The Next Generation Leader: An Interview with Andy Stanley In November 1995, Andy Stanley cast a vision for a new church in a northern suburb of Atlanta. Today some 10,000 people (3,000 of them members) regularly attend one of three Sunday morning worship services at North Point Community Church. In addition to his pastoral leadership, Stanley has become one of the nation's most popular authors and speakers in the area of leadership. LeaderLinks editor Michael Duduit recently visited with Andy to discuss his most recent book.

LeaderLinks: In your book The Next Generation Leader (Multnomah), you talk about some of the key characteristics that young leaders need to understand. What are some of those leadership characteristics?

Stanley: The Next Generation Leader was the result of monthly leadership lessons I do here with our staff. And our staff is young. Once a month — I got this idea from John Maxwell — instead of our normal staff meeting, I do training — we do outlines, fill in the blanks, the whole deal. I spend a lot of time developing these talks for our leaders; we've got about 180 full time staff. That's where this book came from.

I was essentially answering the question: if there were just a few things I could tell young leaders, what would they be? These are things I think leaders generally figure out anyway along the way — they're not original — but I thought these are things I wish I'd known earlier. I would have saved so much time and energy if somebody had said up front, "OK, you may not believe this but just trust me, this is true. Go ahead and apply this stuff and later on you'll look back and be glad you did." So it's basically a few things I wish every young leader — especially in Christian leadership — would go ahead and embrace because it makes the learning curve so much easier.

The first one is the whole idea of doing less to accomplish more — find your core competence and play to your strength, delegating your weakness. Determine to do that even before you can do that — of course when you start up an organization or a church, as you know, you have to do everything. But we know we're not good at everything and young leaders often make the mistake of trying to shore up their weaknesses and wing it on their strengths. I did that for too many years. I finally figured out I just need to do what I'm good at and let the other stuff go undone, then eventually somebody else comes along and does it. It's amazing.

We talk about clarity and how even in the midst of uncertainty leaders have to learn to be clear. Uncertainty is permanent — it never goes away. I am pastor of this big church with all these wonderful things going on and there's more uncertainty right now in my ministry than ever before.

This morning I met with one of our elders talking about the vision of our church. Here I'm the guy that wrote a book on vision! Essentially we are everything we ever envisioned to become, so now the question is: Now what? What's next? And I don't know. I've got lots of ideas but uncertainty is permanent and learning how to lead and be clear with lots of uncertainty is huge. Young leaders think once I am a good leader I won't have any uncertainty and it's a myth. I say to young leaders: learn to navigate through the uncertainty. It's permanent; it doesn't go away. It's not a reflection of your poor leadership.

In the book I talk about courage and the significance of the fact that many times it's our acts of courage that establish us as leaders in the minds of other people. God has gifted us but nobody knows. God's called us, nobody knows. How do we become leaders? Often it's the person that steps out first. That act of courage establishes people as leaders in the minds of others.

I say to young leaders eventually there is going to be a defining moment and everybody will be looking off the cliff and you'll realize, "If I jump first they'll follow me." And you'll jump and you'll become the leader. You'd already been called. You'd already been gifted but suddenly in that moment is when people say, "That's somebody worth following," so be on the look out for that moment.

Another key is coaching and finding leadership coaches. I love to talk about this because it's difficult — it seems on the surface difficult — to enlist people to coach us as leaders. Unlike athletes, leaders think, "I don't need coaching — I'm the leader! If I needed coaching I wouldn't be the leader." Well nothing could be further from the truth. Among the greatest benefits of my life have been the people who have coached me in my leadership — people who, if you met them you'd be tempted to say, "Andy, they're not even good leaders so how could they coach you? You seem to be a better leader than they are."

That is the myth about coaching. You know athletes have coaches and the athletes are far better performers than the coaches but they are still coachable and benefit from coaching. So leaders at every level — especially young leaders — need people speaking into those areas of our lives. I talk about how to find those people and enlist them and not scare them off.

