Most Emerging Sages are “extreme doers” who seek to produce tangible results. They are impatient with talk, and at the end of the day want to feel a sense of accomplishment. They need to be achieving something all the time, and their civic engagements enable them to meet this need while benefiting other persons. For many of the Emerging Sages, the greatest reward comes from immediately being able to witness the outcomes of their civic involvement; it’s about getting to an end result from a passionately held idea—as in the case of Generativity Two, when men and women can directly witness the impact on their children or the benefits arising from their projects. Generativity Four is often about identifying a community problem and organizing people to solve it. While many Emerging Sage leaders say they derive satisfaction from translating an organization’s vision into tangible results, another identifies a different kind benefit; he talks about being a “translator” of the organization’s vision to the community.
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).
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, running successful special events, creating a new business and then finding an adequate location for its operation, achieving significant artistic quality and audience appreciation, filling downtown retail spaces, shifting the governing board from being an advisory agency to a corporate entity, weathering a host of problems, and making a successful turn-around:
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