FCLP 37 | The 5 Biggest Mistakes Women Make When Asking Their Church to Invest in Them

In this relevant leadership episode of the Female Church Leaders Podcast, Kadi Cole explores why advocating for your own development can feel more complicated than advocating for everyone else’s. Drawing from conversations with senior pastors and executive leaders, she identifies five common mistakes women make when asking their church to invest in their growth.

You’ll gain practical insight into approaching development as stewardship, making a stronger case for investment, and navigating the conversation in a way that honors both your leadership growth and the church you serve.

This week I'm teaching The Competency Gap Live Training live - register here!

TIMESTAMPS

01:48 – Mistake #1: Waiting for someone else to invest in your growth 

04:23 – Mistake #2: Not showing how your development benefits the church 

06:11 – Mistake #3: Not preparing to make it an easy yes 

07:21 – Mistake #4: Failing to be honest and honoring 

08:29 – Mistake #5: Assuming a full yes is the only good answer 

11:13 – Resource: Make Your Stewardship Case & Closing the Leadership Gap cohort

Resources mentioned:

Make Your Stewardship Case; www.kadicole.com/stewardship

Next Steps and Resources:

• Take the Quiz: Identify your growth gap with our Sticky Floor Quiz at www.femalechurchleaders.com.
• Join a Cohort: Be part of our next Closing the Leadership Gap cohort for guided coaching and monthly Q&A with Kadi. Visit www.closingtheleadershipgap.com to learn more.
• Stay Connected: Follow us on Instagram @femalechurchleaders for daily encouragement and leadership tools.
• Spread the Word: If you found this episode helpful, please follow, rate, and share the podcast to help us reach more female church leaders.

