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What does that have to do with leadership, and getting in touch with oneself?
You'll find out tonight!
---
When we talk about getting in touch with ourselves as a person and as a leader,
we realize the Scripture is pretty insistent and consistent that anyone claiming to be a leaders is called to be prayerful and careful...That may be partly because, like an iceberg, most of "us" is below the surface, beneath the mask and title..(usually, only about 1/7 of an iceberg is visible (above water, visible to the naked eye):
Fill in these blanks; then you can read on to compare your answers with his.
- "The pastor/shepherd's job is to keep watch over __________"
- "Your most anointed ministry as a pastor/leader will flow from your being ___________."
Then say "WOW"!
And he's just quoting the Bible...
John O'Hara asks what if we expected church leaders to be
- honest instead of perfect
- servants instead of rulers
- friends instead of managers
- coaches instead of performers?
---------------------
MYERS BRIGGS RESOURCES:
Links and resources on the Myers Briggs Personality Profile..
Links:
- Take a version of the "test" online
- Take the Kiersey version online
- MyersBriggs Website
- Wikipedia article on Myers Briggs
- Descriptions of the 16 types..Type talk
- Desriptions of the 16 types...MyPersonality.info
- Descriptions of the 16 Types (Gifts Differing): scroll down to Chapter 9, page 83)
- Myers Briggs and Culture/Ethnicity (free book online)
- Type and Culture Blog
- Temperament in Leading (Kiersey)
- Implications for Leadership
- Temperament in Leading per each type
- same as above but in Word document
- Leadership Type at Work (scroll to Chapter 9, pages 151-153, 163)
- Books:
-
- Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Type
- Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence
- Type Talk: The 16 Personality Types That Determine How We Live, Love, and Work
- Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
Books geared toward spiritual application:
- Personality Type and Religious Leadership
- Prayer and Temperament: Different Prayer Forms for Different Personality Types
- Your Personality and the Spiritual Life
- Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation
- Online essay:Prayers for each Type
- Online essay:Prayers and Type..related to Augustinian, Thomistic, Ignatian, Franciscan
---
We'll also introduce left brain/right brain theory, and compare
these carts with RRWI/EPIC (see Week One) and Mysers Briggs ESTJ/INFP...wreseling with implications for leadership.
Tonight's Ray VanDer Laan
video on Moses striking the rock is not online,
but you can find it on this DVD-----
On the "practical relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity," especially for leadership, and being in touch with oneself, there will be plenty of good discussion tonight...but here are some quotes and links:
- "our trust in the Trinity's embrace frees us to love more fully with triune types of love--fostering deep relationships that involve solid friendships without sexual innuendo" (Marva Dawn)
- "It is precisely the one triune God in whose image all human beings are created who holds the promise of peace between men and women with irreducible but changing identities."(Miraslov Volf)
- "Like the Trinity, we are called to understand who we are not as isolated individuals who have to make contracts to protect ourselves, but as persons with faces turned towards God and each other." (Edith Humphrey).....above three quotes, source
- "The more a church is characterized by a symmetrical and decentralized distribution of power, and by a freely affirmed interaction, the more it will correspond to the Trinitarian communion."-Miroslav Volf, from his "After Our Likeness:The Church as the Image of the Trinity," p. 236 (free read here)
- "The Trinitarian Nature of Leadership," by Len Hjalmarson
- Leadership in the Trinity Dance
- Two-stage shaming, Naked at the Cross, Trinitarian unity when separated
- backbone of a trinitarian hymn: Three friends have a beautiful day pontificating
- a Trinity teaser
----------------------------------------------
Outline/Summary of DARK SIDE textbook (by Jürgen Friedrich, click HERE)
--------------
Remember, each week we watch three of the (12) "Aqua Church Essential Leadership Arts" with Leonard Sweet":
Here are tonight's episodes 7-9:
Leadership Art #7-Taking Shore Leave: Sabbath Rest:
Leadership Art #8-Signaling with Flags and Semaphores: Communication:
Leadership Art #9-Valuing the Crew: Collaboration and Team-Work:
-------------------------------
Here is a summary of Sweet's discussion of these three leadership arts (From source linked above):
Leadership Art #7-Taking Shore Leave: Sabbath Rest
The pace and pressure of a twenty-first century lifestyle has brought us head-on to another all-too-solid wall. Many of us have already slammed into it. The “speed-of-light pace” of postmodern living is exhilarating but exhausting. Just as a plane moving through air builds up pressure in front of it as its speed increases, so our bodies and souls, the faster our lives speed up and zip by, feel the crush of growing pressure and risk the approach of a deadly, life-shattering, wall-slamming event.
