Mentoring: Keeping Creativity Alive

 1 - Mentoring, 2 - Leadership, 3 - Dialog Resources, Show All Posts
May 142012
 

Genius will only take you so far. Lehrer suggests in Imagine: How Creativity Works, that solitary geniuses peak at about age 30. So how do you keep creativity alive?

New perspectives. Travel. Read. Explore.

New people. Collaborate more. Keep your network growing. Really listen.

New “professions.” Challenge yourself. Take risks. Keep growing mentally.

Co-learning in networked mentoring environments is an ideal way to gain new perspectives, interact with new people and explore new fields.

How do you keep generating fresh ideas?

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Leadership: Creativity Begins with Frustration

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May 012012
 

Lehrer suggests in Imagine: How Creativity Works, that the creative journey begins with losing hope, becoming frustrated.

What implications do you see for leadership?

For more to discuss watch this creative video on Lehrer’s concepts:
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Simpleadership: Three Key Actions

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Apr 302012
 

As you reflect on the personal, relational and mission dimensions of leadership, what would your three key actions be?

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Personal Leadership: The Place of Character and Competence

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Apr 262012
 

Can you have effective, incompetent leaders? Nope. But some highly skilled leaders have enough character flaws to create a dangerous situation for themselves and others! These character issues are usually the result of a wrongly placed sense of identity. It is relatively easy to get ahead using personal competency as the lever because that is the most visible part of leadership. However, character problems usually show up as soon as pressure is applied to the leader.

This unstable leaderhip pyramid to be replaced. Leadership needs to work from the ground,up starting with our Identity and Character. Competency then becomes a way to help others succeed and the organization expand instead of being perused as a path to personal prosperity.

What are the character qualities most needed by effective leaders?

 

Fill in the blank: I trust someone more when they __________(do what)?

 

 

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Personal Leadership: The Importance of Knowing Your Essence

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Apr 182012
 

Effective leaders know who they really are, embrace it and give themselves to the cause. We looked at identity as a foundational understanding of the personal dimension of simple leadership. The concept of essence is closely related.

From Wikipedia:

In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity.

How is essence different than personality?

 

How does a leader discover who they really are?

 

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Simpleadership and Identiy

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Apr 162012
 

First, understanding and embracing your true self, your identity is critical. Over a lifetime, who we truly are gets distorted by:

  • False messages of our society
  • Negative messages conveyed in painful relationships
  • Our own misunderstanding and misinterpretation of life’s events

Layers of projection and protection develop that impede our ability to communicate and relate as seen in this illustration:

I know it looks ridiculous when you picture it, but these layers are all too real in my life and leadership.

How do you see these layers impacting your life and leadership?

For further study:

Writers that have shaped my sense of identity include Neil T. Anderson, Henri Nouwen and John Eldredge. Writer Jim Collins identifies level 5 leadership as a paradoxical blend of both personal humility (working for the noble cause, not their own glory) and professional will (pushing through criticism and failure to the highest goals of the organization). This kind of leadership only comes from very secure people. Those who approach leadership from other worldviews may have different anchor points, but you cannot lead effectively if your need for success, praise, or security twists your motives and decisions towards selfish ends.

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The Personal Dimension of Simpleadership: Introduction

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Apr 032012
 

Developing yourself is the foundation of effective leadership. Without this foundation, relationships will crumble under the stress of competing needs and opinions. Without a healthy sense of your own value, the mission can shift from a noble cause to a self-centered quest for success. Conversely, a growing leader creates an ecosystem of healthy growth for the people and the organization. Nothing is more important than developing the personal leg of the simpleadership triangle.

So how do you continually develop yourself as a leader?

 

What are the keys to developing others?

 

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Leadership, Ministry and Inadequacy

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Mar 152012
 

In both leadership and mentoring, feeling inadequate is simply part of the job. Often I have no clue what a person or team needs to grow or be more effective. This was driven home today in the Gospel reading from the lectionary. I couldn’t help but see the BIG IDEA Jesus was driving home to His future leaders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How does this translate into practical truth that can give me the courage to step into leadership or ministry? One thing that has helped in the last few years is reconceptualizing ministry as simply:

“Being with God, with others, for their blessing and HIs glory.” All three dimensions of this definition are critical.

