What is the difference between a corporate leader and a shopkeeper? Kim Seung-ho, a businessman and bestselling author, explains this distinction in Introduction to the Study of Being a CEO by identifying three criteria: competence at work, the size of the market, and the way income is generated. In this column, I would like to focus on competence at work.
Kim argues that if the owner of a company is the most capable person at every task, then what he is running is not a corporation but merely a business. Take a restaurant as an example. If the owner is the best at cooking, serving customers, managing finances, cleaning the restaurant, wiping tables with a rag, and even doing the dishes—doing everything more neatly and efficiently than anyone else—then that restaurant is a neighborhood business, not a franchise company. Corporate operations are entirely different. Sales are handled by Manager Kim, marketing by Assistant Manager Choi, finance by Director Jung, and planning by Team Leader Hong—each performing at a level even higher than the owner. The owner’s role is simply to train and support them so they can do their work even better, and to make a few key decisions that are most critical to the operation of the company. Kim Seung-ho’s perspective on business offers meaningful insight for pastors as well.
What about leadership in the church? In more than 95 percent of churches, the person with the greatest operational ability is undoubtedly the senior pastor. As a result, even though there may be associate pastors, assistant pastors, elders, and deacons working alongside him, in the end, almost everything is handled by the senior pastor. The coworkers merely take care of menial tasks. To be honest, the senior pastor is not truly satisfied with the results of those tasks. He either overlooks them or ends up redoing the work himself. Consequently, the senior pastor becomes overloaded and exhausted. The fact that more than 95 percent of churches are small churches and more than 95 percent of businesses are mom-and-pop shops stems from the same underlying reason.
According to Kim Seung-ho, a boss who does everything well is not “a versatile, diligent, and capable leader,” but rather “someone who works alone, fails to develop people who can replace him, and cannot trust anyone.” Such a person can never rise above the level of a small business. A true corporate leader is “someone who enables and develops employees so that each of them can demonstrate even greater professional competence in their own unique areas—surpassing the leader himself.”
The apostle Paul describes the primary responsibility of a pastor in this way: “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12).
For a senior pastor to move beyond a structure in which he does everything best and instead enable others to serve with excellence (in the work of ministry), he must focus on developing leaders. John Maxwell offers this exhortation to pastors: Do not strive to build a big church; strive to build great people. Then they will build a great church.