Context is Everything
This post is the sixth in a series around the C’s of leadership, featuring a different Leadership C with each new post. Whether you lead a corporation, a church, a department, a classroom, or a family, HOW you lead has enormous impact on those you lead.
As a preacher, I have discovered how essential context is. Words without context can be confusing, misleading or, even worse, wounding.
But there’s more to context than words. One definition of “context” is: “considered together with surrounding circumstances.” Several articles I found online discussed “space” as “context” from an architectural or ergonomic perspective. But, in my thinking, context and space can be interchangeable and go well beyond an appropriately sized desk (although that’s a huge deal for me because I’m so petite and feel like I spend half my life working with my elbows up to my ears!).
Leaders play a critical role in establishing context within an organization, in insuring that context is hospitable and there is A Place for Everyone. Leaders are called to bring everyone to the table; to consider “surrounding circumstances” from our individual and varied experiences and perspectives. Each work environment provides a context within which we explore our identity and our ideas… which can be incredibly helpful if we embrace this reality. Those we lead already have uniqueness to their identity. They already have ideas brewing within them. Will we, as leaders, encourage others to give of themselves to create A Place for Everyone: a creative, courageous, collaborative context?
In the last couple weeks, I’ve struggled with my “surrounding circumstances.” I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and waking up in the dark is a huge challenge for me… hardly motivational. Right now, I’m looking out my office window at a cloudy, dreary sky. My phone tells me it’s 39 degrees with a “feels like” temp of 31. Burr…
Yet metaphorically, our inward, spiritual, space/context can project outward to influence our shared context. We can lend light and warmth to a context, or darkness and coldness. My new position of Associate Director of Innovation, Engagement and Development is one in which I am called to collaboratively construct contexts of warmth and light that provide A Place for Everyone. It’s something our world and our denomination desperately need.
Join us this (Wednesday) evening at 6:30 for A Place for You Online. And, if you haven’t yet done so, join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aplaceforyouinumc/
The link to join A Place for You Online can be found at https://www.inumc.org/umc-a-place-for-you/ midway down the page on the right.
traceyleslie 