Senior Sage Leaders
As with Emerging Sages, those experiences that provide Senior Sages with most generative meaning and satisfaction are organizational achievement and success, assisting others, helping to improve the community, teamwork, and personal and professional growth. In addition, some Senior Sages identify giving recognition to others as being highly meaningful (a blending of Generativity Three and Four).
Achievements: Among the Generativity Four successes of Senior Sages are communicating the story about their organization’s achievements to the community, including fund raising objectives, implementing and tracking performance of a strategic plan against goals. Senior Sager leaders love to assist with and witness the operation of successful special events.
As we noted with regard to SCORE mentorships, the Senior leaders we interviewed find satisfaction in helping someone create a new business and then find an adequate location for its operation. Success comes through helping members of their community achieve significant artistic goals. They enjoy witnessing audience appreciation. Senior sage leaders like to fill downtown retail spaces, shift the governing board from being an advisory agency to a corporate entity. They find gratification in weathering a host of problems, and making a successful turn-around: And love telling stories about these achievements.
“What is most satisfying to me these days is sitting in a meeting and listening to others talk about the organization and reflecting on our accomplishments to date. And musing about all of the wonderful new things that are on the drawing board.”
“Helping to change the hospital’s image from being a county hospital to becoming a really first-class health care facility and being recognized as such throughout the service area is very satisfying. We still have to work hard at this, but we have made a lot of headway. The more I get involved in the hospital, the more I realize how fortunate we are to have the quality of physicians, staff, and health care that we do. One of the nice additions has been the new specialty called hospitalist—whereby a physician practices at the hospital rather than having his or her own private practice.
The fact that we fill our retail spaces is a validation of what we do. By far our biggest success is what we have been able to achieve with a lot of people chipping in – business owners, professional people, and businesses outside of the downtown.”
Assisting: The blended Generativity Two and Four experiences that come from Senior Sages assisting others include seeing the success of young people, being a co-founder of a homeless shelter, and mentoring:
“I get enormous satisfaction from watching kids at the Young Composers Concert and hearing feedback from audiences and donors about how important our organization is to their young lives.
Seeing the shelter open with people coming in and getting help, getting fed, getting sheltered during the terrible winter seasons, and having a welcome center open during the summer where they can get water, bug repellent, tents, or simply be taken care of if they’re sick—all of this has been greatly satisfying to me. Moving from labor-intensive, low-yield special events to authentic fund development for the organization has also been gratifying. I know how to do this now for any organization, and I almost feel I want to be a professional fundraiser.”
Generative women and men not only provide direct assistance (Generativity Two), but also broaden the scope of their generativity by seeing that other people are enacting Generativity Two activities.
