I began coaching a leader in a growing organization recently and he came to an important realization: what had been working for leadership development and discipleship in the past wasn’t working as well anymore. Some of the dynamics had changed since the organization had grown. In the past, he’d had many of his discipling and leadership development conversations in the hallway just spontaneously as a part of daily life. But lately those opportunities were coming along less often: the ministry was getting too big to rely on those spontaneous conversations.
I asked him, “How can you intentionalize what you’re doing to create environments and processes that allow that functionality to still happen?” He decided to schedule some more retreat times with his team. They carved out more space for relaxed social times. These changes to their schedule allowed space for relational discipleship and leadership development to continue to happen in natural ways.
Very often what works in one season doesn’t work in the next and we need to shift gears to continue to make progress.