Leadership
Dec 23, 2003 Uncategorized
I was reading an article by Ron Martoia from Westwinds and he makes some good observations about shifts in leadership in the era we are living in.
I especially liked this point…
[Currently,] leadership is about serial sequencing. Serial sequencing is about making sure everyone is thoroughly trained before they’re cut loose to invest in others. There’s a proper serial sequence that must be followed to make sure people are really “qualified” before they do anything. This is a deeply embedded mental model.
We put people through a whole bunch of training and then—and only then—do we deem them prepared to invest in someone else’s life.
A probing question, though, is how much training did the disciples have before they were sent out into the villages to preach their first messages?
[The Shift We Need]: Leadership is about parallel simultaneity. The Jesus model of training was “on the job.” The total time Jesus had with the disciples was three years. Quite obviously, they were sent to begin their public preaching ministry much earlier than the three-year mark. Jesus clearly thought the best model of training was the nexus of mountainside retreat, where there were talking-head segments (hence the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7) with praxis elements where they debriefed their observations of Jesus’ ministry and their own. They were training and being trained simultaneously.
Isn’t this the way life really is? We’re constantly learning and, hopefully, constantly pouring our lives into someone else. There’s no set of competencies that enable us to say we’ve now arrived and are ready to train someone else. Of course, there are some baseline minimums, but I secretly think our minimums are far more elaborate, complex, and detailed than the minimums Jesus held to.