  • Being – My job is to show up and be present to them, will all my strengths and weaknesses. Somehow God can use me, even it appears like a lost cause to me at times. In Christ, I have every spiritual blessing in the Heavenly places.
  • With God, with others – I am not there by myself, I am there with God, with others. We are all working together on the issues at hand. This is true whether I am in my community of faith or workplace. In my inadequacy, I am looking for the creativity of the Father, the love of Jesus and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to show up and do what I can not do.
  • For their blessing and God’s glory - I am there to be a blessing, not to have all the answers. It is about God’s glory not my success. Leadership and mentoring are both opportunities to see God’s strength perfected in my weaknesses. Truth is, sometimes people are blessed way more by our simple presence with them than our pearls of wisdom for them.

These three dimension of ministry in general – being, with, for – translate into the personal, relational and missional dimensions of the simpleadership model.

 

How do you respond to feelings of inadequacy in ministry, leadership or mentoring? What has been helpful to you in moving through those feelings towards others.

 

 

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Introduction to Simple Leadership

 1 - Mentoring, 2 - Leadership, 3 - Dialog Resources, Show All Posts
Mar 112012
 

Simple leadership. I have spent the last few years trying to think both deeply and simply about leadership. In this post I want to give a very simple overview of the basic framework of my thinking. Later I will go into more on how and why I ended up here. For now, conceiving of leadership in three connected practice areas as a triangle was influenced by “triple constraint theory” used by our IT team at Triple Creek. Quality in project coding is determined by balancing three essential elements: cost, time and scope of the project. In a similar way, leadership impact is visualized by the area bounded by the leader’s mastery of three areas:

  • Personal- Identity, awareness of strengths and weaknesses, competencies and skill sets.

  • Relational- Communication, developing others, setting culture, building teams and community.

  • Missional- Setting vision, direction, values, strategies, while inspiring others to join the noble cause.

A growing leader is continually expanding their mastery in all three areas. However, the personal dimension is foundational, because it is the primary constraint of one’s relational capabilities. In a similar way, a person with a big vision but poor relational IQ, will never reach their peak impact. However, a good person, with decent relational skill, will be a underachiever if they never stretch their vision beyond the status quo.

The long-term goal of the simpleadership.com project is to provide a simple, transferable way to develop leaders in your organization. I use these ideas and models in my own personal mentoring meetings and in the teaching on leadership I do in my context (both business and Christian non-profit work). The following video lesson is intended to both give you an overview of these basic ideas and model how you can simply teach these concepts. You notice a few things about the resources we will produce:

 

1 – They are simple. This video lesson was produced on a free app, Educreations, which is wonderful but has no editing capabilities. The goal is not to be slick but give both information and model how you can use this material in mentoring coversations and short teaching sessions (hence the back of the napkin illustrations).

 

2 – They are NOT copywrited. While I hope that those who “riff” off of these ideas will give me some props, I want people to be free to modify anything here to fit their own leadership context and produce much better resources than I can.

Click here to view introduction to simpleadership.

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Covenant: God’s Leadership through Withness

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Mar 042012
 

In looking at how God accomplishes His global mission, covenant is an essential part of His leadership.  Abrams’ attempt to “help” God out by generating an heir with Hagar instead of Sarah did not prevent God’s persistent promises from fulfillment. In the face of Abram’s doubt God remains completely faithful.  This faithfulness in promises and relationship is the essence of what we are calling “withness.”

Withness in leadership means:

  • Showing up, entering the mess people have made, to lead them forward.
  • Persevering with people to accomplish the long-term mission.
  • Repeatedly affirming your own commitments to the mission and to them.

What is your instinctive response to others who fail to make the same level of commitments to the mission as you do?

  • Write them off?
  • Chew them out?
  • Withdraw your own support to them or to the mission?
  • Join them in looking for a way forward?

