Mentoring Potential Leaders
Mentoring has been defined as a process of an integrated approach to advising, coaching, and nurturing others with a focus on creating a viable relationship to enhance an individual’s personal growth and development.
The following factors can help to determine whether a person has the potential for leadership training:
* Hard working
* Steps up to leadership opportunities
* Has integrity
* Respects others
* Admits mistakes
* Seeks out and welcomes feedback
* Passion for results
* Capacity to create or catch vision
* Enthusiastic and positive
* Willing to take responsibility
* Peer respect
* Ability to listen to others
* Willing to take risks
* Self confidence
* Aware of own strengths and weaknesses
* Commits to reaching goals
* Has a desire and ability to learn
* Is effective in managing money
* Communicates well
* Thinks creatively
* Operates with a healthy work ethic
Mentoring involves a relationship in which one person helps develop and empower another.
Having mature persons investing in one’s life will pay huge dividends in a person’s development. Emerging leaders have a lot to learn from seasoned veterans. It is important to take the initiative to build long lasting relationships with those that can impart wisdom, knowledge, and experience into one’s life.
Through effective mentoring, potential leaders can achieve their highest potential, just as a coach can help an athlete achieve success. Leaders at every level need to enhance their natural talent with practice.
Providing a mentoring opportunity to others will allow their development to be accelerated. This investment is beneficial for the individual as well as for the organization. The vast majority of leaders find that mentoring potential leaders is one of the most rewarding of all their responsibilities.
Mentoring is a gratifying means by which mentors can pass on the rich lessons they have learned throughout their leadership tenure.
Leadership that lacks integrity, ethics, and character has become a common occurrence. However, there are people with the necessary character and skills who need to invest their capacity in others.
All potential leaders benefit from role models they can respect and emulate. Quite often, people identify role models based on shared outlook and connections to similar experiences. However, mentors who are different in race, gender, or other characteristics, have a vital role to play in mentoring.
Individuals with a mentor advance further and faster and experience fewer adjustment problems than those without mentors.
Mentoring is a process
Mentoring is not an overnight occurrence. It is a process that takes time to mature. This is largely due to the fact that a major aspect of effective mentoring is relationship building which takes time and effort.
Mentoring is a structured process. There is specific information, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that need to be transferred to the potential leader. Mentoring is a process balanced on relationship and structure.
Mentoring is a two-way process
Mentoring requires that both the mentor and trainee commit to the mentoring process. The process is not one-sided.
Potential leaders need to make the effort to learn from their mentors and the mentor needs to be willing to provide the necessary information needed.
The foundation of mentoring is leadership
No mentoring process can be effective without some form of leadership as its origin. Leadership is the driving force behind human activity and is therefore the driving force behind mentoring.
The mentor can only transfer what he or she possesses
This is a critical principle. The mentor can only transfer the skills and knowledge that he or she has. It is essential to grasp the reality that people generally go only as far as their mentor leads or allows them to go. A mentor cannot take a person where they have not been themselves.
Growing as a leader
Leading well, however, is a great challenge. Becoming a leader is not a destination, but a journey of learning. Leading well requires learning well.
Fundamental to leading and growth is a commitment to a lifelong journey of learning.
Being given a challenging job is the single most important motivation for the teachable leader to learn and grow into the next level of leadership competence. Nothing in leadership development is more powerful than connecting real-life situations that demand strategic solutions.
Growing as a leader is a long journey of learning within the realities of a lifetime of experiences. The journey requires building a blend of qualities, characteristics, and competencies that will serve them well.
Mentoring Christian leaders
Hebrews 13:17 - Obey those who rule over you, and be submissive, for they watch out for your souls, as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you.
Ephesians 4:11-16 - And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head – Christ - from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.
One of the strongest desires all potential leaders express is to obtain more effective mentoring. Good mentoring helps potential leaders learn more successfully and this should be a core value of the church. The church needs to identify, pursue, and encourage strategies that enhance success and diversity in all facets of development.
A Christian leader is called by God and is called to serve. This is one who serves by leading. The vast majority of people are followers.
Those who have been anointed and called to lead are most valuable to the body of believers, especially if they are willing to follow their call and do that which followers so desperately need.
The most common design is for a church to expect leadership from their senior pastor. They may try to provide it, but most pastors are, by their own reckoning, trained and gifted as teachers and preachers. They try to lead by using their teaching and preaching gifts and abilities.
