Recommend Your Leadership?
by Mark Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader
Were you mentoring new clergy, fresh out of seminary and ready to engage the pastoral leadership challenge, would you recommend your leadership? How much would you hold up your leadership as an example to follow? If we eliminate our grandiose moments when we believe we are God’s gift to leadership while also eliminating our despair moments when we believe we are the worst leaders ever… then what’s left? Would we recommend our approaches to pastoral leadership?
I hope your answer tilts toward the affirmative. And if it does, that’s excellent. Most of us, in all honesty, answer this recommendation question with a “yes and no” answer.
My reason for asking this question is to invite you into leadership growth and development. Externalizing our reflections on ourselves can introduce more objectivity about ourselves. By considering how much we would recommend our leadership, we are depersonalizing, thereby gaining some perspective on our leadership.
Based on the question at hand, here are two strategies for moving forward in your leadership journey.
First, identify your leadership strengths, bless them, and then strategize how to use and expand them even more.
I’m hopeful you would recommend parts of your leadership approach to others. This first strategy then involves you specifically identifying what you do in leadership that you would recommend to others. Reflect on your best leadership experiences, the high points, your wins and successes. What did you do? How did you do it? What skills and competencies did you employ? How was your faith involved? What spiritual posture and attitudes were the foundation of your actions? What principles were in play behind your actions?
Once you identify what in your leadership approach is good, effective, and recommendation-worthy, then you can reflect on what this means for you and about you. Every one of us has signature strengths, those leadership strengths that are so much a part of who we are that we take them with us into every situation. Identify yours. Acknowledge, receive, and bless them as gifts from God.
The final action in this first strategy is to identify how to live into your leadership strengths more and more. In years past, leadership philosophy encouraged leaders to become as well-rounded as possible. Over time, we learned that approach is not very helpful, draining our energy and toning down our effectiveness, a sure route toward mediocrity. Instead, we now recommend that leaders serve out of their strengths most of the time. If you can arrange your ministry where you are leading from your strengths 60-80% of the time, you will make huge contributions to this Christian movement. When your percentage is below 60%, expect to need exceptional support and renewal time in order to keep leading. There are many ways to lead from your strengths, something leadership coaching can help you identify and implement.
Second, identify what in your approach to leadership you would not recommend to others.
Like the first strategy, identify these actions, attitudes, thought patterns, spiritual postures, emotionally-driven reactions, and so on. You will need courage and support here (leadership coaching again perhaps).
Once your description of that which you don’t appreciate in your own leadership is developed, then it’s reflection time. What do these mean? How did they develop? What might this suggest about you? What parts of you may be unfinished, needing the gentle and sure hand of the Holy Spirit? Ruthlessly and courageously explore what these approaches to leadership mean about you.
This kind of honest self-reflection positions us to learn from our experience. That’s what successful people do. Successful people are not those who always get things right, always functioning at their best, avoiding all mistakes. No, successful people are those who learn from lived-experience, using insights gained to grow and develop.
After mining for insights from your experience, then you are positioned to make decisions about the parts of your leadership you would like to change, through
Deleting – laying this aside
Or Accepting – recognizing it’s a tendency you are going to need to manage in some way
Or Change – recognizing you can create new actions to replace these
Part of the beauty of being human is employing the gift of choice. When we overtly and clearly decide which of these three approaches we will use, we are far more likely to follow through.
So, as this summer moves onward, how about it? How about setting aside some time to reflect on this question about recommending your leadership? If you need a conversation partner to walk with you, this is something we do in leadership coaching, so just get in touch. Regardless, I’m praying that we will all steward well these clay vessels we are, growing more effective toward achieving our purposes as we journey along.