Part 1 – Leadership Foundations Overview
Part 2 – Why are leaders needed?
Part 3 – How do I discern if I’m a leader?
Part 4 – How do I develop as a leader?
In Part 4, we talked about different ways that you can develop on your pathway towards becoming a team leader. One of the most important aspects of that is forming a personal development plan, or PDP. It’s critical for your own development as a leader, and it’s also important that leaders know how to develop other people.
Develop Towards Maturity
We’ve come back to Ephesians 4:11 a few times in this blog, and we think it also speaks to personal development.
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ… we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Ephesians 4:11-16
One of the main goals that Christ has in giving leadership giftings to the church in verse 11 is to equip the saints for the work of ministry, which will lead to the building up of the body of Christ. But in addition to that, there’s a goal for each of us to grow towards maturity and fullness and to grow up in every way into Christ. Leaders equip, not just for the sake of the ministry, but to develop those they lead into being more like Jesus.
One quick note on the difference between learning and developing. Leaders should be constantly learning and gathering knowledge and wisdom that will help them to lead well. But development happens when you actually have progression in who you are as a person and as a leader – whether in character, giftings, or competencies. I might learn a fact or an idea from a book I read, but until I can apply it, until I can internalize it, use it, and it actually affects how I live and lead in Christ-like maturity, it’s a fact that I learn and not something that I’ve developed in.
How to Form a PDP
In this post, we’ll walk through how to form a personal development plan, either for yourself or with someone you lead. In order to form a development plan that’s effective, we do a personal evaluation on different areas of our lives, ministry, and leadership. This is the personal evaluation form that we use on our team annually, and from this evaluation we can form a PDP.
As we’ve noted in other posts, we believe the inner spiritual life and character components hold more importance than skills or even giftings. When forming a personal development plan, we try to focus on one character / abiding aspect and one competency / skill / gifting. Any more than 1-2 things and you end up not really progressing in anything – it’s a principle of focus, in development and pretty much everything else.
Many people tend to think you need to develop primarily in weaknesses, and it’s true that sometimes addressing a weakness is important because it’s a core character issue or competency that you need to have. But development plans can be really great to help you grow in your strengths and giftings as well.
Personal Evaluation
We made this personal evaluation form during our first term in Thailand and have tweaked it over time. It’s split into 4 sections:
1) Abiding, Spiritual Walk, Character, and Attitude
2) Cross-Cultural Adaptation
3) Personal Time and Work Management
4) Ministry Skills
There’s an additional leadership evaluation for those in leadership positions on our team. To create this evaluation, we looked at various biblical frameworks like 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, as well as personal review and evaluation processes from churches, ministries, and professional development sources. Lastly, the ministry skills section would depend on your team’s ministry approach, so ours reflects a ‘Be Barnabas’ CPM focus.
In each section, you’ll evaluate yourself in the various aspects. Then, at the end of each section, you’ll give open-ended responses to what in the section was a primary area(s) of strength, primary area(s) of weakness, primary area of growth + development, and other comments. This allows the person doing the self-evaluation to draw out the important points in each section. At the end, you’ll take all the information together and form a PDP.
Below, we’ll have screenshots of the evaluative categories for each section and I’ll provide a few comments about it. The entire PDF form of the self-evaluation is attached at the end.
Abiding, Spiritual Walk, Character, and Attitude
In our experience, pretty much all of these things are critically important to either an individual goer’s health on the field or how they affect the team. If we were to highlight perhaps the top risk 5 areas that, if unresolved, could send your people home from the field, we would emphasize: abiding, humility, freedom from bondages, health in singleness / marriage, and living out of identity. Each of these is a huge topic, and there are a variety of resources that exist to help a goer develop in health and freedom before and during their time on the field. If there’s any of these areas (or any of the following sections) that you have specific questions about how to address, please let us know at contact@missionsleaders.com. We’d be happy to help consult!
