FCLP 22 | Why Things Aren’t Getting Done – and How to Fix It (Spiritual Gifts: Administration)

In this clarifying leadership episode of the Female Church Leaders Podcast, Kadi Cole continues the Spiritual Gifts Summer Series by showing how spiritual gifts assessments can become powerful tools for developing the people on your team. This episode also introduces the spiritual gift of administration and why it is often misunderstood, undervalued, and essential for healthy team leadership.

You’ll gain fresh insight into how leaders can identify gifts more intentionally, create opportunities for growth, and recognize where the gift of administration strengthens clarity, execution, and long-term ministry effectiveness.

TIMESTAMPS

00:57 - Why your team’s growth feels slower than it should

01:13 - Using spiritual gift assessments as leadership tools 

03:52 - Focus on top three gifts for development 

04:40 - Creating opportunities to test and observe gifts 

05:34 - Understanding the gift of administration 

05:58 - Signs you're missing administration on your team 

Resources mentioned:

• The Spiritual Gifts Leadership Toolkit: kadicole.com/spiritualgifts 
• Free Spiritual Gift Assessment: Giftstest.com

Next Steps and Resources:

• Take the Quiz: Identify your growth gap with our Sticky Floor Quiz at 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 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

SPEAKER_00 0:01

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, Autor, 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 gonna be ready for it. If your team isn't growing the way you expected, there's usually a reason. You can have great people, you can have a strong culture, you can even have clear vision, and still feel like development is slower than it should be. Leaders plateau, potential goes untapped, and you find yourself stepping in more than you want to. Not because people don't care, but because they're not being developed in alignment with how God designed them. So today, we're going to get very practical. I want to show you how to actually use a spiritual gift assessment as a leadership tool. Not just something people take once and forget, but something you use to identify, affirm, and develop people over time. And then we're going to take a deep dive into the first gift in our series, the gift of administration. Let's start with the assessment. Many Christians have taken one, they get the results, they read the descriptions, they might even say, yeah, that sounds like me. And then nothing changes. Because information alone doesn't develop people. Leadership does. So here's how I want you to think about spiritual gift assessments as a leader. They are not the answer, they are the starting point. They give you language, they give you direction, they give you a place to begin paying attention. But they are not meant to stand alone. Because here's what's important self-awareness, which is what we do to take an assessment, is not nearly enough. God designed spiritual gifts to be recognized and confirmed in community. That means you don't just look at what someone says about themselves, you also pay attention to what others see in them, what produces fruit, what consistently shows up over time. This is where your role as a leader becomes incredibly important. As a leader, you carry spiritual authority. And when you take the time to notice someone, to observe them, to pray about what you see, and then you say, I see this in you, that matters more than you realize. I learned this leadership concept from my friends at Exponential. As a leader, the four most important letters in the alphabet for you are I, C, and you. I see in you how you naturally step in when someone is struggling. I see in you how you bring clarity when things feel confusing. I see in you how people respond when you speak. That kind of language does something. It brings clarity, it builds confidence, and it helps people recognize what God has already placed in them. And this isn't just for young leaders, by the way, this is for everyone. Because no matter how experienced or confident someone is, when a leader they respect names something they see in them, it carries weight. It stays longer, it goes deeper. In many ways, it's what spiritual leadership looks like. You're acting as a spiritual parent. And when a parent speaks identity, calling, and affirmation into their spiritual child, it matters differently. So when you use an assessment, don't simply stop at the results. Use it to start the conversation. Ask, do you see this in yourself? Where have you seen this show up? What are we not using in our ministry right now? And then bring your voice into it. This is what I see in you. The second thing I want you to focus on is don't try to develop everything at one time. Focus on just a person's top three gifts. That's where you'll see the most fruit. Because gifts don't operate in isolation, they actually integrate and work together. And how they combine actually shapes how someone leads. For example, someone with the gift of administration and leadership is going to build systems and move people forward strategically. Someone with administration and mercy gifts may create systems, but it will be systems that care deeply for people and remove friction in very relational ways. Someone with administration and encouragement might build structures that consistently strengthen and develop others. Same gift, but different expressions because of the combination. Once you begin to identify and confirm those top three gifts, your role as the leader shifts again. Now you create opportunities, not permanent roles, but short-term opportunities to test and observe. Let them try it out. Let them lead in small ways and watch to see what produces fruit. If the gift is really there, you will see it because the impact will be disproportionately greater