Is the an area in which you need to lead by renewing your own commitments?

My own area now is in improving my “withness” in my marriage communication as an example.

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Simpicity in the Spiritual Life?

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Mar 012012
 

My mind rebells against simplicity. Whether it is leadership, mentoring, ministry or the spiritual life, I enjoy learning new perspectives, theories and practices. But, there is a hidden cost – all the time focused on new stuff clutters the mind and worse still, it helps us avoid the actual practice of the leadership or even the spiritual life. In the thinking about living, I can forget to live.

I am trying to get more simple in my approach to everything. What about you, is simplicity something you crave or avoid? Why?

Blessings!

 

 

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Withness and Leadership

 2 - Leadership, Show All Posts
Feb 282012
 

 

Mentoring and leadership both derive power from the experience of withness. Take a look at this image from my journal and reflect on all the ways we use the idea of with.

 

How would being truly with others make a difference?

 

 

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Failure and Christian Leadership

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Jul 272011
 
Failure happens.  No matter how perfect your leadership and how grace giving the culture you create, personal choices create conflict and consequences for your organization.  Just ask God!
The fundamental temptation is to exchange the position of receiving good gifts from God, for the position of taking what we want for our own purposes, independent from God.  We chose pride over humility.  I like the way Fleming puts it in his discussion of Ignatian spirituality:
What we need to understand is this: everything is a gift  from God. This is the fundamental truth of our existence. All  created things are “presented to us so that we can know  God more easily and make a return of love more readily.”  The problem with Lucifer‘s program is that riches, honor,  and pride subtly lead us away from this truth. These values  delude us about the true nature of things. They focus our  attention on ourselves rather than God…. The values of Jesus lead us back to the fundamental  truth. The value of poverty reminds us that we have nothing  in ourselves but only as a gift from God. Embracing powerlessness   acknowledges that God is our strength. Humility is  the expression of the reality of the self before God. It recognizes  that we are first and foremost sons and daughters of  God, children who call him Father. What Is Ignatian Spirituality? (David L. Fleming) – Highlight Loc. 492-94
What did God do in response to our lack of gratefulness, rebellion and hiding in shame?  He waded into the mess and restored the relationship.  Let’s look at a few leadership principles:
  • Initiate – God walked, God called, God asked questions.  Hoping problems will go away never works.  God took the initiative right away to get to the root of the failure, restore the relationship and chart the course for the future.
  • Get to the root issues – The issue was the choice to listen to the word of creatures rather than the word of the Creator.  People do self-centered, self-protective things because they don’t appreciate the full blessing of the their status as “the image of God” in the world.  For believers, it goes even further.  Our identity is more fully described as God’s very children.  If this image controls our choices, we live freely in relationship with God and others.  If we live out of a needy, deprived image of ourselves, we listen to the voices around us that call us to find life in what we don’t have, so we take!
  • Face the future together – God laid out the future, the changes because of the rebellion, but He did so in the context of relationship with us.  God dealt with the new reality of shame and nakedness symbolically by making clothing Himself for us.  He sets new boundaries, protecting us from choices with even more dire consequences.  Life cannot be taken from the tree by our own choice, we  must depend only on God as the source of true life.  God bind Himself to our future and our future to Himself.
  • Lead redemptively – The culmination of the calamity is Christ, God with us, redeeming us from death by His own death and giving us His life, through the resurrection.  Failure is an opportunity to press into relationship, to invite others to commit afresh to their true identity and invite other into life with God.

Christian leadership must face the reality of failure with faith.  Trust that God has both been there over and over with us and continues to press forward with us for the benefit of mankind as His image.

I saw the “fork in the road” above and took the picture – full of metaphore, entendre, and irony about loss of purpose.  Could the fork be redeemed?  What about the choices we all make?  It inspired this haiku:

the fork in the road

bent, flattened, twisted, tarnished

which way will it go

 

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Creation and Christian Mentoring

 1 - Mentoring, 2 - Leadership, Show All Posts
Jul 212011
 

God’s act of creation provides a theological foundation for both leadership and mentoring.  We’ve looked at creation as the context for:

  • People to experience the love and grace of a giving God.
  • People to exercise their capacities and freedom as God’s image to shape creation itself for God’s glory and their own benefit.
  • People to relate to each other as co-image bearers, learning from each other and collaborating creatively in their joint vocation.
  • People to understand their unique place in God’s world, celebrate life itself and worship the creator.