Cross-Cultural Adaptation
These are aspects of cross cultural adaptation that are particularly important in the first 1-2 terms. For your first term of 2-3 years, the first two sections – abiding and health, language and culture – are the main goal. We had a very experienced missions leader give us great expectations and advice before launching that has remained true and that we’ve also set as an expectation for teammates that we transition onto the field. He told us, it can take up to 7 years on the field on average for goers to even begin doing the right things to pursue CPMs. If at the end of your first term of 2-3 years, you are loving Jesus, healthy in your marriage or singleness, have learned some language, and have even a few local relationships – that is great success.
It reframed success in the first few years for us, because with all of our passion and urgency and emphasis on seeing multiplying movements among the unreached, we can sometimes be a little over-enthusiastic in starting the ministry and not setting good foundations of health, language, and cultural adaptation.
After the early season of focusing on language and culture, when you start getting more into the ministry, the ministry skills and spiritual gifts will probably begin to take precedence over the cross cultural parts.
Personal Time + Work Management
For us, this section tends to be the least prioritized compared to the other sections, unless there’s a glaring weakness in a person’s reliability as a teammate and co-worker. Many of these are what would be called ‘permission to play’ type of requirements – good teammates need to embody these basic aspects in order to be effective contributors to the team and the ministry, and healthy in their own rhythms. Sometimes, missions teams can recruit people right out of college who haven’t been in a working environment before. This can lead to some misunderstanding or entitlement to think that support raising or being in ministry means you don’t have to come to meetings prepared and on time, communicate in a timely manner, or report to your supervisor. So this section helps us as leaders and them as teammates know that these things are expected.
Ministry Skills
As explained in the screenshot, this section is a bit different from the previous 3. Because we believe that there are a variety of giftings and skills within each teammate, we aren’t necessarily claiming that every teammate needs to be excellent at every ministry skill. Instead, we have a scale from basic awareness to expert, defined above in the screenshot.
There should be basic competency in some of the areas that every teammate needs to engage in ministry. For example, since our team focuses on training local partners to make disciples, every teammate is expected to be able to give the basic training, as it is the bread and butter of what we do. But some teammates are more proficient or gifted at training and they might get more opportunities to exercise those giftings, whereas some other teammates may be less proficient, and get to specialize in some other areas. How much you specialize depends on how your team is built and what stage of ministry you’re in, among other things. Generally, in the first 2 years of ministry, everyone on the team tries their hand at doing everything so that they can all obtain some basic competency in each area and explore where God has gifted them. Every year, we’ll continue to do personal evaluations and PDPs, and ask the question – where do you feel the Holy Spirit is asking you to focus your giftings and contribution? We’ll also do this in conjunction with a ‘SHAPE’ retreat (Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Aptitudes, Personality, Experience) where we look at the different giftings and skills on a team to allow people to specialize and synergize as a team.
We’ll have a future post on how to do a SHAPE retreat and one on spiritual gifts. But as it pertains to personal development, spiritual gifts are a critical aspect! They are gifts that Jesus himself gave to you through the Holy Spirit to edify the body and expand the Kingdom. As leaders, identifying, developing, and using those gifts personally and on our team results in Spirit empowered ministry!
Leadership Evaluation
The last section would be only for those in a leadership position on our team – team leaders or sub-team leaders. Our definition of a leader is a man or woman who receives vision from God to influence the people of God towards the purposes of God, and we tried to help our leaders evaluate those aspects in this self-evaluation.
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When filling out a personal evaluation, people tend to fall into one of two pitfalls – either greatly overestimate themselves and pretend that they’re good to perfect in every area, or to underestimate themselves with either a low view of themselves or fake humility. Although it’s important for leaders to be able to give feedback into a teammate’s development, personal development has to be personal. Our belief is that a PDP formed through honest self evaluation and personal buy-in will be much more effective than leader directive PDPs. So this evaluation allows each teammate to be honest with themselves about where they are strong and weak, where they can grow, and how they can develop. And, it allows leaders an opportunity to give feedback and come alongside those they’re trying to help to develop.
