Followup to Solitude as a Leadership Path

The Blogference is continuing to generate good interaction even though (fortunately) the firehose flow is reduced somewhat!

Justin posted a very insightful comment in a different discussion thread called Get Over Yourself. I and others responded. I’m repeating the (slightly modified) response here since it’s another part of the Solitude as a Path discussion. You can read the full interaction here.

Time is often a forgotten factor in our immediate-focused world. We all grow throughout our career with CCC, however long it is. In the early years, we’re just trying to learn the skills, learn the methods, figure out which way is up. Think about all the things a new believer has to figure out about the Christian life. Much is by rote mimicking others in the early years. This is normal. It’s kind of like early childhood in which kids mimic the way parents talk and walk and hold their spoons and speak about others. This is the time of dependency.

But over time, the basics become second nature. That’s when the growing of Leadership skills really kicks in. That’s when it’s important to start testing out your own ideas and sharing them with others to see what they think. That’s when questioning is normal, often trash-talking the status quo. Think about adolescence and middle and high school. Even college years. It’s when we try out our own thoughts. It’s a time of independency.

Eventually we move into an adult world in which we learn how to be our own person but to value and respect others also. We learn how to collaborate where we can share our ideas while valuing others. We can give and take without our identity as a person being challenged. This is interdependency.

The challenge to us as leaders helping others develop is to help the process along over time. Recognize the stages. Accept where people are but also help them keep developing.

I really connected with the Greenleaf quote that Brian Virtue used in his post on Serving Self Leadership. The measure of our servant leadership is how well others develop as servant leaders. How well do they move from dependency through independency and into interdependency.