I recently congratulated a well-respected leader for hiring and developing a particularly stellar young leader. "Your employee is clearly bright and capable," I said to the senior leader. "What do you see next in her future?"
The leader looked at me as if I had spoken treason. "I have spent all this time getting her here. I need stability! I can't think about where she is going next."
The senior leader may not be thinking about where her young hire is going next, but the hire most certainly is.
Few remain with a single institution for the length of a career. Families move. Technology has enabled us to change jobs without leaving our home office. Travel is as easy as ever.
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the average job tenure is 4.6 years nationwide, but in the religious world, it is only three to four years.
Hiring well takes effort and time, and it's understandable that senior leaders would focus their attention on trying to buck this trend and retain staff through competitive benefits and a positive work environment. A stable staff is safe and predictable -- but it's not a mark of a vibrant institution.
The work of a senior leader is to cultivate an institutional mindset of incubating talent.
Vibrant institutions take fresh talent and mold those hires into excellent leaders in their field -- not just leaders for a single institution. Courageous leaders seek out, nurture and support rising leaders, even knowing that those leaders will leave for other work one day.
Pastor and filmmaker Marlon Hall, who teaches in Leadership Education at Duke Divinity programs, is one of these courageous leaders. He sees himself as "a curator of human potential."
Let that sink in.
A curator of human potential.
Courageous leaders curate human potential not just because Christian institutions need leadership development but because it is part of their own calling.
