Spirituality and Growth on the Leadership Path

An Abecedary

Haynes

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899082
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Spirituality and Growth on the Leadership Path: An Abecedary offers lessons not usually taught about leadership, lessons learned over the author's more than thirty years in higher education and nonprofit organizations.Few resources on leadership and administration attend to the inner life of a person in a leadership position. Many of this book's themes are therefore related to the inner moral and spiritual life. Some topics are prosaic, dealing with everyday activities. Throughout the book, pith instructions offer simple practical advice about the inner process and core values that may inform the leadership path. Haynes draws on the world's wisdom traditions--philosophy and religion, mysticism and theology, including indigenous beliefs and rituals--as rich resources for reconceiving leadership.This abecedary includes drawings by artist Michael Shernick, which are paired with entries from the chronicles of experience, etymology and poetry, examples of contemplative practice and meditation, and metaphoric digressions. Common elements--such as lists and advice--mix with uncommon elements, including recipes. This primer will provide inspiration and insight for navigating the shoals, deep water, rocky coasts, wind, and sunny climes of the leadership journey.

Administrator

The verb “administer” is related to minister, from the French “servant.” What might it mean to say that an administrator is, first of all, a servant?

When I encountered Robert K. Greenleaf’s essays, collected in his 1977 book Servant Leadership, I found a provocative concept that helped me to reframe my aspiration and experience as an administrator in several contexts, including nonprofit organizations and institutions of higher education. In Greenleaf’s view, a leader must be a servant first, one who wants to serve others and ensure that their needs are being met. The success of this process is measured by whether those who are being served become healthier, wiser, and more likely to become servants themselves. Grounded in altruistic values and a vision of community, such an administrator must follow an internal calling or vocation. Leadership in this model is not about personal gain and relentless pursuit of one’s own self-interest. In fact, working for the common good means subordinating one’s ego for higher goals. Yes, such an administrator has ambition, but this is channeled for the community one serves, not for the self.

Certainly, serving as a leader in any context has rewards. The rewards of my own service include: developing my leadership and management skills; exercising my vision; seeing my departments and programs grow and change; experiencing the fruits of my labor within the wider university and community; mentoring others and sharing their challenges and successes; helping to hire a new generation of staff and faculty and coordinating the activity of volunteers; collaborating with skilled personnel to run the programs; and participating in variety of non-routine projects such as fundraising and planning for new facilities.

But being an administrator also involves a tremendous amount of mundane activity. Here, at the beginning of this discussion on leadership, I want to emphasize prosaic ways of being, for they provide a way of thinking that foregrounds the everyday and ordinary. In a short essay, published as Toward a Philosophy of the Act, the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin emphasized that wholeness and integrity of the self are not given. Rather, they are always a matter of work, a project to be undertaken in daily life. “Every thought of mine,” he wrote, “is an act or deed that I perform—my own individually answerable act or deed. It is one of all those acts which make up my whole . . . life as an uninterrupted performing of acts. For my entire life as a whole can be considered as a single complex act or deed that I perform . . .”1 To speak of the commonplace, therefore, is a way of indicating that creating an integrated life takes a lifetime. Although this work may never be completed, it is nonetheless a responsibility that we carry out in daily life.

I have learned on the ground and in the trenches that the everyday activities of administration, both mundane and exotic, involve being comfortable with who I am, unafraid of being vulnerable, but also unafraid of the risks associated with taking a stand. For the administrator—and for anyone wanting to live a good life—nothing is more essential than authenticity and integrity.

Beginnings

With what values at the forefront of your awareness will you begin?

I have loved T. S. Eliot’s poetry since I was a teenager. I read it silently in my mother’s library and recited particular poems for an audience during competitions as a teen. I still relish the first line of “East Coker,” part of Eliot’s Four Quartets, in which he links the beginning of an activity, or even of a life, to its end. At the conclusion of this quartet, the conundrum of the last line always causes me to reflect, for there Eliot connects the end to the beginning.

I sought out mentors when I began my first administrative position, and this is a practice I highly recommend. My first dean, John Pierce, urged me to think about what I wanted my legacy to be—my end, in Eliot’s sense. “What do you want to see when you look back?” he asked.

I did not answer immediately with the first thing that came to mind, but I have reflected about this in the years since that conversation. What I want is to look back on how my actions expressed my core values: kindness and compassion, humility and patience, discipline and generosity, modesty and accountability, moral courage and willingness to take risks, respect and open-mindedness. From where I stand today, I can say that my commitment to hold and communicate these values in my interactions has been strong and steady. Have I always succeeded? Of course not, but aspiration and intention set a stage for playing out the roles we must assume. A leader may leave one organization and move to another. Looking back as she leaves may well impact the beginning—and all the days that follow—in the next position.

When composing their poetry, modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot looked back, too, toward the wisdom of pre-Socratic philosophers, including Herakleitos. Of the many fragments attributed to him, translators differ in both the numbering of the fragments and their rendition of the original Greek.2 In 1889, for example, G. W. T Patrick translated Fragment 70, “The beginning and end are common.” In his 1954 scholarly study, G. S. Kirk offered a longer version: “But there is no such thing as a start and finish of the whole circumference of a circle: for every point one can think of is a beginning and end.” Two more recent translations are more poetic to my ear. Guy Davenport’s 1979 version simplifies the sentence: “The beginning of a circle is also its end.” Brooks Haxton’s “The beginning is the end” captures the essence of the meaning of Herakleitos’s insight, and take us right back to Eliot. Every end is also a beginning.

What do you want to see when you look back?

From the Chronicles of Experience

I vividly remember the day I accepted my second administrative position, as chair of an academic department at a large research university. Walking home from work on an early spring afternoon, I contemplated my choices: to stay where I was or accept the proffered position. I crossed the pasture where a neighbor kept horses, carefully avoiding the mare with her nursing filly. Rain clouds had just passed through, leaving my garden damp. Kneeling to examine the vigorous garlic greens, I glanced up to see a fully articulated double rainbow that extended from horizon to horizon. This seemed like an auspicious sign, and I took it as support for accepting the new position. In retrospect, I realize that I might have interpreted it as a reason to stay put, but my interpretation in that moment was that it supported leaving. My subconscious mind may have seen the second band of rainbow as a message to step into this second administrative position. I made my decision to move forward, though I had no idea what lay ahead. I had had many experiences in both the academy and nonprofit worlds by that time, and thought I was prepared for a new challenge. A challenge it was.

The first few days on the job, three of the office staff announced their intention to quit and find other positions. I understood that this had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with what they had experienced in the recent past. The department had been in turmoil: a college dean had placed the unit in receivership before leaving the institution, which means that control over its affairs was placed in the hands of outsiders. There had been three chairpersons in two years, and to be fair, efforts had been made by these individuals to stabilize departmental conditions with new personnel policies and bylaws that defined how the department should function. A viability study had been conducted about the need for a ne...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• A — Administrator
• Epilogue
• Selected Resources
• Endnotes
• Colophon