Faith & Everyday Leadership
Reinventing the 21st Century Church
September 9, 2008 – September 11, 2008
Roslyn Retreat Center , Richmond, Virginia
Facilitator: Wayne Floyd
Note: Seminar begins at 12 noon on day 1 and concludes with lunch on day 3.
This retreat introduces you to the exciting new curriculum developed by the Alban Institute, “Faith and Everyday Leadership.”
Are you someone who desires to live a more integrated life, linking your faith more fully with the demands of everyday leadership in your home, business, and congregation? Are you a clergyperson who wishes you knew how to encourage your laity to bring their everyday gifts of leadership into the life of the community of the church?
Learn about how to recognize and value all of your leadership roles in your work, communities, and family lives as expressions of your faith commitments and values.
Discover ways to be more mindful of the best practices of leadership you already know, as well as ways to become a more faithful agent of grace and transformation, contributing to the shaping and healing of the world.
This leadership workshop will provide you with a way to
- Learn more about faith at work from leaders in everyday life
- Build collaborative approaches to leadership among clergy and laity
- Make your congregation into a resource to sustain everyday leaders
Join with others who want to learn what the church and everyday life have to teach each other – and how faithfulness in everyday leadership can contribute to reinventing the 21st century church.
About Wayne Floyd
Wayne Whitson Floyd is in charge of Education Development at the Alban Institute. He is a lay professional with experience in leadership both inside and outside church. Wayne had developed and led programs in adult education and vocational discernment in three Episcopal dioceses and at the Washington National Cathedral. He is an author and educator and is married to an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Washington, DC.
LINKS
Printable Event Flyer (PDF format)
Mail-in Registration Form (PDF format)
Coaching news from the “other” AMA
AMA Study Finds More Use of High-Level Coaching
by Agatha Gilmore
Thu Jul 10, 2008
Today, many organizations aim to grow by accelerating talent development as much as possible. According to a new study by the American Management Association (AMA), coaching has become one increasingly popular way to do it.
The study, “Coaching: A Global Study of Successful Practices,” surveyed more than 1,000 business leaders around the world and found use of coaching as a means of increasing individual productivity was up. Nearly 60 percent of North American companies use coaching for high potentials frequently or a great deal, and about 42 percent use coaching of executives to the same extent. These percentages were higher in the international sample.
Contrarily, only 37 percent of North American respondents and less than 30 percent of international respondents said they used coaching to help problem employees.
“We’re all expecting more out of individual performers,” said Edward Reilly, president and CEO of AMA. “I think coaching has been found to be another effective tool in terms of talent development, and it makes sense to invest in that type of development. It’s also pretty clear that the reduction [in coaching for low performers] comes from trend to learner, more competitive companies with probably less tolerance for long-term carrying of people who are not performing. Extensive amounts of intervention are probably not as common as they might have been a decade or two ago.”
The study’s findings also tie into issues surrounding Generation Y employees’ entry into the workforce. These young workers are known for their social networking and their need for mentoring and guidance. Coaching is not only desired but expected by Gen Yers, but many recognize it’s something they must earn in today’s marketplace.
“I think younger people see [coaching] as an important part of their long-term deal with the company,” Reilly said. “Part of their compensation is the company’s efforts to develop them as individuals and as managers.”
The AMA study also found the type of coaching offered has an impact on the effect. For example, it appears external coaches can be more individually effective, while internal coaches tend to be more cost-efficient in the long term.
“[I]nternal coaches often provide lower cost of services, exhibit more consistency in methods and understand the organizational culture,” said the AMA study. “However, they may also be perceived as less credible. Leaders may consider internal coaches to be less confidential. ”
The study’s authors cite a 2007 report titled “Executive Coaching for Results,” in which 59 percent of leaders indicated a preference for external coaches, while only 12 percent preferred internal coaches.
“External coaches can bring greater objectivity, fresher perspectives, higher levels of confidentiality and experience in many different organizations, industries and business environments, ” they wrote.
Regardless of what kind of coaches an organization chooses, the AMA study showed, in these troubled economic times, organizations likely will find more value than ever in leveraging coaching.
“Generally speaking, our team believes that coaching will continue to expand and mature as an important leadership development practice,” said the authors. “We expect that coaching will become one of the keys to developing and retaining scarce talent in the future, and we think companies that learn to leverage it well will have a significant competitive advantage in the global marketplace. ”
To see a full copy of the free AMA study, visit www.amanet.org and register to view the materials.
Writing Your Way Home in Preaching, Teaching, and Soul Tending
by Kent Ira Groff
Do you ever think, “I’ve got to write this”? But other times, “I get to write this!” Sometimes duty takes over: Sunday’s sermon, newsletter deadline, persistent e-mails. How can we move through “got to” into “get to”?
During a writing funk, two things occurred to me.
First, if I find bits of grace in the grit of duty, then obligation morphs into invitation.
