I'm embarking on a focused season of staff development. I devote our Fall semester to reaching out to non-believers and connecting believers to the movement. However, the Spring lends itself to setting aside time to engage development as a team and on an individual level.
I have changed my philosophy on staff development. The key word being STAFF. Until recently I have minimized the importance of developing staff out of an organizational capacity for the following reasons:
- A heavy performance culture that honors success and doing.
- A staff development program from our National Office that honors skill and technique while minimizing capacity/experiential development.
I still experience both of these dynamics, but am convinced that I can be a part of redeeming these dynamics by...
- Honoring innovation, faith, failure, and learning on our team.
- Setting up my staff team to process our staff development content in the context of real-life experiences that not only increase their skill but expand their capacity.
- Integrating CCC's organizational content into the development of our student leaders.
- Clarifying with staff and student leaders the specific elements of development that I will focus on for a particular season.
The clarification process has grown in importance for me as staff and students are bringing many and varied expectations as to what 'being developed' looks like. Even as I examine my own expectations for development from my leaders I see that I'm expecting them to develop me beyond their organizational scope, capacity, and even training.
I've also experienced how unrealistic it is for me as a leader to think and try to cover every aspect of development in such a short season (3 months). By clearly deciding and communicating the development focus, it has freed me from an unattainable goal and allowed staff and students to pursue developmental areas not included in our focus through other sources (pastors, friends, non-CCC ministry relationships, etc).
What about you? What are your expectations of developement? If you're a non-CCC person, how does your company view development?
