Some thoughts…coming at’cha.
Lately I’ve been very intrigued by the idea of Leadership 2.0. But there are two barriers that are keeping us from experiencing growth in this across our organization (Campus Crusade for Christ). The first one is developing a culture of learning. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not all bad in this area, but continuous learning and asking invigorating questions must be part of who we are if our capacity for helping to fulfill the great commission is to be fulfilled.
The other area I’ve been thinking about is the idea of sharing. Do we share our ideas, strategies, goals, leadership perspective’s with our co-workers on other teams?
I don’t think so.
I get glimpses of what other team leaders are doing at various regional conferences and random face to face meetings, but for the most part I don’t know what’s going on with their scope and team. I don’t know what they’re trying that’s new and working well (or not well). I don’t know what resources are influencing them and their team. I don’t know what they’re dreaming about as they seek to bring the message of Christ to students in their scope.
Don’t get me wrong, I know these men and women are busy (I’m one of them), and if we weren’t all followers of Christ they might flip me the bird when I ask them to do a little bit more. But the reality is…everyone has expertise and I want to learn from them. Are there simple ways that you and I could begin to share the wealth of knowledge that exists in our organization? Simple ideas like these or these.
Could learning to share increase organizational effectiveness and empower leaders that wouldn’t otherwise have the chance? I think it’s worth a shot. It might take an extra few minutes to share but imagine the resources that could be available to anyone who is launching/leading a campus movement all over the world.
Where have you seen value in sharing your expertise or learning from someone else who is sharing?
Photo courtesy of Enggul
Other LTI posts kinda like this one:
Obviously, you know I’m a fan of this stuff.
There is no better way to quickly catalyze improvement or innovation – in both practice and thought. Right now, making learning a priority isn’t just an uphill climb in Cru, but in all kinds of college ministry circles out there.
I certainly agree that organizations should develop really strong collaborative networks within themselves; it’s obviously really valuable to learn from others who are doing similar things in different contexts. But I would also hope that our push to learn would go outside that. There is a different but highly applicable stretching that takes place in collaboration with those in other college ministry circles.
In fact, it may be more beneficial for college ministers already focused on learning to join forces first. We may have a hard time dragging people to the table of College Ministry Learning until there is, in fact, a table at all. When people see innovation, impact, and improvement taking place as a result of participation in an actual “field of study” or “vocation” (that’s bigger than any one org or branch), I bet they won’t be as hard to convince of its value.
Thanks for your great calls to Learning. You’re absolutely right about it being needed – and you’re absolutely right about it being painfully difficult at the moment.
I think you’re right about learning from other ministries too. To often we rule people out based on what organization they work for. I learned a ton from the Chi Alpha and Intervarsity staff during my time at MSU.
However, the problem I’d like to help solve first is connecting people that are willing and “learners” within Campus Crusade for Christ. I’m finding that there are actually a lot of staff that would like to learn from each other, but logistically we have no outlet for that in our structure. Sure we make a few phone calls to people we know, but there’s not much real-time collaboration going on.
In fact we’re doing some sort of virtual conference in May…something like Brian Barela’s blogference, but for the CCC staff in the Northwest. We’ll see if it’s a step toward giving people that want to eat a table.