The leadership art of shore leave is not one we have to invent. Only turbocharge. This relief valve has been part of our tradition all along. It’s called Sabbath-keeping. High modernity preferred therapy over Sabbath. Only by relearning the art of Sabbath-keeping can spiritual athletes and spiritual navigators hope to keep safe, sane, and spiritually fresh while cruising postmodernity’s sea-lanes at breathtaking speed.
For those of us raised in Sabbath-observant homes, Sabbath-keeping was marked mostly by a litany of no-nos. For younger children, no fidgeting, talking, or sleeping during services. No getting good clothes dirty by playing after church. For older kids, no movies, no parties, no dates on the Sabbath day. Although special meals and gathered families are good memories of these enforced days of togetherness, more than a few Sabbath-reared children triumphantly latched on to Jesus’ observation that ‘the Sabbath was made for people, people were not made for the Sabbath.” We recited that verse as we hit the door and bolted for what we believed would be “freedom.” And what “freedoms” we enjoy. “Freedom” to work twenty-hour days. “Freedom” to work seven-day weeks. “Freedom” to be dog-collared to electronic ball-and-chains so that one can never get away from work.
Our freedom from the “Sabbath” exacted a high toll. When we lost Sabbaths, we lost spiritual well-being. It is not so much that we “keep the Sabbath” as that the Sabbath keeps us-keeps us whole, keeps us sane, keeps us spiritually alive.
It is hard for postmoderns to see rest as holiness, not laziness. Can you think of any activity more universally banned and panned than napping? Postmodern lifestyles equate sleeping in with sloughing off.
Leadership Art #8-Signaling with Flags and Semaphores: Communication
In the modern world, we mastered the “Three R’s”: Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmetic. In the postmodern world, leaders need mastery of the Three C’s: Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity- Leadership Arts #8,9, and 10.
Apple Computer tried speaking these words to the world of its day. Its Macintosh had the best interface. It had the best graphics. It led the desktop publishing revolution. It was more “uses-friendly” out of the box. But because it refused to “dumb down” the operating system ( a decision made in 1987) by licensing it to other companies, the Mac lost out big-time to Big Blue, which standardized its features and made them available to the competition which itself touted its status as “IBM-compatible.”
What if God had refused to dumb down? “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14a). This is the essence of the Incarnation-God came to us.
Web Civilization
It’s time to decide. It’s time to break ranks and name names. Are you a Postmodern Reformer, or are you a defender of the existing power structures and delivery systems? Are you or ar you not a part of this Postmodern Reformation?
Our ancestors at great personal cost claimed the book as the heart of modern learning and communications. Will we claim the Web as central to postmodern learning and communications? The Protestant Reformers made the book the new delivery system for learning and faith development. Will Postmodern Reformers do the same with the Web?
For leaders, not having a Web site is more than being without a calling card, allegedly the equivalent for a modern leader. For leaders, not using a Web site as a communication and community-building tool is to have bumbled the future. The Net boasts the potential for the biggest communications boost in the history of the church.
Every communications system does some things well and some things badly. The promise of a Web Civilization is paralleled by the perils of a Web Civilization.
If the church doesn’t help identify what’s life-giving and what’s disease-producing in the emergence of this new self-generated, self-adapting, self-modifying, self-diagnosing, self-repairing Web Civilization, a lot of other people will gladly oblige. The church has done this before. It was the Sunday school that gave rise to and modeled the public school system, which ushered children from all socioeconomic levels into print culture.
Wing Culture
The most powerful communicators in the post modern era wing it through sea and sky with images. Metaphors are how leaders chart the course for others to follow. Postmodern leaders are master iconographers whose storytelling skills and metaphor powers graph the routes and guide the ship. The art of telling stories is one of the paramount leadership tools of postmodern culture.
