How Do You Curate Human Potential?
by Victoria Atkinson White 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. Read more » |
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Supervision--the shaping of spiritual leaders--occurs formally and informally in many aspects of congregational life, and while supervision enhances the work of all concerned, it is rarely explicitly addressed in congregations.Shaping Spiritual Leaders provides a hands-on approach to supervision, addressing key areas such as identifying a learning focus, covenanting, managing conflict, understanding and using power and authority, offering and receiving feedback and evaluation, and celebrating and ending the supervisory relationship.
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Ideas that Impact: Staff Supervision
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The Importance of Outcomes by Gil Rendle and Susan Beaumont
An old saying goes "If you don't know where you are going, any path will get you there." This suggests that if you are not clear about what you, your staff, and your congregation are to "produce" in ministry-what the clear outcomes of your work are to be-then it is okay for staff members to spend their time on whatever their current practices or preferences of work might be. This leads to assumptions that work-any work-is appropriate whether it is making a needed difference or not.
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People are Resources by Gil Rendle and Susan Beaumont
Because ministry is about people, we often neglect seeing people themselves as resources for ministry. People, of course, are the recipients of ministry, and a changed person is often the goal of ministry. But ministry is done by people who also need to be seen as a primary resource for doing ministry.
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Continue Your Own Learning & Development
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Reimagining Health Collaborative 2016: The Church and Mental Health Duke Divinity School
Do you or others in your congregation live with mental illness?Does your congregation long to promote mental health and to respond faithfully to the needs of people with mental illness, but you are not sure how?Are there opportunities within your congregation to learn from and walk alongside people with mental illness? Do you want to partner with other congregations that are faithfully and creatively engaging mental health and mental illness?Over the course of our lives, approximately 45% of Americans will develop some form of mental illness-from depression, anxiety, and substance use to many other mental disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Suicide claims 40,000 lives per year in the United States and is a leading cause of death among adolescents and adults. Living with mental illness, particularly serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, is filled with both challenges and opportunities. The church must be equipped and energized to respond faithfully. The Reimagining Health Collaborative at Duke Divinity School invites Christian congregations to partner with each other and with Duke Divinity School faculty, students, and staff,to envision and to implement faithful practices related to health and illness. This year's cohort of congregations will focus specifically on mental health and mental illness. Further information about the program, with application materials, can be found here. For more information, email Rachel Meyer, Program Director of the Reimagining Health Collaborative, at rmeyer@div.duke.edu. Applications for this year's cohort will be accepted until May 1, 2016.
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