Dennis Shaw: Beyond the Hammer -- Expanding Your Leadership Toolkit

Music. In terms of a tool belt. I'm trying to help you put additional tools in your tool belt.

The part of the dilemma that I think goes on with some areas of management consulting is that they have a vested interest in a particular style of solution, particular solution to problems. And so for them, they are interested in putting a hammer hypothetically, in your tool belt. And that's great if every problem that you experience at local church is a nail. But the dilemma you have is that what happens when the problem is not a nail?

And frankly, for both laity and clergy, the problem often moves from being a carpentry problem to being a problem about electricity, literally and figuratively. Sometimes it's a plumbing issue. So you have to become sort of a jack-of-all-trades. You can't have only one type of tool, only one tool in your tool belt, and only one type of tool in your tool belt. Let me welcome you to Mindful Leader. This is Dennis Shaw, and I am the host of this podcast.

This podcast is scheduled for release on the 13th of January. I want to talk to you a little bit today about where we have been and mostly where we're going to be going with this particular podcast.

It probably doesn't surprise anybody for me to say that where we are now in 2025 is not quite where I was when I started this back in 2023, I thought it would be primarily about resource management and those kinds of things. And where we have moved, where we have migrated, where I have moved, where I have migrated has been more over to the idea of leadership in general.

Leadership in general at the local church. I get to a little bit of why I might be relevant to this in a second or two, but it's been about using my own personal experience, my own personal education to help you, the listener, be all you can be. That's my why. I want to help people with that. And my focus is on both laity and clergy. I'm hoping that we can provide you some tidbits here and there of things that you can use.

And I'm a person who really doesn't believe that a lot of things have a cookie-cutter approach. That the solution to something in hypothetically Colorado Springs will automatically work in hypothetically Salt Lake City. I just don't think that leadership works that way. There are things that I did in Colorado Springs, and when I tried them almost cookie-cutter style in Salt Lake City, I got a lot of pushback, whereas in Colorado Springs, I didn't.

It's just different people see things in different ways. I think of this in terms of a tool belt. I'm trying to help you put additional tools in your tool belt. The part of the dilemma that I think goes on with some areas of management consulting is that they have a vested interest in a particular style of solution, particular solution to problems. And so for them, they are interested in putting a hammer, hypothetically, in your tool belt.

And that's great if every problem that you experience with local church is a nail. But the dilemma you have is, is that what happens when the problem is not a nail? And frankly, frankly, for both laity and clergy, the problem often moves from being a carpentry problem to being a problem about electricity, literally and figuratively. Sometimes it's a plumbing issue. So you have to become sort of a jack of all trades. You can't have only one type of tool, only one tool in your tool belt and only

one type of tool in your tool belt. You have to have some idea. And sometimes the idea is knowing who to go to when you experience a bit of a challenge. But to return to my comment, I'm a big believer in the fact that there is not a cookie cutter approach to how you go about solving problems. So you may ask the question, all right, who the heck is Dennis Shaw? And why does he feel like he has a right to talk about the subject of leadership? Well, I was in the military for over 20 years.

And the military does a lot of trying to help people become better leaders. And I retired from the military. And I, at times, had a number of people working for me that I was expected to lead. And many of them still correspond back to me, letting me know that that leadership time that I was with them was effective for them. And they remember it quite fondly.

I was a leader in the local church. I had two congregations where I was the solo pastor, lead pastor, and that was in Colorado Springs and in Salt Lake City. And so I have experience there. I've had multiple courses in leadership in the military and in the pastorate. And I have a doctor of ministry in church leadership from the Wesley Theological Seminary, where I graduated with that in 2012. So I can say that there are certain things that I have done experientially.

There are certain things I've done academically.

But a lot of it is what I've learned about leadership is done by watching and listening, watching and listening. That having been said, I want to present to you an idea of humility. And some people who know me may find that a little surprising, but I really would like to offer the idea of leadership as humility because the longer I'm at this business of leadership, the more I discover I don't know. There's a number of quotes that I've got here. They're all variants on the same

theme. Voltaire, the French philosopher, once said, the more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am, I know nothing. Plato once made a very similar remark, and he said, I'm the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is, I know nothing. Socrates made a similar observation, and there's a derivation of it that I read in a different book, which was, if everything I know is only, if everything I know is from what I have read, then I know nothing.