If the pastor fails as a leader, the church becomes disgruntled and havoc results.
The need to raise up transforming leaders is matched by the opportunity. God in His sovereignty has always raised up leaders for His people.
God is already raising up young men and women of vision throughout the world. These emerging leaders are eager to follow the call of Christ. The big question is whether those who are in senior leadership positions will have the vision to nurture them.
If the goal is to help young leaders lead more like Jesus, leadership development must emphasize both character and competency.
Today, leaders must realize that change is coming faster than ever before and the future will not be what they expect. The rate of change is faster today than it was in the past.
God places individuals in local churches so that they can submit to their leaders and learn from them. Spiritual development seldom takes place outside the institution of the church.
Elisha was not only Elijah’s spiritual apprentice, but he was the only one who caught a double portion of his anointing.
Elijah made three attempts to separate himself from Elisha, but Elisha remained obstinately close to him and followed Elijah wherever he went. These actions must have hurt Elisha, but he never took offense and never became angry.
Too many church members are easily offended with leaders who limit their opportunity for personal growth and development. They leave the church when they feel unnoticed or overlooked.
Believers should prayerfully consider which church God wants them to submit to and they should then make a long term commitment to the church and its leadership so that they can be equipped and mentored for God’s future plan for their lives.
Doing so is a part of being in submission to God. People who cannot submit to earthly leaders may discover that they are unable to submit to God.
Believers should have an attitude of respect and be willing to follow their leaders. Following should be active and not passive. It is advisable to seek out leadership by submitting to them and being mentored by them.
Christian leaders are more successful when they know they are in God’s will and they are able to be more effective because of God’s power enabling them in their purpose.
Without a foundation of inner character that is centered on Jesus Christ and formed by Biblical truth and the work of God’s Spirit, everything else a leader learns and does, will be of little lasting value.
A Christian leader is a person of Christ-like character. Because the central function of a leader is to enable people to know, love, and serve God with their entire hearts, mind, soul, and strength, the leader must possess the kind of personal attributes that reflect the nature of God.
Signs of a good leader
The following signs indicate that a person has likely been called to be a Christian leader.
1. They know they are called
They will feel the call of God in their lives and will sense a divine selection for the task and will have an inner conviction that God wants them to lead people for Him.
2. They seek God
True Christian leaders will spend time fasting and praying in order to be assured of the vision and strategy God wants them to implement.
3. They will be eager to lead
True Christian leaders are eager to lead because they simply cannot help it and because it is who they are. The urge to serve as a leader is undeniable.
4. They think differently
Leaders are people of vision and are focused on the future. They think about the long-term implications of today’s opportunities and choices.
They are mindful of the big picture and are not satisfied with focusing only on the micro-level events of the day.
They are excited by change and want to shape it. They work hard, work smart, and are strategic thinkers.
5. They are fruitful
A true Christian leader is one whose life bears the fruit of effective leadership. The call of God manifests by a tangible evidence of a special gift to lead.
6. They associate with other leaders
People are most comfortable around others who are like themselves. Being in the presence of other leaders defines the comfort zone of one called to lead.
7. They are courageous
Few people have the internal strength to stand up for what is right. This is called courage.
God’s leaders are always people of great courage and are not intimidated by people who oppose them or work against their vision.
8. They never give up
Leading people is very challenging and leaders can become unmotivated and discouraged.
God’s leaders endure an incredible amount of heartache, controversy, and animosity.
Christian leaders who are likely to fail:
* Satisfied with doing the bare minimum but demand maximum benefit
* Settle for mediocrity and under-achieving
* Thrown around by the wind with no aim and purpose in life
* Self-centered and largely motivated by status and prestige
* Focus on their own security and do not bother about the needs of those around them
* Do not pray and spend time in personal devotions
* Are not connected to a local church
Fulfilling God’s will
God uses people who desire to do His will. Potential Christian leaders must want to do God’s will more than anything else if they are to be used effectively by Him.
Everyone is born with a divine purpose but it is not automatic. A person must choose to cooperate with God’s purpose for their life or else the opportunity could be missed.
Younger Christians need models of relative spiritual maturity. If they want to grow spiritually, they will profit immensely from being able to rub shoulders with people who have Godly character and who have built a lifestyle centered on serving the Lord.
