There is a part of leadership that is close to The Fathers heart. It’s the part that I am going to describe as facilitating people to be fully at choice. When God made man and woman one fundamental decision he made was to give them a free will. This is such a fundamental thing as to how we are made and how our brain functions. God desires for each and every man, woman and child to have free will. Obviously this means having choice to accept him as God but it goes way beyond that as we were made to have choices about our lives, how we follow God, our relationships, how we steward our time, our strengths and our anointing.
When we lead, how good are we at ensuring that those we lead remain fully at choice?
Most of the leadership skills we operate in naturally and comfortably, involve us first studying something to gain knowledge and then becoming an expert. We then typically get recognized for the knowledge we have been able to accumulate. Our education system teaches this way. It gives us knowledge and tests our ability to be able to retain it and disseminate it appropriately. Consequently, when we lead people, our mode operando is to offer up this knowledge at any opportunity to give the person the benefit of our expertise and experience. So we tend to relate mostly to those we lead by showing up as ‘the expert’, fixing their problems and giving them what we know. It is not so common in our culture to develop leadership skills that help people to be able to fully explore their options and make good choices. Passing on knowledge is of course very helpful but could it be time for the emphasis on this type of leadership to shift?
75% of our children in school today will be doing jobs that do not yet exist. To lead our future generation it will serve them better to adopt a more facilitative approach to empower them to go forward into new areas which we have no idea about. Some of the best leadership we will be able to offer the generations after us, will be to help them figure out their best strengths and how to access their creativity to apply these strengths to a world that is, and will continue to change constantly at a fast pace. They will appreciate help from us to unpack and understand the desires of their hearts, which will help them to unlock the passion they need to take risks and create new things in a world which values creative self-expression. This new world has more opportunities for entrepreneurship than a previous generation’s long gone ‘safe job for life’ culture. The next generation will appreciate help on how to apply their unique personal core values to a world where moral boundaries are being stretched. Having confidence in who you are, in this type of world will be an even stronger necessity for leadership in the future. All this In a world where technology, space travel and so much more, will stretch imaginations and conventional interpretations of how to live out kingdom values.
I’m currently training a couple of dozen leaders on how to coach people. Getting right down to the fundamental building blocks of leadership coaching is interesting because it is all founded on ultimately giving the person you are coaching complete choice. It provides a different style of leadership that empowers and ignites creative thinking out of the box.
Kingdom leadership coaching provides the facilitative leadership toolkit that will equip the next generation of our leaders to fair well. This type of coaching helps to access hidden places in people’s hearts. Working with Holy Spirit it activates the person into all they were created to be. It frees them up to fully operate in their strengths, following their passions and living out what the father created them for.When we coach, we start by asking for the coachee’s agenda. We honour their agenda and bring coaching tools in that not only address this agenda but address their whole life bringing them back to choice in each area. The coaching toolkit opens up mindsets and expands opportunities by giving new perspectives. When we adopt this more facilitate approach to those we lead, we give them the opportunity to reach their fullest potential and not be restricted to our fullest potential. This is because we are allowing them to reach beyond our knowledge and expertise.
It’s such an incredible privilege to coach people and see them go on and achieve so much more than you could ever do. Learning to coach helps you to re-direct your strength into empowering and lifting the person up to a place you cannot see or imagine when you start, because it’s their unique hidden places of strength that you draw out. It’s a place without restrictions. You become their supporter, you champion them, and you help them grow into their skin without needing to tell them what it all should or could look like.
What would one of the best examples of a facilitative leadership style in history be? Jesus. He often answered questions with questions, he empowered those he healed and discipled to go minister and lead others into the kingdom. He released them to do this pretty much immediately after they got healed without insisting that they undertake years of healing or school. Did they fail? Yes! Despite this, most amazingly of all, after just 3 years he trusted them all to receive his Holy Spirit and then go and finish the job he had started.
How can you develop your facilitative leadership skills to bring those you lead fully back to choice and be fully empowered to live out their unique calling?