The last thing we talk about in the book is character. Obviously that's not a new principle but the thing I say to young leaders all the time is: you can be successful in leadership and have no integrity. Integrity is not essential to leadership but it is essential if you want to be a leader worth following. If you want to be the leader that, at the end of the day, people will say, "Not only am I thrilled about what we accomplished, I enjoyed the journey. The journey was just great." Not just the goals and accomplishments but the process, and in order to have that kind of experience with the people you lead you have to be a person of integrity. We just don't enjoy the journey with people we can't trust.

There is so much more to say about leadership. I feel like if the leader can begin to just embrace those five things — set those up as mile markers and boundaries in their leadership — they're just going to further faster.

LeaderLinks: One of the topics I particularly appreciated was the discussion of finding your core competencies and focusing there. Lots of us think we have to have our finger in everything. It's a good reminder to me to work at finding your groove. How did that take place in your ministry and how has it influenced your leadership?

Stanley: I learned all of this the hard way, even though I look back and wonder what took me so long. I am only good at a couple things in terms of skill set. I'm a good public speaker and I'm good in a meeting where everybody's in the process of trying to get all the information on the table — I'm good at looking at all the information and moving us in a direction. I don't always make the right decisions. But I've learned I'm good at recognizing a bad decision quick. It frustrates my staff but we've all agreed this is how I am. My temptation is to run down a road and about the time everybody figures out where I'm going I'm coming back saying: that is not where we're going. And they just laugh and they know that's how I make decisions. That's how I make them personally. That's how we make them corporally sometimes. Once I figured that out I realized the arenas where I need to focus are public communication, vision casting, and decision making at the highest level in the organization.

I'm not a good event planner. I'm not a good organizer. I'm not a good team builder as far as going out and putting together a team. I'm not an extrovert — I don't even like extroverts a lot of times! I finally figured out there are certain people I don't click with and that's who it is. Part of this is a maturing thing, but looking at all of it through the grid of, "God, what have you designed me to do?"

I think where it's impacted us in ministry is very early on I just stuck with the few things that I did well. As I say in the book, when you do less you accomplish more and when you do less you allow other people to accomplish more. I think that if you talk to our leadership team — there are seven of us that are sort of the 'they' of North Pointe staff — they would tell you, "Andy lets us do what he's hired us to do." I just trust them and I know that I'm not as good as them.

I tell our staff all the time I'm not the best leader. The reason I get to lead is because I'm the best speaker, and in the church world if you're the best speaker they let you lead whether you're any good or not. I don't claim to be the best leader but I've created the space for the good leaders around me to lead. I see that with my dad. That's how my dad has always led. And I should have learned this earlier because he modeled it. He's the guy who just stays in his groove and enabled other people to fill up the vacuums.

I'm surrounded by the most creative, wonderful, confident people I could imagine. One of them — probably one of my sharpest guys — told me if I didn't work for you I would go be a senior pastor because I don't think I could stand to work for anybody else. It's his way of saying you give me so much space to operate I don't feel the need to go to some other church so I can be the number one guy because I can't imagine having more opportunity or freedom. And I said, "Yeah, plus you don't have to take up the offerings so you've got it made. I fund all the fun that you're having over there on your side of the aisle!"

I say to young leaders all the time, "Don't look at me and say, 'You've got it made.' You have to look at your own situation and ask, 'How do I apply this principle, because the principle is the same whether you're starting alone or with two or three people. Figure out what you're good at, and do the best you can to stay there."

When I do this talk publicly I juggle, and I talk about how I can juggle three balls but I can't juggle five. So I juggle my three and I say, "Now if I try to juggle five guess how many I'll drop?" I'll drop all of them but one. If you watch me juggle five balls you would conclude Andy can't juggle but that's not true. I can juggle. So I'm going to juggle three and let two lay on the floor and somebody who sees me juggle three says, "You know, I can pick up the one." And somebody else says, "I can pick up the other," and before long all five are held. That visually says you just have to do what you are good at because good people love to work for good people. If people can't see what you're good at because you're trying to do everything, they won't join your team. It's just an extremely important principle and I think there is application at every level in leadership, whether it's a young leader or somebody who's been in leadership a long time.

For more information on Next Generation Leadership by Andy Stanley, click here.