What is icon-parable storytelling? A postmodern icon-parable is an image or metaphor that coveys a lifetime of experiences and stories. Icon-parables story people’s lives. Icon-parable storytelling helps us make decisions or reverse decisions we’ve already made. Without icons, postmoderns are spiritually ill-fed.
There are various kinds of iconic stories. “Stories of identity” help convey values, build morale, develop role models, reveal inner mechanisms of community. These icons serve as carriers of identity, values, and memory. They are the primary carriers of religious culture.
Communication’s Four Tacks
1. Make the Net Work.
Use the Web. To communicate with this new Net culture, leaders must experience and employ the Net. This is more than simply being Web-friendly. It is also more than a Web site.
It is a Web ministry.
How do you help people become attached to your Web site? Enable them to play, have fun. Eddie Bauer has “virtual dressing rooms” where you can mix and match clothes or scan in your home’s floor plan and see how its furniture fits in.
2. “Give Away the Farm.”
In a Web Civilization, you give away content.
MCI, which offered for the first time free domestic calls to many of its customers on the busiest day of the year for telephones: Mother’s Day.
The only people who don’t have to “give away the farm” are those who are giving big-time experiences. For this people will pay big bucks. The ultimate “big-time” is the experience of God. For this postmoderns will pay “big”-pay with their lives.
3. Tell Big Stories
Stories are the skeletal structure of the soul. Is there energy in your story? Is you body in your story? Is there passion in your story? Is you story more about God that about you? The last step in exploration and discovery is to close the loop. To close the loop is to tell the story, to share what you’ve learned.
Jest and zest are the psychic glues that hold things together in postmodern culture.
Be playful, be funny, and have fun. If you’re having fun, you’re more creative, more energetic, friendlier, and optimistic. We can say something serious too seriously. But remember: For the Christian, the purpose of life is not jest but joy.
Leadership Art #9-Valuing the Crew: Collaboration and Team-Work
Modern leadership highlighted the noun “equipment.” Postmodern leadership stresses the verb “equip.” The first time the word for “equip” is used in the Gospels is when Jesus finds a father and his two sons in a ship, “preparing” their nets 9matthew 4:21; Mark 1:19). The Greek word for “prepare” Is kartatizo, which means to repair the rends, to make whole again. But it also means to make someone what they out to be-to “equip,” to “prepare,” to ‘strengthen” someone for a mission. “Equip” doesn’t mean to fix the nets yourself, but to enlist and empower others to do what God is calling them to do.
Leadership is less about employing people than empowering people. Leadership is less about controlling people than releasing them. This does no mean that other people will not put their lives in your hands. But the whole purpose of an air traffic “controller” is not to keep planes on the land, but to get them off the ground and into the sky. What do “controllers” do? They clear pilots for takeoff.
The future belongs not so much to movers and shakers but to leaders who can work in teams. If fact, the movers and shakes of postmodern culture are teams, which must become the dominant model for ministry and mission.
Postmodern culture is a sink-or-swim society. It creates sink-or-swim scenarios. But the biblical witness is another: We sink or swim together. The actions of one affect all.
In a connectional world, not only does every action have consequence, but every action has consequence on everything else. Collaboration extends outward and inward at the same time.
The Christian tradition is teamwork-obsessed. The doctrine of creation trumpets a God who shares creative power with us, who insists we be co-conspirators in our own story, collaborators in our emergence. The doctrine of redemption is the universe’s story of pulsating and materializing relationships. The very doctrine of the Trinity is based on a relational God living in community both within and without.
Log On and Link Up
The mantra of the future is a collaborative one: “Log On and Link Up.” Leaders Get Linked, Leaders Get Connected.
The Web is about community and connectedness. It is the postmodern watering hole. Moderns use the Internet as an information medium. For postmoderns the Internet is a social medium. They use it as a water cooler and bar stool.
A Good Crew
What is an authentic community? What is an authentic self? What makes an authentic team? The following are critical elements:
1. Mission
Essential to every mission is a focused sense of calling. A team is being deployed “for such a times as this.”
