Preaching: The coaching issue may sound odd to some pastors. What do you see as the importance of coaching for a leader and how does the pastor use that? How do they find a good coach?

Stanley: I say to pastors: every time you preach, your sermon is evaluated by as many people as there are in your congregation. You are being evaluated. You will either learn and take advantage of those evaluations or you will not. But you're already being evaluated. Your leadership is being evaluated. Every person that sits in your leader staff meetings, your deacons meetings, your Sunday school directors meetings, every time you lead a meeting your leadership is being evaluated. So the question isn't "Should I get evaluations?" The question is, "How can I grow from these evaluations?" The evaluation is already happening, so engaging somebody to give us input — whether positive or negative or critical or whatever — should be a no-brainer because all the evaluators are already in place taking mental and sometime not just mental notes. And they are talking about how we're performing to each other. The question is: do we have the security to take advantage of that? Since the evaluations happen anyway it's wise to take advantage of that.

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The last thing you want to do is ask somebody to be your leadership coach. Everyone will say no. They don't feel competent. They don't know what that is. What you do is you simply ask for people's input. Everybody loves to give input. In our culture here at the church there's some built-in critique for things that happen every week for every part of our service including the sermon. There are people that in my meetings I've asked strategically — I give them permission to tell me after a meeting where I've not been clear, where I've been too dogmatic, where I've been abrasive. I want to know that because I won't know it otherwise. I'm giving you the freedom to give me that feedback.

When you're leading a meeting you don't know how you are doing. You don't. You think you do but you're not sitting there watching and listening. So often it's just giving people permission or asking for their feedback. Get people that you respect. People that you know have done this before in their own realms, and there is really no realm of leadership that I know of that you can't get coaching on.

A big area for me is in personnel — hiring and the few times we've had to let people go. In a case years ago I almost let someone go and it would have been a terrible mistake. There's a guy in our church that is really intuitive about personnel issues — actually two guys. I never make a personnel decision with out talking to them first: "Here are all the issues, here are the details. What do you think?" I've never said to them, "Would you coach me in my leadership? But what I've said is, "Would you give me input in this area of leadership," and they are more than happy to. Consequently they feel the freedom to interject at will. I feel very dependent upon that handful of people that I've brought into that circle and I get all the benefit.