A few thoughts from a very enriching “Experience”.
A three day workshop – no “An Experience” – was offered to the priests and religious of the Southern African region by the LCCLSA. (Leadership Conference of Consecrated Life of Southern Africa) The Facilitator was Rev. Fr. Hugh Lagan S.M.A. PsyD, a Clinical Psychologist from Ireland who arrived to work in South Africa almost two years ago. His passion and ministry are directed towards Formation, both initial and on-going in the Church and as a Missionary of Africa, he is here in our midst to enhance our opportunities for formation in the Christian way of life. Four of us Mercy Sisters joined the other fifty-four participants to rediscover the gift of religious life today.
Participants were from different congregations and from different Southern African countries
The agenda was to explore the strengths and challenges of working in leadership teams and to explore effective strategies for managing difficult persons.
According to Father Hugh Lagan everyone is a leader, either in a formal or informal role; the way to evangelize others is to teach Christ to oneself; transformation is the purpose of religious life; the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers; difficult persons? Don’t rule yourself out! He emphasized that this was an ‘experience’ not a workshop.
‘Living into your Promises’ was the re-echoing refrain which rang throughout the three days and under-girded every concept.
Time to reflect on the banks of the Vaal River
Video clips, taken in the last three years and showing several women’s religious communities with large numbers of young members, aroused a plethora of feelings among the participants, many of whom were 60 plus years old and have been living through a dearth of ‘new vocations’ for years; joy, hope, envy, sadness and cynicism, though not voiced, were palpable in the room. The challenge was to ‘Live into your promises’ which would imply ‘getting out of the comfort zones’. The question is: Are we, as congregations, ready ‘to welcome the stranger’ (Matt. 25:40) those with different values, world views, ideas, customs, or are we looking for ‘people like us’? We were introduced to the word ‘gerontocracy’ meaning the majority of membership use their vote to secure the status quo.
We agreed that, traditionally, we had looked to our finest intellects when searching for persons to take up leadership among us. A three-day experience later, we believe that emotional superiority may be even more important; certainly a combination of both would be ideal. Self-knowledge and self-worth leading to appreciation of the other and the ability to find the value in the other are basic. Relationship is the key to healthy leadership. A high emotional quotient would prove invaluable in social and emotional conflict situations, when handling sensitive issues with persons, as well as enabling leaders to understand, interpret, and deal with their own feelings.
Time for sharing thoughts and experiences
Father Hugh spoke with great empathy of those leaders who were emotionally depleted, exhausted and devalued during or after their terms of office. He said many people who claimed to be exhausted, were in fact ‘wounded’ during their leadership by the very people who had elected them and thus, should have been their support system. The ancient adage: ‘Do unto others as you would have done to yourself’ was replaced with: ‘Do unto others as they would like to have done unto them!!’
Four Styles of leadership, The Driver, The Analyst, The Expressive and The Amiable were introduced through a very apt video clip by Robin Scharma. Having answered and scored a particular test around emotional quotient, each participant was able to begin to identify her/his own particular style with its strengths and blind spots. This was a challenging exercise, many finding that they identified closely with either the strengths or blind spots of a particular style but then the opposite side of the coin did not seem to match up! As with everything during the ‘Experience’, there was no feed-back; all was simply and graciously offered as a resource for personal reflection for anyone who wished to avail of it.
‘The Little Prince’ said that what made the desert beautiful was that somewhere, a well lies hidden in it, (The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry) and Father Lagan said that the beauty of the difficult person lies in the fact that s/he has potential beyond the problematic behaviour. It’s important to see the ‘behaviour’, not the person, as the problem. He said that ‘difficult people’ are often merely symptoms of organic break-down. Also, he stressed the importance of distinguishing between the distressed minister and the impaired minister.
Listening
Words of wisdom in this area included:
Walk into a conversation, don’t jump in! Make sure I am ready for the conversation.
Don’t kitchen-sink! Stick with the one issue.
If you have a hammer, then everything is a nail!
Remember there must be one adult in the room (not two adolescents) for conversation to take place. (You can be the adult!)
Never try to teach a cat to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the cat!
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. (Plato)
It is not possible to do justice to Fr. Lagan’s expert description of some types of difficult persons one might meet up with nor of his suggestions as to how to approach them. But certainly words such as empathy, sensitivity, understanding, compassion stay with me. Genuine listening would be another key-word. However, there was no sense that one should allow oneself to be bullied by or become subservient to the other, possibly very needy person.
The Experience’ ended on the note on which it had begun and that was “Living into your Promises.” The most important question to ask oneself is not: “Why did I come?” but, “Why have I stayed?”
Goretti Rule rsm
South African Province