Christian leader follow God’s example by shaping the context and culture of the organization to encourage these experiences.  Mentoring is one context where leaders can shape their own understanding and experience of following God’s pattern of leadership.  As a collaborative, learning relationship, mentors and mentees both shape the culture of their relationship to be a life-giving experience where God is understood and worshipped and all parties grow in vocation and self understanding as God’s image.  When I in mentoring relationships with others, I am constantly asking myself three questions as we process life together :

  • How are we understanding more of God?
  • How am I better understanding myself and others?
  • How am I growing in my vocation to glorify God and serve others?

Focusing on these questions, shapes the dialog to address these core learning objectives present in any Christian relationship focused on growth and development.  The give and take of mentoring dialog stimulates creativity.  This is how we were created to function!

While the following video by author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany is not presenting these concepts from a specifically Christian view, I find the way Steve Blanks connects mentoring, leadership and creativity compelling.  There is a lot to chew on here.

In addition, take a look previous posts on creation, creativity and leadership for mentoring discussion ideas:

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Christian Leadership, Love and Creation

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Jul 192011
 
Liturgy of Saint James. Russian Orthodox Churc...

Image via Wikipedia

As we ponder the theological roots of Christian leadership, the starting point for understanding the generosity of God’s love is creation itself.  If our leadership is an act of love in which we help others discover their gifts and follow God in loving service, we must reflect on how God has as led us first in creation.  St. Ignatius sees it this way:

God who loves us creates us and wants to share life with  us forever. Our love response takes shape in our praise and  honor and service of the God of our life.  All the things in this world are also created because of  God’s love and they become a context of gifts, presented  to us so that we can know God more easily and make a  return of love more readily.  As a result, we show reverence for all the gifts of  creation and collaborate with God in using them so that by  being good stewards we develop as loving persons in our  care of God’s world and its development. (What Is Ignatian Spirituality? by David L. Fleming, Kindle Loc. 44-48).

Creation is the context in which we understand God’s love and the gift of life itself.  Leaders help others see God in all created things and find inspiration for their own creativity in the vast created universe God has given to us.  Our primary vocation as God’s image is to be good “leader-managers” of this creation in partnership with God Himself.

I mentioned in a post a few days ago that rainbows are almost sacramental to me, a reminder of God’s covenant with humanity.  Conversely, the Eucharist is anchored not in abstractions, but in the simple elements of bread and wine. These are perfect examples of the divine-human partnership in creativity.  God made the grain, man makes bread.  God made the grape, man makes wine.

As leaders, what has God-given you that can be creatively used for man’s good and God’s glory?  I have been an architect, pastor, consultant and leader in a mentoring movement.  In every career, I hope that I have helped people see life more as a gift to be enjoyed with God.

How do you see your current vocation and your current connection to creation?

Implications for Leaders:

  • See if you can notice something about God each day in your connection to creation.
  • When you need inspiration for creativity, go outside, take a walk, look around, listen, smell, feel the weather.  Listen for God with all your senses and see where He takes your mind and heart.
  • It is essential and foundational that we lead others by word and deed into a closer connection and appreciation for life in all it’s forms as a beautiful expression of God’s love.
  • From Wikipedia… Finding God in All Things: The vision that Ignatius places at the beginning of the Exercises keeps sight of both the Creator and the creature, the One and the other swept along in the same movement of love. In it, God offers himself to humankind in an absolute way through the Son, and humankind responds in an absolute way by a total self-donation. There is no longer sacred or profane, natural or supernatural, mortification or prayer—because it is one and the same Spirit who brings it about that the Christian will “love God in all things—and all things in God.” Hence, Jesuits have always been active in the graphic and dramatic arts, literature and the sciences.
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