Description
In this second episode in the Mentoring Intelligence Series, Phil discusses how Jesus model of developing others was rather counter intuitive. He shares an analogy of how our leadership training can often be compared to just throwing someone in the deep end and hope for the best. He then begins to look at some of the barriers we face that hinder us from mentoring others.
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Video Script
Episode 2 Intro: Why is Mentoring Difficult?
Last episode we discussed how Jesus’ model of developing others was rather counter intuitive. His priorities in ministry were quite different than ours. Now we all agree he was effective, so why don’t we all make his priorities our priorities? If Mentoring is such an effective way to reproduce leaders, why is it so difficult? This time we want to begin to look at some of the barriers in our own lives that hinder us doing this? Understanding and being intentional in removing them could have a huge impact in our own life and ministry?
Sink or Swim: A Typical Leadership Approach
Something I have noticed as I have taught on this topic around the world is that in many nations, we as evangelicals have evolved a rather interesting leadership development approach. Now my guess is that we likely don’t have a monopoly on this approach, as I have noticed it in a variety of contexts, but let me try to explain it like this and see if you can relate. Fair warning, it may trigger some PTSD responses from your own experience!
So let’s imagine that I want to teach someone how to swim. I begin with them on the shore and I give them a manual to quickly flip through and maybe even give them a pop quiz. Then we get into a boat and head to the middle of the lake. This is where the genius of my teaching technique really becomes evident!
Once in the middle of the lake, I grab them and quickly through them overboard…. of course there’s lots of splashing, sputtering, and thrashing about, but low and behold, the “successful” swimming candidates eventually makes it to shore. Genius. My candidate has now learned to swim, well maybe kind of … at least they can dogpaddle or whatever you want to call all that splashing about. The important thing is that they made it to shore, right?!
Well this apparent success empowers us to get others to do the same. After all, What a great way to learn to swim! Doesn’t take too much effort on my part, I just need to row to the middle of the lake…. and voila. I might even be tempted to write a book or two, like “How to teach Swimming from the middle of the Lake”.
Survival of the Fittest not an Effective Method
So that happens when this new “Swimmer” now wants to teach others how to swim? Well, no surprise, they have them flip through a book or two, put them in a boat, take them to the middle of the lake…. and we know what happens next. I would make the case that this technique is not really teaching people how to be swimmers, but could better be described as creating survivors. And of course what we don’t see in my analogy, is all the potential swimmers at the bottom of the lake, those that drowned and never made it.
It’s kind of a baptism by fire approach – or water in this case – but it’s actually worse, because we then use it prove the calling of a potential leader. As if just being able to survive is a litmus test of leadership. With this method so prevalent, should we really be surprised that there is such high rate of burnout and ineffectiveness in our churches and organizations. Many have never been properly equipped, no one has come alongside of them and mentored them. While throwing people in the deep end may be an efficient training method for us and the structures that we are part of…. in the long term it’s not a very effective way to develop healthy, reproducing leaders.
A New and Better Approach
Now what would happen if we would take a different approach to leadership development. Sure, there is some content and knowledge that is helpful for the potential swimmer to master, but I focus on beginning in shallow water with them and begin to teach them the basics — how to float and some basic strokes. Then I slowly progress to deeper water, showing them proper technique and building their endurance. I would suggest that there is a much higher likelihood that they could one day even become Olympic level swimmers, rather than survival experts with the dog paddle.
We will never develop effective leaders if we teach them to rely on adrenalin and only function in survival mode. The fact is that leadership principles and practices are crucial foundations that will ensure future capacity and longevity of leadership. If we don’t provide them with a healthy start it is likely they will never progress to reach their full potential.
The Paralysis of Analysis
In other nations, I have noticed the opposite scenario. Here there is an abundance of academic training options, unfortunately here ministry tends to become a profession rather than calling. Kind of the paralysis of analysis. Many of these potential leaders never actually swim…..just set up a chair on the beach and philosophize to others about the merits and intricacies of swimming. They may even train others in philosophizing but few become practitioners. How many of our seminaries are producing church planters, and practical church ministers, rather than academics and theologians.
Now before you turn this off, hear me out. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with training, I’ve had my own fair share…. but I am suggesting that if we are going to produce practitioners rather than just theorists the “how” of training is as important as the content itself.
