I try to demonstrate to those I supervise that I'm there to serve them. After board meetings, for example, which may go until midnight or one o'clock in the morning, I stay with one or two other people and clean the room. I want to serve that board, so I clean the room, meaning they can get home earlier. And I want to serve the church custodian. One time a custodian said to me, "The board sure leaves the room a mess." Now I clean the room so he doesn't have a mess the next morning. My hope is that these people will say, "If the pastor will do that for me, I'm going to do that for other people."

Patterns like these eventually duplicate themselves in the organization. For example, our pastors for junior high students and senior high students serve their volunteers so well that they have a waiting list of people to serve.

I never want a volunteer at our organization to be recruited and then abandoned. I know that if someone asks a teacher, "Will you teach next year?" but has not talked with that teacher all year long, the teacher will not do it. The only way I can hope to avoid that is to create a corporate ethos that says, "Ongoing support is essential." And I can create that ethos only by continually supporting those people I directly supervise.

Excerpted from Identifying and Developing New Leaders, a new downloadable resource from Gifted for Leadership.