If you have been following our posts over the last few weeks you know that we have begun a journey of helping you to become a better leader. We have covered personality testing to better understand yourself and more recently looked at 360 feedback.
Now the question becomes “what next”? What do we do with all the information we’ve collected to begin to help ourselves? In an excellent blog on https://viapeople.com/(2/17/14), Dr. Karen Caruso offers some valuable guidance in an article entitled, “Improve Your Leadership Skills Though 360 Feedback”. In this post I will summarize some of her advice and customize it more specifically for priests.
- Be Positive
It is quite common to be surprised by some aspect of the feedback received. It is important that you remember why you engaged in this exercise. This is the beginning of a journey. The feedback provided is an honest attempt by those you chose to help you grow and improve; it is not meant to hurt you.
- Be Open
It might be natural to be defensive or make excuses regarding information you perceive to be negative or challenging. DON’T DO THIS! Rather, ask yourself how you can learn from the feedback, not prove to yourself why they are wrong.
- Analyze the results
Look for themes and trends that occur across the different sources of information. Are there commonalities that arise? Do fellow priests and friends see you differently than parish staff or parishioners? Are there trends among the subsets of responders? This could point out how you act differently among different groups. Are your self-ratings significantly different than the broader group? Accept that some data may be an “outlier” but don’t use this as an excuse to disregard or discard negative feedback.
- Create a development plan
We will cover this in more detail in our next post but for now focus on 1-2 areas. Look at the more popular concerns and those which are most likely to be hindering your relationships or your ability as a leader/pastor.
- Don’t delay
Like most priests your schedule is most likely very busy. This makes it easy to procrastinate or lose focus as other priorities become more pressing. Recall how important this journey to becoming a better leader is for you and for your parish. Even small steps leading to “quick victories” will allow you to build upon your success and create momentum. Small wins will motivate a bigger effort.
- Don’t go it alone
Engage a coach or someone who can serve as an objective 3rd party. This is important because we can easily deceive ourselves in this process. We can believe we’ve made great change, but others must see this as well. Or we can be discouraged by our efforts while others start to see some positive results.
In our next post we will start to focus in more detail on how to start to create a development plan.