A Mile Wide and Inch Deep
This alternative method of leadership development takes time and often requires getting our hands dirty as we engage in someone’s life. It’s not as easy as just dumping someone off the side of the boat and hoping for the best! Over the generations, this faulty methodology compounds leadership problems. Rather than a wise approach that utilizes the practical wisdom from previous generations, each generation has to from scratch and many wind up at the bottom of the lake.
After four decades of missions work observing and utilizing various training methods, this has been my experience. The reality is that in many nations the church has grown so fast that we just can’t keep up with leadership training. In our desperation we resort to the “toss em in the deep end” approach. Many in these contexts have little or no leadership training. They basically were left on their own to figure it out. Which is why it is said that in many nations, the church is a mile wide and only an inch deep.
A Global Leadership Deficit
You know, but even if we could just outsource all leadership training to seminaries and bible schools, this would still not really be a solution. First, the global reality is that if all Bible schools in the world functioned at full capacity and 100% of all graduates served in the Church, we would still not be able to keep up with the need for leadership training around the world.
Not to overstate the case, as nowadays there is lots of alternative training such as online and so on. Yet even those who are fortunate enough to have access to this training, often they never really gain the experience necessary in a safe environment which mitigates damage to them and others as they develop. In these cases they develop bad practises in order to just survive…. they become experts in the “dog paddle.”
Healthy effective leaders can only come from other healthy effective leaders. As in nature, we reproduce after like kind – so it is inevitable that we reproduce who we are. Yet many preparing for ministry and leadership — or already in positions of leadership — have had no one to come alongside of them to encourage and train them and show them the ropes.
Imagine a New Approach
What would happen if existing church planters, pastors, evangelists – current church leaders — began to personally mentor the next generation of leaders? We have actually seen this happen…. it’s more than theory. In regions were our MCNet ministry coaches have begun to mentor potential leaders, we have seen a church planting movement of healthy, reproducible churches. Imagine if this could happen in your country…. imagine what would happen if each leader took the responsibility upon themselves to develop another leader?
I am aware there are other factors, but perhaps because training leaders through a mentoring relationship is not a priority, it is hard for us to reproduce the type of ministry that Jesus had. And maybe, just maybe, why we are not getting the same results he did. Reproducing leadership is a multi-generational task. It has been said that if we can accomplish our vision in our own lifetime it is likely a rather small vision; and if we can accomplish our vision by ourselves it is also likely a small one. We need to shift our thinking and our priorities as leaders – thinking longer term and not how to survive in the short term.
Barriers to Mentoring Relationships
Okay, let’s just take a few moments and look at a couple barriers that can hinder us from doing this. The first one I want to look at is how having wrong priorities in our ministry will hinder developing others.
At some point you have likely seen the classic Time-Management Matrix. This graph, which you can see on the screen, organizes all of our activities according to their varying degrees of Importance and Urgency. Urgent things act on us, while important things we much be proactive to act upon. The vertical axis of the graph measures the relative importance and the horizontal axis the relative urgency.
Many leaders spend most of their time doing Q1 activities – these are Urgent and Important activities. They are represented by the top left quadrant. Q1 activities include: dealing with crisis, pressing problems and making deadlines – generally what we think of as the stuff of good leadership. But if in our lives and leadership the Urgent consumes our time experience has proven that we will never reach our full potential or our capacity as an effective leader.
The Urgent versus the Important
Focusing primarily on the Urgent and Important will inevitably lead to burnout and stress. We feel important… like the firefighter, always called upon to put our fires. As leaders it feeds our ego to always be the go to person. After all, we have the training, we have the degrees and want to put them to good use. We are the person of first and last resort. But focusing just on these activities will be the demise of our leadership and maybe our very health and life.
Other leaders spend a lot of time doing Q3 activities – this is the bottom left quadrant. These are activities are those that are Urgent but Not Important. Things like many or our emails, phone calls, some meetings and so on. Then there are those leaders who may spend much of their time in Q4 activities which are represented in the bottom right quadrant. These are activities that are Not Urgent and Not Important – this is busy work others could be doing, time wasting activities and even just losing ourselves in the fun stuff we like doing. We could put these individuals in the failed leadership camp.
Our goal as a leader should be to focus our time doing Q2 Activities. Now this is the top right quadrant and are activities that are proactive, prevention orientated. Things like strategic planning, relationship building, both personal and professional. These activities are very Important, but – this is the kicker — they are seldom Urgent. This is why it is so easy to procrastinate and focus only on crises and pressing problems that arise. However, if we make the shift in priority, from being the “go to crisis solver” to proactive, strategic longer term, the results will be greater vision, perspective, balance, discipline in our leadership. All these Q2 activities flow from deeply held beliefs and values, that guide us over the long term.
