Co-Leadership

The Emmys last night were awful and I think that was due in large part to the fact that there was no clear host.  When will these organizations learn that groups of hosts don’t work?  That has never worked…not once.  It didn’t work for the Oscars or the Grammys or the Tonys either.

The truth is that group leadership sounds good on paper but it just doesn’t work.  Somebody, some individual, needs to be clearly in charge for any project or effort to succeed.  You’ve got to have a lead person that, well, leads.  You’ve got to have a single point of vision and direction as well as an ultimate decision maker.

Don’t get me wrong.  A leader by himself can get very little done.  You need teams of great people working together to achieve anything of any real significance in this life but, at the end of the day, there simply has to be one point person.  One person to make the tough calls.  One person to answer the tough phone calls.  One person to lead and inspire and challenge the group.  One person that’s in charge of the whole effort.  There has to to be one vision or you have di-vision and a diluted mess.

God doesn’t appoint committees.  He calls leaders first.  Then, He calls a team together to work with that leader.  With those two components in place, He then proceeds to change the world.

4 Comments

  1. Found this old thread based on your ratings below.

    I hear the mantra of “one leader” very often in the church. I think too often, though it’s easy to get carried away with this line of thinking where the “one leader” is like Muhammed coming down from the mountain top with a message from God. I have seen failed plants where no one else really bought into vision because they had no ownership. It all belonged to the leader.

    Of course I can make other extreme points about leadership by committee. Actually, I could make much more scary points, LoL.

    My friend @RandySchoof is the full-time pastor of the Warehouse church (warehousechurch.org). I think they’ve married multiple leaders and vision very well. It’s elder led with Pastor Randy and 4 other elders. Randy had the vision to start the church, and he is probably one of the most visible parts of the church (being the only one on staff). However, each elder takes a lead role in some aspect of the church structure and each leader has an equal amount of teaching time on Sunday.

    He could share a lot more than I could of why this works for them.

    @bobcrane

  2. Found this old thread based on your ratings below.

    I hear the mantra of “one leader” very often in the church. I think too often, though it’s easy to get carried away with this line of thinking where the “one leader” is like Muhammed coming down from the mountain top with a message from God. I have seen failed plants where no one else really bought into vision because they had no ownership. It all belonged to the leader.

    Of course I can make other extreme points about leadership by committee. Actually, I could make much more scary points, LoL.

    My friend @RandySchoof is the full-time pastor of the Warehouse church (warehousechurch.org). I think they’ve married multiple leaders and vision very well. It’s elder led with Pastor Randy and 4 other elders. Randy had the vision to start the church, and he is probably one of the most visible parts of the church (being the only one on staff). However, each elder takes a lead role in some aspect of the church structure and each leader has an equal amount of teaching time on Sunday.

    He could share a lot more than I could of why this works for them.

    @bobcrane

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