The Leader's Calling: Born to be Recognized

Michael H. Shenkman President, Keystone International, Inc., Strategic Development Group

By Michael H. Shenkman

We have often heard how leading is a calling. That means certain people step into the role, accept it and build their lives around the challenge, demands and joys of leading. But ask anyone who leads and they’ll tell you that the call doesn’t come through a bullhorn, blaring a message that others are anxiously awaiting your leadership. And once one has “answered the call,” the journey has just begun. For, as with any high-level, complex skill, the called leader must then develop those skills.

The call is subtle, usually starting with a nagging dissatisfaction with the status quo. The potential leader detects something isn’t right and wants to take responsibility for making things better. What’s more, this potential leader envisions something so large that it requires the collaboration of many people to accomplish it.

What can tune a person in to the call to leading? Every leader I work with cites the fact that someone else took notice of his/her longing, identifying it as the kind of longing that leaders have. “She saw something in me I didn’t realize I had” is a common recollection. And having recognized the calling to leadership, the mentor nurtured the prospective leader on that path, taking care to get the prospect’s “skills of character” —self-awareness, people skills, practical insight, and drive—in balance, then melding such concerns and skills into a state of resolve and acceptance. The leader energy that was welling up invariably then strikes a heart and mind ready to take action.

Heeding the call to leading, unlike calls to art or prophecy, is a rare human event that happens only in the context of significant relationships. The call can be missed because of its subtlety or understated quality, but mostly it can be missed because leaders need to be recognized. Alone, most of us wouldn’t know what that static we are hearing is all about. That first recognition is crucial, a mentor often the one to dampen the noise so the potential leader gets the message.

The call itself may be welcomed, feared, even refused. But with a mentor’s help, it can produce a strong signal capable of translation into a critical decision: to lead or not.

The next step, developing skills demanded of the leader’s calling, is more like a journey that defines a lifetime. Leader skills are thought to comprise such actions as speaking well, working well with people, driving others to get the job done. But these are only the affects of the deeper skills leaders need to cultivate. A leader’s calling is not just about having requisite skills for executing tasks but pertain to how a leader feels about the way the world needs to be. The call first stirs and evokes the leader’s values. Next it wants those values to be congealed into a vision. Finally, it wants the leader to inspire collaborative action through an organization.

The journey of answering the leader’s call begins with a need for self-awareness and self-trust, the leader coming to an understanding of how his/her life has led to this point, to this need to lead others in an action to realize a vision. With calm deliberateness and determination, the leader then guides followers through the experience of bringing to fruition what was once only a vision. Self-trust is the realization on the part of the leader that no matter how arduous and difficult the task, leading defines the life he/she was meant to have.

Again, it often takes a mentor to help a leader realize the demands of the calling for, without help and recognition, few would think themselves capable of having or realizing a vision. But a mentor challenges the leader, prodding him/her to the heart of the calling, helping to marshal the courage, energy and self-trust needed to meet the call’s demanding dimensions.

The call to leading is an invitation to see life from the perspective of the excitement and aspiration the vision ignites– for the leader, for followers and for those touched by the endeavor. It comes to few, and it needs a mentor, a far-sighted and wise companion, to be fully heard, answered and heeded.

Michael Shenkman, Ph.D., is founder and president of the Arch of Leadership (www.archofleadership.com), a leader mentoring company. This article was adapted from his new book, The Arch and The Path, the Life of Leading Greatly (Sandia Heights Media, 2005).