Mentoring Leaders

I just finished Carson Pue's Mentoring leaders: Wisdom for developing character, calling and competency. Pue presides over Arrow Leadership Ministries, an international ministry founded by Leighton Ford based in Canada.

Pue's emphasis has been on mentoring individual leaders through their consulting ministry. But his insights can be helpful for any local church, or for that matter, any seminary whose sole purpose is to train church leaders.

Here are some of my notes from the book.

Five Phases of the Mentoring Matrix

1. Self-awareness - deep-seated understanding of who we are as children of God though Jesus Christ
2. Freeing Up - disentangling ourselves from those things that hold us back and having our needs fully met by Jesus
3. Visioneering - discovering God's purpose for our lives
4. Implementing - beginning purposeful in how we live and lead
5. Sustaining - learning how to realize our purpose and maintain zeal for ministry

Starting with Self-Awareness
"The most significant thing in navigation - the very most important piece of information - is knowing exactly where you are."

Daniel Goleman places a great deal of emphasis on the importance of being able to recognize feelings and sees this as central to his measurement of what he calls emotional intelligence. "Self-awareness - recognizing a feeling as it happens - is the keystone of emotional intelligence ... the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from whom they marry to what job they to take."

What keeps leaders from Self-Awareness?

• Lack of feedback. It seems that the higher one rises up the ladder of leadership, the less feedback one receives. The battles of being a leader cause us to become isolated.
• Seminaries have not historically been strong in the feedback area themselves. They are caught between their deep desire to provide foundational content and doing anything that might cause a student to withdraw from school.
• Insecurity. Insecurity breeds misleadership. It erodes confidence within leaders and makes it very difficult for them to leader others. It can also surface during times of great success, not just in negative times.
  
• Busyness. Most leaders function at high rpm. Problem: We can actually get addicted to the adrenaline rush of our leadership. When this happens, we do whatever we can, unconsciously, to feed our need for adrenaline. It actually feels good! Problem: no time for reflection.

How at peace are you?
Once leaders have a clear understanding of their place as a child of God, there is a new peace or shalom that embodies their life and their leadership. Anxiety and drivenness decrease as we mature in our spiritual walk, while at the same time, there is an increase of that inner sense of peace. When leaders lead out of peace rather than frenetic activity, fewer people are hurt and the work of the Lord is multiplied in ways unimaginable.