Thursday, June 5, 2014

Leadership in Capuchin Fraternities

The reflections are based on the various talks and discussions that took place during CRI priests section meeting held in Kerala from 17-19th Feb 2010.
1.     Be a little more attentive to a person of another social, cultural and linguistic group.
2.     Be careful to the emergence of sub-grouping according to age and experience. Rather than holding them in suspicion, integrate them into the community in a healthy manner.
3.     Try to learn a little more about the background of the difference members of your community. Show interest in news from their homes, their areas of origin, their areas of interest.
4.     Be willing to listen especially when the other person is angry. Be less eager to defend yourself that to understand the real cause of the trouble. Sift out true wisdom from a lot of emotion-charged words. Sympathetic listening alone can have a healing power.
5.     Don’t give answers or propose solutions too fast. There are no ready-made solutions to problems. More often people need you, your genuine sympathy, and your non-critical attention that your solutions. Pay attention as much to them, their mood and feelings as to what they say. They themselves will suggest solutions.
6.     If someone else can deal with a person better that you, seek help. We are all limited begins. It is good to seek completion in the assistance that others can offer. Learn to combine members of your community together in such a way that one acts as a stimulus not a block, to the other’s genius.
7.     Do you want to be respected? Respect others. Do you want to be important to others? Make sure that others are important to you. Do you want others to make of you a success, lead others to success?
8.     No matter how many wonderful things you have done, how many miracles you have worked...for that reason alone you are not important to people. Or even if your important in that sense, your importance is irrelevant to them. But this moment you consider them as important to you, you become important to them, then only, and then alone, do all your achievements, ideas and ideals become relevant to their world and important in their understanding.
9.     Respect the autonomy of your subjects in their own areas of competence. Consult them and value their advice.
10.  Remember; persons are more important than rules; values are more important than their external expressions. The letter kills, the spirit gives life. It is more purposeful to win over persons that to force external conformity. This method may prove slower in yielding fruits, but the results will be lasting.
11.  Never adopt undignified ways in exercising authority, like getting information about someone else in devious ways, showing excessive eagerness to know what someone wants to keep secret. The information that we can gather with dignity and due respect to everyone is sufficient to guide a community.  We need not hunt out information about others.
12.  Never be jealous of your subordinates. The greater they are, the greater you will. Rejoice in their success and popularity. They will in turn make you successful and popular as well.
13.  When an individual member is handling a work different from what the rest of the community is engaged in, it is possible that he becomes isolated and is even misunderstood. Interpret and explain his work to the rest of the community.
14.  It is the superior who gives a public face to the community. What you are as a superior is what people will gradually come to think your institution is. If you are cold, unapproachable, lost in your self-importance, petty-minded, insensitive, calculating, the image of the entire community suffers as a consequences.

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