Helping us build strong leadership teams

BY TIM ALLAN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR

SIM workers have wrestled with the huge challenges of building leadership teams for many years.

Whether it’s forming a team to lead a large, complex entity with multiple ministries, or creating a team to lead a small, under-resourced entity, the issues are complex.

How can directors share the load of leadership with others? How can people grow into leadership roles? How can we develop local leaders? How can we build resilience into our teams and our people? How can we plan effectively for the future?

In an attempt to help answer at least some of those questions, SIM International is expanding the global Leadership Forums to give more people a taste of what it means to be a leader.

Until now, the quarterly forums have been open to all directors and one other person in any SIM entity.

Responsibility

But as we recognise the challenges of building leadership teams are ever-growing, SIM International is now inviting each director to bring up to six members of their team to the forums.

We hope this will allow directors to bring more local workers to the forums, as well as some of those who are perhaps on the fringes of the leadership team.

The intention is that by involving more people, we will equip more for leadership. This expansion is perhaps a natural progression of our Leadership Development programme, which has benefited many SIM workers. We want to build on that work and help our potential leaders continue to grow.

As more workers take part in these online Leadership Forums, we believe they will feel more able to take on roles which support their directors. As they do so, they will become more aware of how they can grow and take on more responsibility.

We hope this will serve the whole of SIM by supporting our directors, equipping more local workers and expanding the pool of people from whom future directors might be called. The next two forums, in September and December, will address these issues directly, with one on developing local leaders and the other on what shared leadership looks like in practice.

Undoubtedly, there will be some who currently feel ill-equipped to take on such roles. But we very much want to extend the invitation to those who feel exactly like that – we believe that is the way we can better equip potential leaders.

Potential

It’s worth remembering that was the case with the people Jesus called into leadership roles.

He called frail, forgetful, fearful, sinful human beings to be his disciples, knowing that in a very short time he would use them to build his church. He walked with them, shepherded them and taught them, so that they could step up to the plate when the time came.

But on the day Jesus went to the cross, it’s hard to imagine any of them would have felt well-equipped for what lay ahead. Yet they took on the challenges and today’s global church is the result. There is no doubt God can achieve great things through people who feel they might not be up to the challenge.

The Leadership Forums began in 2020, just as the world was beginning to see the full impact of Covid-19. They came out of conversations at meetings in Kenya, where our directors gathered together, each bringing a younger potential leader with them.

Within a month of that Kenya conference, the world was locked down and we began the forums as a means to keep directors and their teams connected to others.

We have seen the great value of these wideranging discussions, which have included how to develop more women leaders, the role of prayer and how to develop disciples in varied ministry contexts.

Those conversations have served to bond directors together, develop younger leaders and promote best practice across SIM. We hope by inviting more people into the discussions we will multiply those effects, helping us identify new leaders and unlocking the God-given potential in more of our workers.

We urgently need interpreters for the forums. If you could help interpret from English into French or Spanish, please email tim.allan@sim.org. This is a crucial need if we are to bring more workers into leadership positions.