How Leadership Calling Unfolds in the Mysterious “Now”

André L. DelbecqSanta Clara University

adelbecq@scu.edu© 10/22//11

We Are Called

We are God’s stake in human history.

We are the dawn and the dusk;the challenge and the test.

How strange to be a (Chosen Child of God)and to go astray on God’s perilous errands.

We have been offered as a pattern of worshipand as prey for scorn,but there is still more in our destiny.

We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gates of heaven.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Vocation Traditionally Spoken of as “One Time” Choice

• Regarding a “State of Life”– Lay, Vowed Religious– Married Single

• Regarding a Career Choice– Business, Law, Medicine, Arts, etc.

More Recently - Calling As A Career Reflection

• Much Quoted in Lilly Grants

– The place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need”

Buechner

Steve Jobs

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. So don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Empirical Managerial andPsychological Literature

• Job – Series of Tasks

• Career – Advancement Through Organizational Roles

• Calling – Fundamental Inner Orientation Towards Both

Calling As Inner OrientationResults In

• Greater Intrinsic Motivation– Finding sustained meaning in work

– Bringing more purposeful values

– Higher performance

– Higher satisfaction

• Different Level of Commitment– Ability to endure difficulties

– Less burnout and cynicism

– Lower turnover

Critical to Knowledge Work

Imagine Yourself At 25-45- or any age

• In A Limited Role• Reporting to Difficult Supervisor• Within A Toxic Organizational Culture• Facing Job Insecurity or Loss• Limited Short Term Options

Idealized Discussions of “Calling”

Often Not a Source of Consolation

In This Light, Much “Calling” Literature Seems To Imply

• Undue Certainty

• Unrealistic “Self-Control”

• Absence of Mystery

• Avoidance of Suffering

Extended Life Expectancy, Career Mobility

Leadership Biography AHelpful Offset

• Ghandi

• Eisenhower

• Eleanor Roosevelt

• Oppenheimer

• John XXIII Lives of the Saints/Biblical Stories/Biography

Key Lessons from Biography

• Long periods of preparation/Uncertain Horizon– Delayed gratification

– Uncertain / erroneous career paths

• Setbacks and Failures– Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, ML King

• Unpredictable Twists and Turns– Ghandi

Theological Reflections

• Coping With Uncertainty – Focus on Be-coming; Allow Do-ing to Unfold

Our first work is not really our job today or tomorrow.

Our first work is our heart and how our mind is brought down into our hearts when whatever we do is really for Him, in Him, and most especially into Him

Father Simeon, Abbot, St. Isaac of Syria Skete

Be-Coming Precedes Do-ing

The Requirement of Patience

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are, quite naturally impatient in everything to

reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by

passing through some stages of instability;

and that it may take a very long time.

 

Pierre Teilhard deChardin,S.J.

Speaking to The Impatient “Internet” Generation

• Two Sources of Hope– Called by Name

• “I have you by name, you are mine” Isa 43:1

• “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world” Paul: Cor 1-5

– Endowed With Gifts• “Special graces called ‘charisms’ given for the well-

being of the community” CCC 2003

The BE-coming and DO-ingAre Enacted the “Now”

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come.

We have only today. Mother Theresa

• God is always choosing people. First impressions aside, God is not primarily choosing them for a role or a task, although it might appear that way. God is really choosing them to be himself in this world.

Richard Rohr

The Eternal “Bulls Eye”

• The primacy of the “primary group”

• The mystery of “indirect” leadership

• The witness to light in imperfect organizations

Direct or Indirect LeadershipNow

People are not inspired simply by position or expertise

They are inspired to act by:– Who you are– Your integrity as a person Before they care what you know they must know that you care

Kouzes and Posner

Eyes That See

I have long thought that there is a lacuna in the ecclesiology with which

most of the churches, especially the Catholic Church, function. The

lacuna is that the churches are often full of people uniquely gifted with

the Spirit. But this tends to be seldom adverted to because they usually

exercise their gifts beyond the boundaries of congregational life. ….

Without intending it, the impression is given that participation in the

activities of the congregation is primary and the leavening of faith in the

world, secondary.John Haughey, “Originality and Faith in the Commons”,

Woodstock Report, No 100, June, 2011 pp

 

The Role of Small Vocational Communities

A Major Role of Community Is to Recognize Gifts and Call Them Forth

• Why should there not be groups vowed to the task of exemplifying by their lives the general sanctification of human endeavor; those who would devote themselves in the fields of thought, art, business and politics, etc. to carrying out, in the sublime spirit these demand, the basic tasks which form the bone work of human society?”

  Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, 1960

The Illusion of –Self Determination

We cannot design or intend our vocation.

Rather we must surrender into “calling”

through deep listening”

Parker Palmer

• Calling Stories Almost Always –

Who me?

Surely you have the wrong person?

Surrender

Discovering God’s faithfulness

The Requirement – Listening in the Now

Again the surprise stories of biography

Discernment regarding “little things done

with great love”

Accepting the humble before/instead of

coveting the grand

The unexpected Consequences

Comparative/Competitive/Contributive

Task Specialist vs. Administrative

When to Say Yes/No“Discernment, dis…,disc…

It is not easy to distinguish between doing what we are call to do,

and doing what we want to do. The most prestigious position in society

can be an expression of obedience to our call, as well as a sign of our

refusal to hear that call, and the least prestigious position, too, can be a

response to our vocation as well as a way to avoid it.

 

What God calls us to do we can do and do well. When we listen in silence

to God’s voice and speak with our friends in trust we will know what we

are called to do, and we will do it with grateful heart.Henri J. M. Nouwen The Only Necessary Thing

Leadership Forum Experiences – Again Community

Avoidance of Suffering

Exercising “spiritual” authority means accepting to be placed in situations in which events are, in fact, beyond us all the time. That is the authority of someone poor – someone who, instead of seeking to dominate (as we so easily do) exercises authority as nothing but a

service of love, without claiming any rights (and consequently resisting resorting to power).

PHILLIP´, O.P., Fr. Marie-Dominique,The Mystery of Joseph

Forms of Leadership Suffering

• Superstitious Attribution

• Set-backs and Failures

• Absence of Privacy

• Great Demands on Time

• Dealing With Succession

– Etc.

“Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me”

Summing Up

You can never connect the dots looking forward - you are only able to do so looking back.

Steve Jobs

Yet We Must Live Confident of Our Being “Called”

We Are Called

We are God’s stake in human history.

We are the dawn and the dusk;the challenge and the test.

How strange to be a (Chosen Child of God)and to go astray on God’s perilous errands.

We have been offered as a pattern of worshipand as prey for scorn,but there is still more in our destiny.

We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gates of heaven.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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