Postmodern teams are as marked by “otherness” as the Jesus TeamNet. Jesus brought together political opposites on his team: Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax collector. Jesus brought together a mix of generalists and specialists with the advantage to the generalists, who can keep in mind the big picture. Jesus mixed up age groups and generational gestalts, with advantage to the younger who make us less blind to the possibilities of what we can discover. Jesus nurtured young talent, let them go, and let them rip. Mission teams must begin to read-like Jesus did-the printouts of cultural difference, dissonance, and diversity.
3. Trust
What the language of “virtues” was to moderns, the language of “viruses” is to postmoderns. It is as important to develop positive spiritual viruses as it is positive social viruses. One of those “viruses” that brings together the social and spiritual is “trust.”
4. Succession
A “successful” team is one that knows how to deal with “succession” issues, the most critical of which is loyalty. Leadership is not just the ability to work in teams; it is also the ability to inspire “successors” and mark others for successive sailings-people who will keep the mssion going and raise it to new levels.
Postmodern “people skills: raise to prominence the ability to pick a crew and be a crew. All organisms experience growing pains, which means that sometimes teams must be disassembled, reduced, expanded, or reconstituted. The team you start a mission with is not going to be the team you end that mission with. Exercises help discover who doesn’t belong on the team, as well as who needs to “succeed” on that team.
5. Collaborative Competence Framework
The leadership art of collaboration depends on one’s willingness to become a collaborative person and develop collaborative competence frameworks. This does not mean one gives up the identity of the self.” But it does mean that the “self” takes its meaning, shape, and direction from one’s community and tribe.
-
Bonus: I can let you in on a secret:
: tomorrow morning at 9 am, you can get in on a conference call with Leonard Sweet.... he will be taking questions mostly about evangelism and his latest book "Nudge,"" but he will certainly mention EPIC and AQUA issues.
--
Finally, this timely story about the Chilean miners who will hopefully be rescued on Wednesday offers an amazingly leadership lesson about the "First shall be last" leadership principle of Jesus we charted out last week...just look at the title of the news story:
--------------
Remember, each week we watch three of the (12) "Aqua Church Essential Leadership Arts" with Leonard Sweet":
- Free online read of much of Aqua Church 2.0 here
- Summary of Aqua Church and the Leadership Arts here
Here are tonight's episodes 7-9:
Leadership Art #7-Taking Shore Leave: Sabbath Rest:
Leadership Art #8-Signaling with Flags and Semaphores: Communication:
Leadership Art #9-Valuing the Crew: Collaboration and Team-Work:
-------------------------------
Here is a summary of Sweet's discussion of these three leadership arts (From source linked above):
Leadership Art #7-Taking Shore Leave: Sabbath Rest
The pace and pressure of a twenty-first century lifestyle has brought us head-on to another all-too-solid wall. Many of us have already slammed into it. The “speed-of-light pace” of postmodern living is exhilarating but exhausting. Just as a plane moving through air builds up pressure in front of it as its speed increases, so our bodies and souls, the faster our lives speed up and zip by, feel the crush of growing pressure and risk the approach of a deadly, life-shattering, wall-slamming event.
The leadership art of shore leave is not one we have to invent. Only turbocharge. This relief valve has been part of our tradition all along. It’s called Sabbath-keeping. High modernity preferred therapy over Sabbath. Only by relearning the art of Sabbath-keeping can spiritual athletes and spiritual navigators hope to keep safe, sane, and spiritually fresh while cruising postmodernity’s sea-lanes at breathtaking speed.
For those of us raised in Sabbath-observant homes, Sabbath-keeping was marked mostly by a litany of no-nos. For younger children, no fidgeting, talking, or sleeping during services. No getting good clothes dirty by playing after church. For older kids, no movies, no parties, no dates on the Sabbath day. Although special meals and gathered families are good memories of these enforced days of togetherness, more than a few Sabbath-reared children triumphantly latched on to Jesus’ observation that ‘the Sabbath was made for people, people were not made for the Sabbath.” We recited that verse as we hit the door and bolted for what we believed would be “freedom.” And what “freedoms” we enjoy. “Freedom” to work twenty-hour days. “Freedom” to work seven-day weeks. “Freedom” to be dog-collared to electronic ball-and-chains so that one can never get away from work.