Here is the link to the full evaluation:
Creating a PDP
Now that we’ve done the hard work of personal evaluation and trying to draw some highlights out of each section, we can go ahead and form the personal development plan from what we’ve learned in the evaluation. Forming a PDP is much more of an art than a skill, so below we’ve provided a basic guideline for how to form one. But again, there has to be personal buy-in for your PDP. If the topic you choose or the plan you create isn’t something that you’re personally invested in and driven to pursue, it’s an unhelpful PDP. Create a plan that you want to jump into!
- Analyze your results. Take a step back and analyze the results of the personal evaluation as a whole. Overall, where are you strong and weak? What surprised you about your answers? Did anything upset you or make you anxious? Your emotions, positive or negative, or feelings of anxiety could be revealing that there’s a deeper heart issue surrounding that topic and that you might need to give it some attention.
- Self-examine to try and get to the heart of the issue. This applies mainly for character and heart issues. For a development plan to really work, you need to target the aspect you want to work on as directly as you can. That means not just fixing an external behavior that is weak, but also understanding the root of our issues. Otherwise, all we are doing is behavior modification. For skills and competency issues, there may be an underlying insecurity that is at the heart of it (e.g. I’m poor at training because I’m insecure about what people think about me), but for the most part, skills just need to be developed through learning and practice. But for many character / heart issues, we want to ask some questions. What is at the root? Why is this a recurring issue? What keeps me from growing in this?
For example, if I marked myself as weak in “submissive to leadership”, I could just make a development plan that says “do what my leader tells me to do.” But that’s behavior management and my heart isn’t really impacted. I have to look at the root. Why is submission difficult for me? Maybe I don’t really respect my leader and think I know better than them. Maybe I think I’m a better leader than they are and the actual issue I need to work on is pride. Whatever the root reason is, that’s what you want to create a plan around.
- Pray and ask God what He wants you to work on and how. Even with our PDP results, we still are going to have a biased view of ourselves. The only one who truly knows where we need to grow is Jesus, so ask Him to search your heart and reveal areas that need to be developed. Pray and ask God, where do you want me to focus on? How do you want me to grow? Who or what have you put into my life to help me develop?
- Form the development plan.
Again, pick no more than 1 character / heart issue and 1 skill / gifting / competency for your PDP. Any more and we tend to lose focus. Just picking 1, preferably the character / heart issue, is totally fine!
Once you know what area to focus on, think of some resources, mentors / coaches, or opportunities that you could use that would help you grow. It could be a book, article, podcast, class, or person who is strong in this area that you would spend time and learn from – whatever way helps you to learn best. One of the most effective development plans is simply to do a word or topical study over the area that you’re wanting to grow in – Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, humility, etc.
Consider a head / heart / hands grid: head knowledge helps you understand what you’re trying to develop in. But head knowledge alone isn’t enough to help a person change and develop. Heart development gives you the why and an emotional connection. Hands helps you to apply the things you’ve learned.
Continuing with the submission to leadership example, I might do a Bible study on Biblical submission and how Jesus exhibits this. For heart, I might set aside some time to consistently pray for greater humility – and to repent of my pride. For hands, I might consistently pray for my leader, or in my one-on-one meetings with them, ask them how I’ve been doing in the area of submission and if there’s anything I can do to improve. - Set a consistent and achievable rhythm for which you can be kept accountable over a 6-12 month time period. Try to think of an end point that answers – how will you know you’ve achieved your goals? What do you want to see happen? How can you break down your plan in month-long objectives or pieces?
The above PDP put into consistent rhythms might look like:
– First 3 months: topical Bible study on Biblical submission
– Monthly: during Day of Prayer, set aside time to self-evaluate my heart and pray for humility; set aside time to pray for my leader.