than their effort and everyone else's work in the same direction. And if someone is more mature in their gifting, this actually matters to you also. They need opportunities to talk about it with those who are younger in their gifting. They need to be able to name it out loud, to model it, and to explain how it operates as a mature believer who's nurtured this gift over years, because that's how other people will learn, not just through theory, but by learning from that person's example. Now let's shift into our first gift. And this one is incredibly important for leaders to understand, especially when you're developing women on your team. I want to talk about the gift of administration. And I want to say this clearly: the gift of administration is not a support gift, it is a leadership gift. Let me give you a really practical way to recognize if this gift might be missing from your team. Because sometimes it's not about identifying who has it. It's also about, as a leader, noticing what's not happening on your team and in your ministry. You may be missing the gift of administration on your team if things consistently feel disorganized or unclear, ideas don't actually turn into execution, roles and responsibilities are confusing, or the same problems keep happening over and over again. That's usually not just a process issue, it's a leadership gap in how systems are being built and maintained. See, the gift of administration is the ability to design the how behind ministry. It takes vision and turns it into clear, strategic, executable plans that actually move things forward. Vision says, here's where we're going. Administration says, here's how we're going to get there. And this is where the gift of administration is often misunderstood, especially in women, because the word administration gets confused with administrative tasks or being an administrative assistant, being organized, managing calendars, handling logistics. Let me explain. Those are skills. They're actually just part of being a mature, responsible adult. That is not a spiritual gift. The spiritual gift of administration is more than anything, strategic. It sees gaps quickly, it builds systems, it creates pathways forward. This is someone who naturally asks, how is this actually going to work? Or how can we make this better? And then builds the answer. These are people who break ideas into clear steps, identify inefficiencies others often miss, and improve systems without being asked. They don't just organize, they design better ways forward. And when this gift is misunderstood, it often gets mislabeled, especially in women. You might hear things like, she's so critical, she's too detailed, she's always negative. But what's actually happening is she sees what's not working and she cares enough to say something. Or even more commonly, a woman gets placed in a lower-level support role because people assume, oh, she's just administrative, instead of recognizing this is a gifted strategic leader. And when that happens, this gift becomes frustrated and underutilized because it was never designed just to manage the tasks of someone else's plan. It was designed to help build the plan and strategize its execution. Biblically, we see this gift in places like Acts chapter six, where structure was created so ministry could expand, or in Joseph's leadership throughout the book of Genesis, where strategy and planning preserved an entire nation. This gift is not just practical, it's spiritual. It builds the church and serves people. Now, every gift also comes with its own growth areas. For administration, that often looks like learning when to speak and when to simply be supportive, learning to lead with relational awareness, especially when giving input, and learning that not every inefficiency needs to be fixed immediately. Because this gift can move fast, and most people without this gift cannot process at the same speed. But when this gift is developed well, it changes everything. It brings clarity, it removes confusion, it helps teams actually move forward. It turns, hey, that's a great idea, into, oh, this is actually happening. So as a leader, here's what you do with someone who has this gift. Give them ownership, not just tasks. Ask, what's not working that we're missing? Invite them into planning conversations. Let them improve something you know is underperforming, and then support them as they grow in how to lead people, not just systems. And when you see this gift in someone, please name it out loud. I see in you the ability to create clarity. I see in you how you bring structure when things feel chaotic. I see in you how you help us move forward. This is the gift of administration, and I see it in you. So here's your action step this week. Take your team through a spiritual gift assessment if you haven't already. Then identify each person's top three gifts and have the conversation. Then maybe choose one person to intentionally develop. Not everything, not everyone, but one person, one gift, one opportunity this week to let them step into it. And if you haven't downloaded it yet, the Spiritual Gifts Leadership Toolkit will walk you through this process step by step. It will help you identify the gifts of your people, understand how they function, and actually begin developing your team in a step-by-step way. This is designed to be something you can use long term, not just for this series. You'll find a link in the toolkit in the show notes. Thank you for growing in clarity and leadership. As you begin to see your people more accurately and develop them more intentionally, you won't just build stronger teams. You'll multiply impact. Remember, you are called and equipped to lead with the wisdom and authority God has given you. And 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 ClosingThe Leadership Gap.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.