Tune in and get ready to lead with clarity, strength, and joy. Your calling matters, and we're here to support you every step of the way!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Female Church Leaders Podcast, a weekly resource for women who love God, love the church, and are called to lead. I'm your host, Katie Cole, church leader, author, and executive coach. After more than 30 years in full-time ministry, often as the only woman at the table, I understand how meaningful yet challenging your calling can be. That's why I created this podcast to remind you that you're not leading alone. Each week, I'll share practical tools, biblical insights, and honest encouragement for the real challenges female leaders face in ministry. So you can grow your skills, strengthen your faith, and lead with more confidence and joy without burning out or striving to prove yourself. We drop a new episode every Monday because Sunday is coming and you are going to be ready for it. Women are often excellent advocates for everyone else's development but their own. We'll ask for more budget for our ministry, we'll fight for a team member to get a raise, we'll recommend someone for an opportunity because we see so much potential in them. We'll even spend hours thinking about how to develop the people we lead. But when it comes to advocating for our own development, well, things can get a little more complicated. Maybe you have figured out there's a conference or a coaching program or a certification or some opportunity you know would help you grow, but you're not sure whether your church will support you doing it. And more importantly, you're not sure if they will help you pay for it. So I asked several senior pastors and executive leaders what helps them say yes, particularly when a female leader asks for you to develop them. What gets in the way of you being able to put budget money their direction? Well, their answers were incredibly practical. And I think there are a few mistakes described here that will help us all think differently about advocating for our own growth. Okay, mistake number one: waiting for someone else to take responsibility for your development. Your church should develop leaders, absolutely. Your supervisor is supposed to care about your growth. Healthy organizations invest in their people, but ultimately, you are responsible for stewarding what God has entrusted to you. So start by becoming a self-motivated learner. Read, listen, ask questions, find people who are further ahead of you and learn from them. Take advantage of development opportunities already around you, especially those provided by your church. But there may come a point when another book or podcast just simply isn't enough. You're ready for something more organized with personalized feedback, coaching, accountability, or expertise you don't currently have access to. I had to learn this myself the hard way. And I learned it first in the area of my health and fitness. I have worked out for years. I'm a big aerobics girl. I did jazz or size forever. But there came a point where I had a shoulder injury that made me realize I had gotten as far as I could on my own. So I finally decided to spend the money and hire a really good personal trainer. And their only job was to work with just me for an hour three times a week. Oh my gosh, it made such a huge difference. Not because he had some secret exercise I couldn't have like Googled online, but because he was so good at helping me get better. He could see things I couldn't see. He knew what I needed to work on and in what order. In fact, he knew what exercises I should do now and what I should do later and which ones I should never do. He corrected me when I was off, even just a little bit, and he adjusted the plan as I progressed. Plus, and I didn't really always like this at the time, but he pushed me further than I would have pushed myself. So sometimes moving to the next level means investing in a different level of help, higher level expertise, the kind you pay for. Now, the same can be true in your leadership. There may come a point when being a motivated, self-directed learner just simply isn't enough to get you where you want to go next. And you don't have to wait for someone else to notice that you need more. I say this to women in leadership rooms all the time, just as a reminder, that at the end of your life, Jesus isn't going to ask your boss or your husband or what or your pastor what they did with your gifts. He is going to ask you. So if you sense that God has more for you and that you have some learning you need to do to be ready for it, now is the time to invest in yourself. Okay, mistake number two, failing to show how the investment benefits the church. When you ask your church leaders to invest in your development, don't only explain what the opportunity will do for you personally. Show them how the investment benefits your whole church. What does this make possible? How will you lead differently? What problem could you now help solve? What capacity will you be adding? How will your team benefit? What could you bring back and multiply among other leaders? I stumbled into this when I was in my early 20s. I wanted to pursue a master's degree and I asked the college I worked for to help me pay for it. Now, looking back, when I made the proposal, I was had a part of it that was very compelling because it was more than just me wanting more education. At the time, we were dealing with a significant staff retention challenge. So I connected my potential graduate work to how this would increase my leadership capacity within my department, as well as I proposed that I would repay their investment by staying on staff for an additional two years after I graduated. For them, this was a winning situation. They had a strong employee who was committing to stay on staff for another four years. Plus, I was simply asking to join a class that already existed and cost them almost nothing. And I would be more equipped to lead at a higher level, which is where some of our biggest staffing gaps were. For me, it felt like it was a win-win because I knew I had a job for at least the next four years. Now, I certainly didn't have sophisticated language for any of this at the time, and I didn't really understand the retention issue till much later looking back. I just happened to stumble into a really important leadership principle. If you're asking the church to make the financial investment, help them see what that investment now makes possible for the church, not just for you. Mistake number three, not doing the work ahead of time to make it an easy yes. Once you know what you want to ask for, do your homework. Think through the decision, not from your perspective, but from your leader's perspective. What questions are they going to have? What concerns or objections will come up or might other people ask them about? What are the time, budget, scheduling, or staffing implications? And is there anything you can proactively