Why Delegation is the Key to Successful Pastoral Leadership

A New Reality

Crucial to pastoral planning is changing the paradigm of pastoral leadership we may have learned or inherited. With fewer priests and therefore fewer pastors available, we know that our pastoral assignments will only become larger and more complex. While we’ve seen immigration and urbanization affect the demographics of our diocese, we’re not seeing a sharp decline in membership overall. Mass attendance is a different story that we’ll save for another post. So whether we choose to close, merge, or cluster parishes we can assume that no matter what, the pastoral assignments are just going to be bigger. Being the pastor of a small parish with little to no staff will just not be a normal part of our reality anymore. Quite honestly, there really aren’t a lot of those types of pastoral assignments anymore already.

High Capacity Leaders

So the key to a thriving Catholic life in this new reality will be the leadership capacity of the pastor and his ability to form other high capacity leaders. As St. Paul in Ephesians 4 says, the key function of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, is “to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”

Delegation is Formation

It should be no surprise to anyone that the success of any leader will depend on his or her ability to delegate, especially when the job becomes too great for one person. Delegation is defined as “the process of identifying your work responsibilities and assigning portions of your work to others, so that the workers become fulfilled and the work is accomplished.” Looking at this definition we notice the motivation to delegate is not to get rid of the things you don’t like to do. Rather, at the heart of delegation are two things:  accomplishing work and fulfilling people. Don Clifton, former chairman of Gallup, used to say, “What if we focused on getting people done through work, rather than getting work done through people?” There lies the motivation and really the fruit of delegation – developing people!

What to Delegate?

So how does a pastor, or any leader for that matter, go about this process of delegation? Here are a few lists from a book titled Leading and Managing Your Church by Carl George and Robert Logan that we’ve found helpful in deepening our understanding of delegation.

1. List all your current activities.
2. Combine tasks into natural groupings.
3. Eliminate unnecessary activities.
4. Circle tasks someone else could do.
5. Put an asterisk by each one that only you can do.
6. To the appropriate section of your list, add other essential activities you should be doing.

Do not delegate any of the following:

1. Responsibility to correct or discipline.
2. Major problems.
3. Tasks that involve confidential information.
4. Responsibility to create and maintain morale.