Shaping your Leadership
It isn’t unusual for me to be sitting with a pastor feeling like they are at the end of their capacity to lead. They’re wondering if they have anything left, or if they ever had anything at all…
“It was only when scientists were willing to accept their confusion instead of fleeing from it and only when they changed the questions they were asking, only then could they discover the insights and formulations that gave them the great new capacity. Once this new worldview came into focus, scientists reengaged with their work with new energy.” 1
Refamiliarizing myself with Margaret Wheatley’s book Leadership and the New Science, I felt these sentences pop off the page at me. Wheatley could have written them today—she could have written them about leaders in the church. As in, “It was only when leaders in the church were willing to accept their confusion…”
It is such a confusing time to be a leader in the church. And there are many other adjectives you could choose besides confusing. (What’s on your list of adjectives that complete this sentence for you?) Pastors need support from others. Pastors need a place to renew and regain resilience. Pastors need a place to rethink leadership—their leadership. They need to ask new questions. They need a place to wonder about what it all means today and a place to experiment with new ways of being. They need to reconnect—with themselves, colleagues, and God. LeaderWise’s Shape of Leadership program is just the place to do that.
We invite you to become one of the couple hundred pastors who’ve experienced this program. During our year together, we build confidence and a support system; we learn more deeply who we are as unique, called leaders; we learn to lead from the places where God has gifted us, as we dive into topics like conflict, power and the church, adaptive leadership, leading change, leading from a place of purpose, resilience. We accompany you as you discover the insights and formulations that can give you great new capacity (to borrow from the quote above). We reconnect—or connect for the first time—with spiritual practices that bring us closer again to the Holy. And we build relationships. But don’t take it from me. This beautiful video is a presentation one participant put together as our year together concluded.
One thing the program is NOT, is boring. Our facilitators take the adaptive challenge of leadership development very seriously. Every moment of the program is designed to be interactive and experiential—intentionally created to make the learning deep, and make the learning stick.
Leadership development is a life-long endeavor—a journey. Consider making The Shape of Leadership part of your plans to shape your leadership into something more like what God perhaps intends for you. Find more information at our website. Inquire here about the groups we’re forming this fall, in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and North Carolina.
1 Margaret J. Wheatley. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