In other words, he's saying that I have to learn the world a little bit from experience, experientially. Paul says in his first letter to the church in Corinth, in what we call chapter 8, verse 2, he wouldn't recognize that terminology, but it says, if anyone imagines that they know something, They do not yet know what as they ought to know. So he's saying, and I find that fascinating, Paul would say that because there's times I have the impression that Paul's a bit of a know-it-all.

Jesus will tell us in Matthew chapter 18, verse 3, Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, I could read that to mean not all-knowing, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. So what's my personal bottom line with this? Humility. I'd like to believe that we should all approach leadership with humility. Now, I want to return a little bit to what we did last year. An awful lot of my guests were clergy. An awful lot of my guests were Mountain Sky Conference.

A lot of my guests, therefore, were United Methodist. Well, I'm hoping that in 2025, I have more lay people. Last week's broadcast on 6 January was a lay person. I have some other lay people lined up. They're going to help me talk, help me with this. So I do hope to have more lay people talk.

There will be some that will continue to go back to Mountain Sky, but I'm hoping to get out into a larger footprint and talk to others. And there's times that I'll talk to non-Methodists, and I believe all of that is going to be helpful to making the broadcast, making the podcast, be of use to multiple categories and types of people.

I am aware of the fact that by virtue of being a methodist there's going to be times that i have some inside baseball type of conversations it'll probably be around the term of methodism and what methodism looks like smells like acts like in the leadership seminary seminar i we may occasionally screw up and say words like spr which if you're a presbyterian or episcopalian or a baptist you may listen to that say what the heck is that and i'll do the best i can that when we say something

like spr i will stop the person i'll say staff parish relations and that's the human resources committee at the local church. There's going to be sometimes, though, we'll have inside baseball conversations that are about the Mountain Sky Conference and inside baseball conversations about the United Methodist Church. I expect to have an inside baseball conversation about the Mountain Sky Conference in a few weeks.

I can only say that I hope that the conversation we have might be applicable to other conferences, to other denominations, as they have wrestled with issues that are similar as what the United Methodist Church is dealing. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. It's primarily how I get a lot of my news. An analogy I sometimes use is that you can take a stone and go out to the end of a pier, and you can toss the stone so it skips across the water.

Or you can take the stone and walk out and just drop the stone and goes deep into the water. The evening news, if you watch it on NBC, CBS, ABC, that kind of thing, that's the stone skipping across the water. For me, a lot of the podcasts are the stone is being dropped into the water, goes deep, and that's the way I get a lot of my news.

To me, the term when I talk about mindfulness, about being a mindful leader, for me, the take is about trying to focus a little bit on self-awareness. Humility goes hand in glove with self-awareness. But it's his willingness to be able to listen, truly listen in order to understand. One of the great quotes I've been given, and I've used it multiple times on multiple sermons, multiple conversations, is that so often we listen in order to reply rather than to truly understand.

Mindfulness is about listening. It is about listening and seeing, hmm, how might that apply to me? What might be being said here that I could modify or I could adapt locally at my own site? For the last almost two years, I've been doing these podcasts two times a month. That was my goal, two times a month. I'm now here in 2025 going to move to weekly.

And i'm going to do that in part by occasionally bringing in a guest most of the time bringing in a guest as i have been in the past and we're going to try to talk about some topic that's relevant there may come times when a guest comes on and they interview me about a particular topic i've got something lined up on that we're going to go look at call but just because we're going to look call doesn't mean we're going to stop there.

We're also going to look at trust and some other things related to that. And it'll be biblical, theological. And we're going to, at times, just play, we'll go with what's going on in my denomination, the Methodist Church. We may, at times, go with what's going on in my particular conference, which is the mountain sky. I'm going to avoid, I'm not going to focus solely on Methodism or mountain sky, but I will come back to those occasionally.

And I'll try to, so that it's not all totally inside baseball, I'll try to make it in such a way, that you could listen and still get a lot out of it.

One of the things that I want to do is to make these podcasts a little shorter. Now, no one has sent me a note and complained and said, oh my gosh, they're too long, they're too long, they're too long. I personally, when I get a long podcast of an hour, hour and 10 minutes, hour and 20 minutes, I'll listen while I'm on the elliptical trainer at the gym.