Second, even if my words get rejected, what matters at the end of a day is if I’ve written myself an inch closer home to my true self and God.
Writing can help us appreciate ministry. Preaching, teaching, and soul tending extend an invitation to pen our way home and out into the world’s need—the tides of contemplation and communication.
PREACHING
How dare I preach the Word unless I first let the Word preach to me? If I lose my passion, my words are hollow. How can we keep coming home while writing—and preaching?
I constantly remind myself: “Pause… to fall in love again with the Word beneath your words and with the people who ache for you to let them in on your sacred ideas, fears, and dreams.”
Sometimes I trick myself home by writing what I would say if I could. Once all I could think was nothing.
I write about
Nothing.
No thing.
Ah! No thing really matters,
only relationships.
Other times I keep writing page after page even if it feels like junk—then: Pause… I tell myself, there must be inklings of grace in all this grit. So I go back and highlight the inklings (prune my junk) and I’m home again.
I tell myself to “story the sermon,” oxygenating theological ideas. A pastor conversed about preaching new insights regarding Advent. We paused… She began telling of a lone child who wandered into worship. Into the synergy of silence dropped this poem prayer.
*To cradle a new insight or give*
**birth to anything everlasting**
***wrap your truth in stories.***
We can practice “contemplative exegesis” by looking at a biblical story from new angles. French artist Claude Monet painted the same cathedrals and bridges in different hours of day, seasons, or weather. What happens when I reposition the easel? Does the subject change? Or do I?
A minister retold the overworked “Prodigal Son” story from the neighbor’s viewpoint. “Let me tell you about this dysfunctional family next door. Young brat was spoiled rotten. Insulted his dad. But guess what that father did? Yep. Let his son run off with big family money. And that mother—she was invisible—just grieved inside the house. Older brother worked 24/7—felt no thanks from Pop. What happened when that wasted brother came home? Did he get a beating? No. Pop threw him a party. Did that cool older brother blow up!”
By shifting the easel to the neighbor’s voice, the pastor reconstructs original tensions in the story. The father and mother (aspects of God?) seem weird like their kids.
Sometimes I need to pick up my easel and go to some far country to come to myself—arise to return home for the first time again. The sermon prepares the preacher; the preacher prepares the sermon.
TEACHING
How dare I teach unless I learn some new thing? “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear,” goes a Zen saying. If the pupil of my eye and heart is wide awake, I can be digging or diapering or delving into books and my teachers appear out of nowhere.
Someone turned the saying on its head: “When the teacher is ready, the pupil will appear.” How can I explain the thread of providence that brought students and seekers across my path when my life was ready?
Sometimes a troubling person is my teacher. A bright pastor contributed insights in a seminar I was leading. The last night he got angry. I awakened early and conversed with him in my journal. Through my fingertips I heard: “It’s so frustrating—when I go back to my Kentucky mountain church I can’t talk about Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky the way I’ve done here.” Trying on his moccasins changed me. We conversed at breakfast and I enlisted his help in the final class to explore students’ re-entering back home.
SOUL TENDING
How dare I tend others’ vulnerable souls if I don’t tend my needy soul first? Prayer helps me show up to God with my hurts and hopes to be safely present to another.
An impulsive letter or e-mail from a tide of anger can “kill” a relationship. Yet as Abraham Lincoln knew, that same letter, written but never sent, can prevent or restore a broken relationship.
One time I scheduled lunch with a friend I thought had failed to support a common project. I felt so fussed I wrote three-pages till I got to God’s desire beneath my anger—then shredded them. When we broke bread I was free: we found ways to support one another.
Without tending our souls, we endanger our selves and our ministry. Words can guard one’s soul: a pastor stays free of porn by imagining Jesus repeating: “Come here… don’t go there.”
A journal helps me get surprised. I play with words and ideas—pray my pain and anger. After my father died, unresolved grief reared its head. By writing in dialogue about his verbal non-responsiveness, I began understanding him and that non-responsive part of me. I realized he was a master at communicating through intuition and gestures! I celebrate those gifts in myself.
Writing creates a way to tend another’s soul. Jon flew 3,000 miles to his home state to be with his comatose father. The next morning he read his father a note penned by his own twenty-something son, Sean. Minutes after “hearing” his grandson’s words, Jon says his father’s breathing began to ebb into a peaceful death.
For the next e-mail or card to contratulate or sympathize, try composing your own simple “prayer poem.”
Whether you write for love, labor, or learning—or blessedly all three—every form of writing can call forth the Word that unlockss the treasure of your life’s purpose.
KENT IRA GROFF is a spiritual companion, retreat leader, and writer living in Denver, Colo. He is founding mentor of Oasis Ministries, Camp Hill, Pa. This article is adapted from his book, Writing Tides (Abingdon). For Active Spirituality (Alban) and other resources for ministry see www.kentiragroff.com
Holy ground in cyberspace
One of the perennial concerns raised about online learning is that some sorts of education simply must occur face to face — that group process, for instance, or the forming of strong interpersonal bonds, or the intimacy of peer to peer mentoring, requires the physical proximiity of teacher to student, and students to one another, in a shared culture of presence.
