first of all to lose capacity and second all we can afford to be a stumbling block to others amen so let's pray and then we'll just ask him to help us with this evaluation
• 27:30 - 28:00 lord god we thank you for being the example that you are but we have to confess that we fail in many ways although we desire to be one with you lord we we find ourselves bent on a course that we never envisioned we find ourselves at odds with people that we thought they were easy to love we find character traits that we never want to reveal to another person
• 28:00 - 28:30 we admit confusion about our purpose and holes in our our skills lord jesus none of us are perfect in this score and we know that you're not out to expose us or shame us but we would like to grow we would like to build our capacity as leaders and disciple makers so we ask the lord for your insight we ask you o lord to help us to see what we previously has been hidden from our eyes we ask you lord for insight and
• 28:30 - 29:00 objectivity to see which of these seeds is more of a problem for us which of these seeds is a spill point so i ask you lord jesus just as we come to you to hear our prayers but most of all give us ears to hear and to see what you see in our life so that we don't either we don't overreact in condemning ourself or become too lacks and dismiss what might be a serious problem or
• 29:00 - 29:30 help us to see what you see and to recognize our spill point and then to interact with you about what you share with us we take this time now between ourselves and you in quiet reflection and prayer [Music]
• 29:30 - 30:00 you