And I'll stop when I get to a certain point on the training and I need to stop and go do something else, I stop and I listen to another 15 minutes in the car on the way home. You get the idea. I don't necessarily listen to it all the way through in one fell swoop. But I think for a little while, I'd like to get myself down to where they're a little more disciplined, they're a little shorter.

I'm thinking 30 minutes or less. And if I talk to a guest, it's going to be clear that we need to talk longer than 30 minutes. I'm probably going to do this as part one and part two. So I just throw that out there. I will, when I have the podcast ready and available, I will put it on Podbean so it can be listened to by you. Now, some people have registered with Podbean so that they are made aware when a podcast has been dropped and it's ready to go.

If you want to send me an email and say, Dennis, please send me an email when Mindful Leader is released or send me a text. And you can ask for me to send you a text, send you the Mindful Leader link through the text. My phone number is 801-889-7013, 801-889-7013, and I will put both my email and my text, how you get to reach me on a text, in the show notes. But anyway, as I said, you can also subscribe through Podbean, and they will let you know.

As I learn more about the various platforms, I will do the best that I can to let you know potentially how you might be able to use them. I personally use Overcast. Why do I use Overcast? A good friend of mine, I asked her, what's the best platform you can use? And she said, without any hesitation, Overcast. And I use it and have liked it so far. If you were to ask me why I prefer it, I prefer it because somebody told me and I've gotten used to it.

Apple, one of the advantages of Apple is that they give you a transcript. And you can get that transcript and look at it. And again, don't do this while driving, but you can also follow the transcript. This one is, it's like a file and you have to sort of do the cursoring down yourself.

But it's it's quite good there's all kinds of little options as to how you go about doing this i talk sometimes about the show notes on overcast you get there by hitting the i for information it tells you some of what's going on a pod bean there's three dots there's three dots over the right hand side and you hit that and bang it pops up you can see you can see the words that i have written about the show.

If you go to the Podbean webpage, it's there along with a picture of the person who is my guest. If you use Spotify, and I haven't been using Spotify, but I may start doing it because it's pretty powerful, but the options just automatically show up there for you. I'm going to occasionally try to get into a thing where I let you know what is going on with my own podcast world of listening to the podcast. And I have recently, was recently given a book by a British author named Tom Holland.

And I liked it so much that I did a little Google search on Tom Holland and found out he had a podcast. It's called The Rest is History. I'll put the link to it in the show notes. And he does it with a guy named Dominic Sandbrook. And it's great. It's absolutely great. Now, they do a lot of huckstering trying to get you to send them money for getting the podcast early. I haven't sent them any money, but it's excellent.

They're a little irreverent at times, but it was so funny. One day, I listened to a podcast about the French Revolution and about Marie Antoinette and their interpretation of the real Marie Antoinette. And it's not necessarily the Marie Antoinette you might have learned in ninth grade history.

Well, lo and behold, about a week later, I was listening to a different podcast, and there was these people on there that were talking, and somehow the subject of Marie Antoinette came up, and none of these four people used the words, I heard this on The Rest is History, but they had this little contest to see who could be the smartest and could show off their knowledge of Marie Antoinette the best.

And every one of them had a little vignette, a little story from The Rest is History. It's the most popular podcast in the world for historians. And it's just, it's been a delight. So I'm going to wrap up now. I'm going to hopefully have a broadcast early later this week. I'll drop a little early and then I'll use Facebook, Twitter, various social platforms, plus the Mountain Sky clergy page to share this particular podcast and other podcasts. But here's my final request to you.

If I say something during a podcast that you think might be relevant at your local church, don't hesitate to forward the podcast to that person. If you're a lay person and you think your pastor needs to hear it, forward it to them.

If you're a clergy person and you listen to something, you think that your director of your trustees, your senior trustee needs to hear it, or the chairman of your staff parish relations committee, your SPR, your human resources committee needs to potentially hear it, don't hesitate to forward that to them. Let them know about it. I want to build up a listening base and get to a place where people regularly listen. Right now it's free. It's a labor of love. It's my ministry. It's what I'm doing.

I just ask you to share, and I'll put that in every week's podcast as well. So thank you today for having listened to this, what we're going to be trying to do for 2025. And next week, we will have a guest, and hopefully you'll get something that'll help you be all that you can be. Thank you very much for being here with us. This is Dennis Shaw. You have been listening to Mindful Leader. God bless you. Music.