Learning to focus on activities that are important but NOT necessarily urgent, will actually result in a decrease in the crises that we have to deal with. In this way we actually break of the cycle of just running around putting out fires – the very things that fuel our ego.
Mentoring is Important but Never Urgent
The powerful takeaway in relation to mentoring is that developing others is never an emergency. We must be intentional or it just doesn’t happen. It’s a Q2 activity. Now if we don’t do this, no one will notice in one month, one year…. maybe not even in 5 years…..but one day it will be too late for us to do this and then it will be obvious where we spent our best time. How? We’ll either blow a gasket physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or we’ll be isolated, and remain ego driven, hanging on to power and position. I am sure we all know people like this…. hopefully though not when we look in the mirror. Without a Q2 focus it will be impossible to leave a true legacy in others – unlike the Apostle Paul, we will not finishing the race well.
Effective leaders prioritize their time to do activities that in the long term are important but in the short term never seem urgent. These activities seldom build the leader’s ego – the type of leadership that develops others is opposite to the adrenaline driven, power based leadership that is so often admired in most of our cultures.
So without adjusting our priorities and focussing on what is really important we will never take the time to mentor others…..it’s just never an emergency… though it is extremely important.
Another Barrier: A Lack of Focus
Okay, another barrier that hinders mentoring relationships is a lack of focus. Usually early in our life and ministry we try to do it all. As we age it hits most of us that we can’t do it all, but some still try. We all can probably name names of those who have tried this approach and have fallen in some way, or have even cashed in their ticket to heaven early…. their legacy results in many hurt and disillusioned people.
But it does not need to come to that. We can decide to change our priorities and become more focused rather than just having a Messiah complex where we think we are the solution to every problem, This can also be hidden under the guise of an ambitious motivation to do work for God. As you can see from the graph there is inverse correlation between our focus and our influence.
The irony is that once we become more focused, our influence increases in our area of focus and this better prepares us to do something of significance within our lifetime. Playing the long game, this is much more effective than just settling for the type of “success” defined by our culture. Instead of being spread out and trying to accomplish more, we learn to focus on just fulfilling what God put us on this earth for.
I was just reading the other day in James 3 where he is describing what true wisdom really looks like. He says that it is actually humble, submissive – and is not motivated by selfish ambition. This is why changing our priorities to focus on mentoring others requires a transformation of our hearts, not just a time management adjustment. It is a heart issue.
Now I am not perfect in this area by any stretch. But years ago, it was very freeing to realize that God didn’t really need me….he was doing pretty good before I came along and once my life is over he will continue to function okay. Not so easy for a type A driven personality to admit, but somewhere along the way I began to realize that the whole burden of world evangelism and training leaders was not all on just my shoulders. And yes, I did sleep a lot better.
More Focus – More Influence
You know, I thought for sure that I would make a huge impact by the time I was 25 (for God of course!), that came and went, so modified it to 35, that came and went, then 45 came and went. I realized that it was not all up to me and perhaps the visions and dreams I had were going to be fulfilled through others, as was the case with Abraham and many other biblical characters. Not great for our ego, but great for our spiritual and physical health. Influence comes from focus not from trying to do it all.
So as we age, and hopefully we learn this sooner than later, our influence grows as we get more focussed on what we should be doing, rather than trying to do it all. As our focus increases, our influence in that area increases. I find it so sad to see a leader who is aging and still trying to do it all themselves….just seems kind of a waste of the next generation. This is why changing our focus and priority to mentoring is crucial if we are going to accomplish what God has for us.
In our next episode we are going to dig a bit deeper and deal with what I believe is the main hindrance to developing mentoring relationships. Without a personal transformation in this area and seeing this truth, my experience is that it is unlikely that a leader will make this switch from power based leadership to one that focuses on developing and releasing others. As always, I hope you’ll join me.
Some Leadership Matters to Consider
But before then, I’d like to leave you a few leadership matters to consider:
As you reflect on your activities, out of which Quadrant do you mostly function?
As you mature are you become more or less focussed or are you still trying to do it all?
Are you willing to be transformed into Jesus’ model of leadership, whatever the cost to your ego?
