Finding the Satisfaction II: Tangible Results
Most emerging leaders are “extreme doers.” 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. It’s 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, one emerging sage identifies a different kind benefit. He talks about being a “translator” of the organization’s vision to the community and offers two examples: the educator who conveys her excitement about what happens in her classroom, the environmentalist who tells a compelling story about the still-wild Yuba River.
Finding the Satisfaction III: Generativity
Erik Erikson, the noted psychological theorist and researcher, wrote about two different stages of generativity. The first is primarily associated with the raising of children, and of seeing one’s own children progress through life. The second stage of generativity comes with witnessing and providing support for people with whom one is working—especially if this involves collaborating to achieve a shared vision. The real satisfaction in this second stage comes from seeing something worthwhile being achieved: nurturing an organization, protecting a river, parenting children in a classroom. It is this second stage of generativity that is pervasive and vivid in the stories shared by emerging sage leaders. These men and women bring something to life and nurture it in collaboration with other persons. They watch it blossom and benefit others. They are truly co-parents of a community-based vision.
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