Our freedom from the “Sabbath” exacted a high toll. When we lost Sabbaths, we lost spiritual well-being. It is not so much that we “keep the Sabbath” as that the Sabbath keeps us-keeps us whole, keeps us sane, keeps us spiritually alive.
It is hard for postmoderns to see rest as holiness, not laziness. Can you think of any activity more universally banned and panned than napping? Postmodern lifestyles equate sleeping in with sloughing off.
Leadership Art #8-Signaling with Flags and Semaphores: Communication
In the modern world, we mastered the “Three R’s”: Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmetic. In the postmodern world, leaders need mastery of the Three C’s: Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity- Leadership Arts #8,9, and 10.
Apple Computer tried speaking these words to the world of its day. Its Macintosh had the best interface. It had the best graphics. It led the desktop publishing revolution. It was more “uses-friendly” out of the box. But because it refused to “dumb down” the operating system ( a decision made in 1987) by licensing it to other companies, the Mac lost out big-time to Big Blue, which standardized its features and made them available to the competition which itself touted its status as “IBM-compatible.”
What if God had refused to dumb down? “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14a). This is the essence of the Incarnation-God came to us.
Web Civilization
It’s time to decide. It’s time to break ranks and name names. Are you a Postmodern Reformer, or are you a defender of the existing power structures and delivery systems? Are you or ar you not a part of this Postmodern Reformation?
Our ancestors at great personal cost claimed the book as the heart of modern learning and communications. Will we claim the Web as central to postmodern learning and communications? The Protestant Reformers made the book the new delivery system for learning and faith development. Will Postmodern Reformers do the same with the Web?
For leaders, not having a Web site is more than being without a calling card, allegedly the equivalent for a modern leader. For leaders, not using a Web site as a communication and community-building tool is to have bumbled the future. The Net boasts the potential for the biggest communications boost in the history of the church.
- The Net commences a whole communications system and a whole new delivery system for ministry.
- The Net makes it possible for the church to engage in one-on-one dialogue with each of its members, to learn about their dreams and daily minimum requirements of spiritual needs.
- The Net enables leaders to customize communication and to personalize teaching, healing, and preaching like never before in history.
- The Net helps remove barriers to communication and celebration-including time and distance. Already a wedding has taken place simultaneously at four different U.S. cities through Web-based electronic videoconferencing.
- The Net helps leaders choose the best time and place to communicate.
Every communications system does some things well and some things badly. The promise of a Web Civilization is paralleled by the perils of a Web Civilization.
If the church doesn’t help identify what’s life-giving and what’s disease-producing in the emergence of this new self-generated, self-adapting, self-modifying, self-diagnosing, self-repairing Web Civilization, a lot of other people will gladly oblige. The church has done this before. It was the Sunday school that gave rise to and modeled the public school system, which ushered children from all socioeconomic levels into print culture.
Wing Culture
The most powerful communicators in the post modern era wing it through sea and sky with images. Metaphors are how leaders chart the course for others to follow. Postmodern leaders are master iconographers whose storytelling skills and metaphor powers graph the routes and guide the ship. The art of telling stories is one of the paramount leadership tools of postmodern culture.
What is icon-parable storytelling? A postmodern icon-parable is an image or metaphor that coveys a lifetime of experiences and stories. Icon-parables story people’s lives. Icon-parable storytelling helps us make decisions or reverse decisions we’ve already made. Without icons, postmoderns are spiritually ill-fed.
There are various kinds of iconic stories. “Stories of identity” help convey values, build morale, develop role models, reveal inner mechanisms of community. These icons serve as carriers of identity, values, and memory. They are the primary carriers of religious culture.
Communication’s Four Tacks
1. Make the Net Work.
Use the Web. To communicate with this new Net culture, leaders must experience and employ the Net. This is more than simply being Web-friendly. It is also more than a Web site.
It is a Web ministry.
How do you help people become attached to your Web site? Enable them to play, have fun. Eddie Bauer has “virtual dressing rooms” where you can mix and match clothes or scan in your home’s floor plan and see how its furniture fits in.