– Monthly: check in with my leader and ask them how I’m doing in this area and how to improve - Get feedback on your PDP from your leader. In our team process, our teammates will be notified at the end of the year that it’s time for the annual personal evaluation, PDP formation, and review with their leader. They’ll be given 2 weeks to fill out the personal evaluation and send it to their leader, and then take a first stab at forming their PDP, knowing that their review meeting with their leader might change that PDP.
Be humble to receive feedback from your leader and be willing to tweak it. Many times, our leaders might have insight into blind spots that we have, things that we aren’t aware of that are negatively affecting the ministry, our team, or even ourselves. In our experience of leading people through PDP formation, either we agree pretty heavily on the topic and might just give some feedback on the elements of the PDP, or if there’s an area that we bring up that our teammate hasn’t considered, we’ll find a middle ground and make both those topics (ours and theirs) the 2 aspects of their PDP.
Since we’ve done this process for several years with 12+ teammates and coached our leaders in how to lead their people through this process, we’ve been able to walk through a multitude of topics for personal development, including humility, perfectionism, anger and unforgiveness, executive presence, training and coaching, communication, self-awareness, leadership, among other things. We’re working on gathering all those development plans that can be used as example PDPs, and when we’re done we’ll post it here! - Work your plan and have accountability towards working on your plan. If you have a regular one-on-one with a leader or mentor (preferably on a monthly rhythm), that’s a great time for them to check in and make sure you’re accountable to your development plan and give you feedback in that area. It can be as simple as them asking, ‘how did you do with your PDP goals last month, and what are your PDP goals for this upcoming month?’
Walking Others through Forming a PDP
Lastly, we’ll just provide a few tips for current TLs who might be walking their teammates through this process and how to give constructive feedback well. Sometimes, this personal evaluation and review process can be a good opportunity to give feedback into a topic that can be challenging to talk about.
Pray and prepare beforehand. As much as we might want to control people’s development, only God can grow his sheep. Ask God how he wants to develop this person and for him to give you encouraging and truthful words that can spur them on. Make sure you’re surrendering any of your own bias or selfish motivations that you might have for bringing an issue up – is it truly what the Lord wants for their good and their development or just so that I can have an easier time leading? Think through and have concrete examples of areas you have seen this person in their strengths and in their weaknesses. Have bible verses that speak to the standards that you want to exhort your teammate towards.
Start by asking questions. It’s best if they’re able to self-evaluate these issues as opposed to hearing critical feedback right out the gate. What did you think about your self-assessment? Did you see any trends? Did anything surprise / encourage / discourage you? Ideally, they will self-identify. If they don’t bring up the topic that you are wanting to discuss, ask some more probing questions around the topic. Did you have any thoughts specifically about this topic? How would you rate yourself on this?
Seek to encourage as much as possible, but also don’t hesitate to speak truthfully. A basic tenet for difficult feedback is an ‘encouragement sandwich’ – encourage, give feedback, and end by encouraging again. Remind them that you are truly for their good and desire to see them grow and enjoy more of Jesus. We may want to spare someone’s feelings by avoiding hard topics, but your goal is to help them identify blind spots in areas they may need to grow in. If they’re not able to self-identify what the issue is, then give feedback as kindly but as clearly as possible, with clear examples of what is expected (even biblically), what has happened (with concrete examples), and where you’d like them to grow and develop. As leaders, we want to spur our people on and encourage them to mature into becoming more like Jesus and to operate in the ways God has created them.
A PDP can be one of the most effective tools that leaders can have for their own development and to help others grow as well. Many times, with the huge backlog of responsibilities and spinning plates that a leader has, personal development can be left to the side. But without proactive development, we’ll find ourselves perpetually at a deficit of having the knowledge or skills for how to lead, or worse and more likely, not dealing with the heart issues and obstacles that keep us from living out the fullness of who Jesus has created us to be. It takes time investment, hard conversations, and hard work, but seeing yourself and your teammates grow into maturity and fullness of Christ will be one of the most rewarding and impactful things that you will do as a leader!
If there’s any specific questions or need for consultation on how to form a PDP for yourself or a teammate, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com. We’d love to help you!
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