{"id":35955,"date":"2024-02-19T13:45:27","date_gmt":"2024-02-19T21:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=35955"},"modified":"2024-02-19T13:45:27","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T21:45:27","slug":"its-rare-to-learn-what-you-need-to-know-about-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/its-rare-to-learn-what-you-need-to-know-about-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s RARE to learn what you need to know about LEADERSHIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

I honestly couldn\u2019t<\/em><\/strong> tell you how many hours of church leadership conferences and trainings I\u2019ve listened to live, and online\u2026. and<\/strong> on DVD, CD, and, yes, even cassette tapes. I do know that for nearly 40 years I\u2019ve had thousands of hours of exposure to the best church leaders alive.<\/p>\n

However, I can<\/em><\/strong> tell you that a great majority of the teachings I\u2019ve heard have focused on some technical aspect of being a leader: How to lead difficult staff members; How to preach better sermons; How to design effective ministry systems; How to put together a winning discipleship program; (and much, much more). If a speaker was good, I would go away with a notebook full of ideas and a head full of dreams regarding how I, too, could lead my church to become the next (fill in the blank with the church du jour<\/em>).<\/p>\n

And along the way I\u2019ve had the opportunity to \u201cbe\u201d the church du jour<\/em>. On a few occasions I\u2019ve been asked to share my \u201csecret sauce\u201d with others who were trying hard to fill up their own notebooks and heads with something that would help them lead their own ministries well.<\/p>\n

The desire to gain or share leadership tools is, I think, honorable and necessary. The problem is when we believe the tools are the answer when it\u2019s the underlying skills, habits and character that make those tools effective.<\/p>\n

In their books Rare Leadership <\/em>and Rare Leadership in the Workplace, <\/em>Marcus Werner and Jim Wilder point out some of those necessary skills and habits as they make the compelling case for the serious need for mature leaders who exhibit and spread joy, instead of fear. These types of leaders are like artists or musicians who are so proficient in their craft that \u201ctheir focus is not on the skills and habits they have already spent years developing. Their focus is on the mood, the creativity, and the situation at hand.\u201d[1]<\/a> Any<\/strong> competent leader can practice focused attention that accomplishes a task, they claim, but a mature leader has ingrained \u201cskills and habits they have developed that allow their character and relational skill to show up automatically.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

All of that reminds me of what Daniel Khaneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow[3]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> calls System One thinking, which is fast, instinctive thinking. This contrasts to System Two thinking that is slower, more analytical, and logical. And while my takeaway from Khaneman was that I needed to employ my slow thinking much more often, with Werner and Wilder I recognized that mature leaders must develop certain deep habits and skills that manifest instantly\u2014without thinking about them\u2014so that whatever leadership task or tool they are engaging will be more effective.<\/p>\n

Wilder shares an observation he made about therapists\u2019 workshops that got me thinking about how this relates to my countless hours listening to or teaching at pastor\u2019s conferences: \u201cPresenters often explained the processes they found effective, but when others tried to implement these processes, they did not find them effective. This was because they did not have the same fast track skills and habits as the presenters. The presenters themselves often did not realize that it was these habits of character and relational skill more than their processes that made them work.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

These two RARE Leadership books are full of insights for leaders who want to grow towards maturity. RARE leaders are those who R<\/em><\/strong>emain Relational, A<\/strong>ct Like Yourself, R<\/strong>eturn to Joy and E<\/strong>ndure Hardship Well.[5]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>Each of those points could easily inspire a separate blog post, and they were personally encouraging and challenging to me in equal measure. I could write about where I might grow in relational leadership, or my need for mature authenticity, or the concept of joy as key to my leadership and life, or the ubiquity of suffering and the victory that comes through my enduring it well.<\/p>\n

But my current takeaway in a book full of valuable observations is that a person can spend thousands of hours learning leadership principles and practices, and can spend even more time earning a Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral degree in ministry leadership, but without the accompanying \u201cSystem One\u201d habits, that learning will fall short of what it could accomplish.<\/p>\n

Pastor and author Eugene Peterson once wrote \u201cFor a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation.<\/em>\u201d<\/em> [6]<\/a>Peterson was being facetious. He went on to describe the potential course offerings that would include \u201ccreative plagiarism\u201d, \u201cvoice control for prayer and counseling\u201d, and \u201cimage projection\u201d. \u00a0But none of this fictitious trade-school training<\/em> included the deep work of relational leadership, or character maturation, or returning to joy, or learning to endure hardship well. His point was that one could train in the tools, but not the habits.<\/p>\n

To be honest, not many of my thousands of hours in seminars or school have included that work in habits, either. These books on RARE Leadership are an important exception. And as I seek to raise up emerging leaders for the church, I don\u2019t want to only provide the tools or processes or even philosophies for ministry leadership, but I want to help them develop the deep habits of RARE Leadership that allows for automatic System One thinking regarding the most important parts of pastoral leadership.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

[1]<\/a> Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder, Rare Leadership in the Workplace: 4 Uncommon Habits That Improve Focus, Engagement, and Prodctivity<\/em>, Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2021, 22.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid, 23.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Daniel Khaneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, <\/em>New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2011.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Warner and Wilder, Rare Leadership in the Workplace<\/em>, 55.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder, Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits for increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead<\/em>, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2016, 14-16.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, <\/em>Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993, 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I honestly couldn\u2019t tell you how many hours of church leadership conferences and trainings I\u2019ve listened to live, and online\u2026. and on DVD, CD, and, yes, even cassette tapes. I do know that for nearly 40 years I\u2019ve had thousands of hours of exposure to the best church leaders alive. However, I can tell you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3063],"class_list":["post-35955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-warner-dlgp02","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35956,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35955\/revisions\/35956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}