2. “Give Away the Farm.”
In a Web Civilization, you give away content.
MCI, which offered for the first time free domestic calls to many of its customers on the busiest day of the year for telephones: Mother’s Day.
The only people who don’t have to “give away the farm” are those who are giving big-time experiences. For this people will pay big bucks. The ultimate “big-time” is the experience of God. For this postmoderns will pay “big”-pay with their lives.
3. Tell Big Stories
Stories are the skeletal structure of the soul. Is there energy in your story? Is you body in your story? Is there passion in your story? Is you story more about God that about you? The last step in exploration and discovery is to close the loop. To close the loop is to tell the story, to share what you’ve learned.
- Fill Everything With Jest and Zest
Jest and zest are the psychic glues that hold things together in postmodern culture.
Be playful, be funny, and have fun. If you’re having fun, you’re more creative, more energetic, friendlier, and optimistic. We can say something serious too seriously. But remember: For the Christian, the purpose of life is not jest but joy.
Leadership Art #9-Valuing the Crew: Collaboration and Team-Work
Modern leadership highlighted the noun “equipment.” Postmodern leadership stresses the verb “equip.” The first time the word for “equip” is used in the Gospels is when Jesus finds a father and his two sons in a ship, “preparing” their nets 9matthew 4:21; Mark 1:19). The Greek word for “prepare” Is kartatizo, which means to repair the rends, to make whole again. But it also means to make someone what they out to be-to “equip,” to “prepare,” to ‘strengthen” someone for a mission. “Equip” doesn’t mean to fix the nets yourself, but to enlist and empower others to do what God is calling them to do.
Leadership is less about employing people than empowering people. Leadership is less about controlling people than releasing them. This does no mean that other people will not put their lives in your hands. But the whole purpose of an air traffic “controller” is not to keep planes on the land, but to get them off the ground and into the sky. What do “controllers” do? They clear pilots for takeoff.
The future belongs not so much to movers and shakers but to leaders who can work in teams. If fact, the movers and shakes of postmodern culture are teams, which must become the dominant model for ministry and mission.
Postmodern culture is a sink-or-swim society. It creates sink-or-swim scenarios. But the biblical witness is another: We sink or swim together. The actions of one affect all.
In a connectional world, not only does every action have consequence, but every action has consequence on everything else. Collaboration extends outward and inward at the same time.
The Christian tradition is teamwork-obsessed. The doctrine of creation trumpets a God who shares creative power with us, who insists we be co-conspirators in our own story, collaborators in our emergence. The doctrine of redemption is the universe’s story of pulsating and materializing relationships. The very doctrine of the Trinity is based on a relational God living in community both within and without.
Log On and Link Up
The mantra of the future is a collaborative one: “Log On and Link Up.” Leaders Get Linked, Leaders Get Connected.
The Web is about community and connectedness. It is the postmodern watering hole. Moderns use the Internet as an information medium. For postmoderns the Internet is a social medium. They use it as a water cooler and bar stool.
A Good Crew
What is an authentic community? What is an authentic self? What makes an authentic team? The following are critical elements:
1. Mission
Essential to every mission is a focused sense of calling. A team is being deployed “for such a times as this.”
- Otherness
Postmodern teams are as marked by “otherness” as the Jesus TeamNet. Jesus brought together political opposites on his team: Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax collector. Jesus brought together a mix of generalists and specialists with the advantage to the generalists, who can keep in mind the big picture. Jesus mixed up age groups and generational gestalts, with advantage to the younger who make us less blind to the possibilities of what we can discover. Jesus nurtured young talent, let them go, and let them rip. Mission teams must begin to read-like Jesus did-the printouts of cultural difference, dissonance, and diversity.
3. Trust
What the language of “virtues” was to moderns, the language of “viruses” is to postmoderns. It is as important to develop positive spiritual viruses as it is positive social viruses. One of those “viruses” that brings together the social and spiritual is “trust.”
4. Succession
A “successful” team is one that knows how to deal with “succession” issues, the most critical of which is loyalty. Leadership is not just the ability to work in teams; it is also the ability to inspire “successors” and mark others for successive sailings-people who will keep the mssion going and raise it to new levels.
