What does it mean to “build infrastructure?”
In my leadership fundamental post on Developing Infrastructure is Critical! I say this …
It’s all about scalability! How can an organization leverage its leadership? Its knowledge? There are only so many leadership people to go around and good leaders are extremely difficult to find. So … building a world class organization depends on the leader’s ability to develop good systems, processes, and methods and to make them known (easy to access, learn about, use, and change as needed) to the entire organization.
That’s right, enabling the church to “scale up” its ability to accomplish the mission with limited leadership horsepower, is the responsibility of the Executive Pastor. An organization can be boiled down to literally hundreds of individual and interdependent processes. The key is to decide what the best method is to do something and to document it in a way that ensures the agreed-upon method is followed every time. This allows the leader to solve problems in a sustainable way and then move on to the next opportunity. And, more importantly, it allows the leader to recruit and deploy staff and volunteers more rapidly. In a growing church, this is critical!
As a good leader, the executive pastor must understand the importance of building a strong infrastructure and have, at least, some experience in doing it successfully. At a minimum, the executive pastor has to be the “champion” for developing infrastructure, keeping its importance in front of the staff at all times.