This has always seemed to me a somewhat questionable assumption for those of us in the Christian tradition, whose main source of authority is itself the product of the discovery of the technology of writing, and is shared with the remoteness of 2,000-3,000 years of history, and across unshared cultural boundaries and barriers of language.
St. Paul, who wrote the earliest parts of New Testament, used this technology of inscription, delivered by the technologies of sailing, in the form of letters to remote communities around the Mediterranean. In doing so he intended to serve as their mentor and spiritual guide, encouraging them into deepening bonds of affection and commitment and faithfulness that have been shared across the millenia thanks in particular to the technology of the printing press.
The following is a post from the Daily Episcopalian blog about one counter-intuitive discovery about online learning written by Ann Fontaine, an Episcopal priest and General Convention deputy from the Diocese of Wyoming. It may make all of us think differently about the potential of cyberspace for religious education.
By Ann Fontaine
Seven years ago the Diocese of Wyoming’s Canon for Ministry Development, Lynn Wilson, wondered if we could offer Education for Ministry (EfM) via the internet to our isolated and rural churches and their leaders. I have been a mentor and trainer with EfM since the early days of the program. This was a challenge I could not resist. How could we replicate this small group experience with its transformative theological reflection and study? Dr. Norm Peterson, a mentor and Dean of Education at the University of Wyoming and I recruited our first class of students for a pilot project with Blackboard, the popular distance education program that most colleges use.
I thought it would be possible to carry out the program but did not believe it would be as good as face-to-face EfM. I could not have been more wrong. Now the online groups are spreading around the country with students from as far away as South Africa, Bahrain and Korea. Originally we thought it would be great for rural isolated students. We have discovered that it is great for those who travel for work, those who live in cities and don’t want one more night out, those who have children at home and snowbirds. The intimacy and depth of sharing is beyond my dreams. When we do find time to see each other in person – we are like old friends.
Other EfM Online mentors have had similar experiences. Jenifer Gamber, Diocese of Bethlehem, finished her 4th year in an online group then became a mentor. She writes:
Leading with life-changing stories
by Twila Glenn
Consulting Manager, The Alban Institute
Narrative Leadership: now what in the world does that mean? There are a lot of answers to that question, but basically, it is a way of leading organizations in which the story of who we have been, seen through the lens of who we are, forms the foundation for the story of who we are to become. Stories wind their way through individual lives, through family lives, through community lives, through congregational lives, and through the faith journey of each of us.
In about a month, folks will gather at Lake Junaluska Conference Center in North Carolina to hear stories, tell stories, and learn new ways to weave together God’s story, their congregation’s story, and their community’s story in powerful new faith journeys. You can be part of that gathering—part of that story.
If you come to Lake Junaluska in July, Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams, noted Old Testament scholar and vivid storyteller, will take you by the hand and walk you into the heart of that rich and teeming story of the Israelites—perched on the edge of promise—learning to remember their own story. You will emerge from the experience with new insight into how what a community remembers shapes its identity.
With Dr. Larry Peers, Senior Consultant for the Alban Institute, you will “wade in the waters of deep change. You will learn the healing power of reauthoring problem-saturated stories of your congregation and your leadership into powerful new stories of possibility.”
And then, Alban Senior Consultant Alice Mann will ask you to journey with her into the “soul of the place” and explore with her what it would mean to befriend the soul of the place in which you and your congregation live. Learn with her how to take this sense of place that is “in our bones”—this place where we live and work and worship—and nurture it, turn it into a powerful story of well-being and justice for our community and our world.
All of this—and beautiful Lake Junaluska (with a powerful story of its own)—can be yours at the Alban Institute at Lake Junaluska in July. Come share your story! (Click here for more information and registration.)
The Problem Trap
Alban Weekly, 2008-06-16
Number 203 printer-friendly version
by Larry Peers
To effect deep change, leaders must be able to stand outside the dominant story of whatever it is we are trying to change—rather than being so immersed in it that we cannot truly observe how to lead a particular group in a particular situation. Ron Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, often talks about this as being able to take a balcony perspective. I have found the tools and perspectives of narrative therapy especially useful in helping clergy begin to get up on the balcony and become different observers of their situations, allowing for different actions and different results to become possible.
Recognizing the Problem-Saturated Story
One of the primary kinds of stories that takes hold in congregations and makes change difficult is what is known in narrative therapy as the “problem-saturated story,” or one in which the focus is on who or what is or has been wrong.
You can recognize the problem-saturated story when you’re in a group where someone offers an example of how difficult or awful something is in the congregation and before you know it the rest of us can’t help but chime in with more evidence for how truly bad and impossible the situation is. We can almost hear ourselves saying, even if the words aren’t verbalized, “You think that’s bad, let me tell you how it is even worse than that!”