Postmodern “people skills: raise to prominence the ability to pick a crew and be a crew. All organisms experience growing pains, which means that sometimes teams must be disassembled, reduced, expanded, or reconstituted. The team you start a mission with is not going to be the team you end that mission with. Exercises help discover who doesn’t belong on the team, as well as who needs to “succeed” on that team.
5. Collaborative Competence Framework
The leadership art of collaboration depends on one’s willingness to become a collaborative person and develop collaborative competence frameworks. This does not mean one gives up the identity of the self.” But it does mean that the “self” takes its meaning, shape, and direction from one’s community and tribe.
- Collaborative Accountability: Popular culture is a prime resource for postmodern ministry, but popular culture can be hijacked very quickly by reactionary forces: Metaphors, unlike “points,” are easy to pick up, warm and fuzzy, and easily susceptible to private interpretation; postmoderns easily mistake “having an open mind” with letting their brains pop out; in a world of complexity and ambiguity, discernment needs the confirmation of the community. In short, a collaborative style requires a communal check and accountability. The community is a key learning instrument in collaborative leadership.
- Collaborative Learning: Collaborative leadership operating out of collaborative competence frameworks is open to stacking new learning habits on top of old ones-like triple-loop learning. In the words of business guru Robert Hargrove, “triple-loop learning involves altering the particular perspective, underlying beliefs, and assumptions (or old rules) that shape who we are as a human being…Double-loop learning (similar to triple-loop) involves altering the rules or underlying patterns of thinking that determine the way we think, interact, and solve problems. Single-loop learning involves trying to do the same thing better or gaining some transactional tips and techniques.”
- Collaborative Style: Postmodern leaders circulate an attitude of creative cooperation and solidarity through constantly evolving projects, missions, and deadline. It’s not true that you’re only as good as your next project. But your leadership is only as good as your next mission. The heart of a collaborative style is multiple frames of reference that can juxtapose different types of people and projects. Witness “the Three Tenors.”
- Collaborative Space: Leaders need spiritual design as much as “smart design” in their use of space. A “sick building syndorem” can afflict the soul and mind as well as the body. Healthy space is tam space, shared space, not a hierarch of space with royalty inhabiting offices fit for the gods while everyone else lives in convict cubicles. Already in the business world the walls are coming down in office space. More and more senior managers now sit in open offices with no doors. The dimly lit cubicle with one’s own private space is becoming more rare. Pittsburgh’s Alcoa has banished all private offices, even for its CEO. The future is “teaming rooms,” “commons areas,” “playrooms.” People need their own personal spaces, their cliff dwellings, but person space is basically electronic space (laptops and portable phones) conjoined with team space-hangouts like water coolers, living rooms, and snack bars dominated by casual learning, casual dress, and casual connectedness.
-Len Sweet
-
: tomorrow morning at 9 am, you can get in on a conference call with Leonard Sweet.... he will be taking questions mostly about evangelism and his latest book "Nudge,"" but he will certainly mention EPIC and AQUA issues.
--
Finally, this timely story about the Chilean miners who will hopefully be rescued on Wednesday offers an amazingly leadership lesson about the "First shall be last" leadership principle of Jesus we charted out last week...just look at the title of the news story:
Who goes first
Before anyone can be pulled up, medics from the Chilean navy and rescuers from mine operator Compania Minera San Esteban Primera have to be sent down to assess the miners and organize their ascent. Those rescuers have authority to change a draft list of who gets pulled out first.
Chilean navy Cmdr. Renato Navarro said the thinking was to have a physically and psychologically strong miner come up first, in case of a rescue capsule jam and so that he can relate to his waiting colleagues how best to manage the tough ascent.
Next are men with medical or other problems, followed by those deemed to have the mental fortitude for the strain of being the last ones left below while their co-workers disappear up into the light of day.
The last miner pulled out may be shift supervisor Luis Urzua, who is reported to have kept his workers in good spirits, particularly during their first 17 days underground, when no contact had yet been made with the world above.
-Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/10/08/f-chile-mine-rescue.html#ixzz124pVebcP
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