address before you make the ask? Then think about the return on the investment. How will you know this development actually made a difference? Is there a result you can measure, a problem you'll be better equipped to solve, or a specific group of leaders you'll be able to train and develop because of what you learned? Don't just bring your leadership opportunity. Bring them a well thought-through proposal. The goal isn't to eliminate every possible reason they could say no. Some things are simply outside of your control and maybe even outside theirs. But you can make it much easier for them to make a good decision when you've already thought through the questions they're likely to ask and speak to them in the language they need to make a good leadership decision. Mistake number four, failing to be honest and honoring. It can be tempting to build your case around everything you haven't received. I've never been offered coaching, you send other leaders to conferences, women around here don't get the same development opportunities as the guys. And some of those observations may actually be completely true. But that's not where I'd start the conversation. Before you focus on what's missing, take an honest inventory of what is already. Maybe your church invests in staff meetings where you learn together. Maybe you've attended or even hosted conferences at your church. You've received feedback from your supervisor. You get to participate in team development. Maybe you've had access to senior leaders, been given opportunities that have stretched you. Be sure to take time to honor what is. Then you open the door to be honest about what you need. That allows you to acknowledge the investment your church has already made while clearly asking for the additional development you want next. It's not wrong to ask for something, but it is wrong to go in with an attitude that you deserve it or that your leaders haven't already been trying to help you. And mistake number five, assuming the only good answer is a full yes. Several of the pastors I interviewed told me they see women buying into the lie that they aren't worth investing in. And sometimes that means we interpret anything less than a fully funded yes as confirmation that we shouldn't have asked in the first place. But your leader probably genuinely wants to invest in you and may not have the budget to cover everything you're asking for. So stay open to what they can do. Maybe they can fund part of the opportunity and maybe you share the cost. Maybe this becomes a catalyst for adding a training light item to your bar department's budget for next year, one that you can now steward your own development and the development of your team year after year. Don't let the size of this first answer determine whether or not you are valued. Your goal isn't to get everything you ask for every time. It's to begin building a culture where investing in your development becomes a normal part of how you and your church steward your leadership. Because ultimately, advocating for your development isn't about having more. It's about stewarding responsibly what God has entrusted to you. Romans 12.3 tells us not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, but to think of ourselves with sober judgment. I love that phrase because sober judgment isn't just an inflated view of yourself, but it isn't an artificially diminished view of yourself either. Sober judgment is an accurate view. Don't honor God by exaggerating what he has entrusted to you. And you don't honor him by pretending he has entrusted you with less either. Part of faithfully stewarding your leadership is being honest about the gifts and calling and responsibility God has given you, and then taking responsibility for developing those competencies you need to steward those responsibilities well. So are you thinking of yourself with sober judgment? Your action step this week is to think about that and identify one area of your leadership that needs intentional development this year. Not 10 things, just one. That if you move that one thing forward this year intentionally, it would make the biggest difference in your leadership for you, for your team, and for your church. Then ask yourself, what kind of development will actually help me grow this? And if you're asking your church or maybe even your family to invest in it, how would that investment benefit them? Take some time with that this week. You don't need to have an entire development plan figured out, but start by getting clear about what you need and what that growth can make possible in the ministry God has already entrusted into you. And if today's episode has got you thinking about a development opportunity you're like to pursue, I've created a really practical resource to help you take the next step in asking your church to help you fund it. It's called Make Your Stewardship Case, and it's filled with practical follow-up steps from today's episode so you can feel ready and equipped to ask your church to invest in your development. And hypothetically, if the development opportunity you're thinking about happens to be, oh, I don't know, an online coaching cohort for female church leaders called Closing the Leadership Gap, it starts October 1st, and I would love to have you join us. So, yes, you can absolutely use the Make Your Stewardship Case resource to help you ask your church to invest in that cohort. But you can also use it to pursue a degree, get some individualized coaching, attend a conference, or any other development opportunity you believe will help you lead and serve your church more effectively. You can find links to both the stewardship resource and information about our closing the leadership gap coaching cohort in the show notes. Thank you so much for continuing to take responsibility for the leader God is developing you to become. You are called, you are equipped, so steward what he has entrusted to you with wisdom, courage, and faithfulness. And remember, we are here to cheer you on every step of the way. I'm so glad we got to spend this time together on the Female Church Leaders podcast. I hope you're walking away encouraged, equipped, and reminded that your calling truly matters. To keep growing, join us for our next Closing the Leadership Gap cohort at ClosingTheLeadershipGap.com. It's a guided coaching experience, including live QA with me, designed to accelerate your leadership journey. If this podcast has been helpful to you, would you please take a moment to follow, rate, and share it? Your engagement helps the algorithms suggest our resources to female church leaders we haven't had a chance to meet yet. And don't forget to follow at female church leaders on Instagram for encouragement and leadership tools designed just for you. You can also follow my personal feed at Katie Cole spelled K A D I C O L E. Keep leading faithfully, keep growing your leadership gifts, and I'll see you next Monday because Sunday is coming and you are going to be ready for it.