Followed By Mercy

Navigating the Perils and Potentials of Leadership Mentorship

• W. Austin Gardner • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Venture with us into the intricate labyrinth of mentorship in leadership, where the stakes are as high as the rewards. Uncover the hazards lurking in the shadows, such as burnout from an unbalanced mentor-mentee exchange and the treacherous missteps when false knowledge is imparted. As I, your host, guide you through this episode, we'll confront the truth that leaders are not merely born; they're painstakingly sculpted through relentless pursuit of wisdom and the right guidance. Our journey will reveal how a mentor's role is akin to that of a compass, pointing the way rather than dictating the path, allowing for the empowering discovery of personal insights and solutions.

Prepare to be challenged and inspired as we scrutinize the art of crafting effective mentor-mentee connections, anchored in the bedrock of clear goals, robust communication, and unwavering accountability. The episode unfolds the concept of knowledge as a wave, cascading from one mind to the next, with the power to initiate a global transformation. The dialogue also honors the natural evolution of mentees branching out on their own, a testament to the mentorship's success, and the obstacles faced in maintaining a laser-focused vision on proliferating the gospel and broadening church outreach. Your participation in this conversation is not just for personal enlightenment; it's a call to action, urging you to become an integral part of a movement with eternal implications.

Thanks for listening. Find us on YouTube, Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

W. Austin Gardner:

Welcome back to the World Evangelism Podcast. It's another special edition. I'm talking to you about mentoring, which is something very dear to my heart. I've tried to go through different stages of it, just kind of taking our time working our way through what it means to mentor. We've talked about what it is and we've talked about how to prepare for it. We've talked about some of the things that might make you hesitate and not think that you could or should or can be a mentor.

W. Austin Gardner:

Today I come to the most dangerous part of all. I want to talk to you about the dangers of mentoring. I want you to know that, in blunt honesty, being a mentor is quite dangerous. It's risky, it's a step out there, and so people will want to enter into a mentor relationship with you. But you don't know why and, to be honest, as I talk to you, I may not know why you want to enter in to a mentoring relationship.

W. Austin Gardner:

Jp Morgan famously said a man always has two reasons for doing anything a good reason and the real reason. A good reason and the real reason. And so why are you wanting to mentor? I hope it is because you believe that it's what 2 Timothy 2 tells you to do. Take that that you've heard from the Bible and men of God among many faithful witnesses and to find other faithful men that you can commit it to, that they would be able to teach others, and so we can continue getting the gospel message to the world. Too many are unique. They have learned how to do ministry in a very special way. They can write books, they can preach sermons, they can build churches, but they can't train anyone else. They're not imitatable. They're just too big for that, and so I want to challenge you to be a mentor, and, as you think about being a mentee, by the way, all of us should always be involved in mentoring and being mentored. None of us have ever reached the place where we know everything, and I hope we continue growing all of our lives. Now, as we talk about mentoring and we talk about the ministry, I love this quote.

W. Austin Gardner:

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born, that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That's nonsense. In fact, the opposite is true Leaders are made rather than born. That's Warren Bennis who made that comment. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I know that far more than you would ever dream. You were meant to lead and you can lead and you are already leading. I think it's a fair statement to say that all of can lead and you are already leading. I think it's a fair statement to say that all of us are leaders to some degree or other. We lead ourselves and we lead our families, and we lead our loved ones and we lead our very best friends. So we're leaders in our own right.

W. Austin Gardner:

But can I name some dangers for you? Let's just chew the fat just a little while. Let's just talk about it. You see, one is what is often referred to as being burnt out. Burning out, the mentor becomes depleted. People are asking so much and they want to learn so much, and you give and you give and you give until your effectiveness diminishes because you're doing so much giving. Now I want to stop right there and say that you want a mentor-mentee relationship where they want it so much that they are nearly just almost sucking the life out of you, and that's why you need a mentor. That's why you need to always be learning to teach others. So I'm listening to Paul my name's Timothy I'm listening to Paul learning from Paul, and I'm teaching others that are teaching others. It's a chain and even after you may say I don't have.

W. Austin Gardner:

You know, the great leader John Maxwell is always quoting people he's learning from. He is undisputably the greatest leadership expert on the planet today Written more books, spoken to more people about leadership, and yet he's always learning. So you've got to stretch yourself, you've got to have a mentor. Got to stretch yourself, you got to have a mentor. You can get mentors by the people you surround yourself with, the books you read, the places you go, the podcasts you listen to. But you can never quit growing because you've always got to be knowing so you can keep giving. There's no real living without giving and no growing without knowing, and so you're going to have to work hard at that. Don't be burnt out, don't let it burn you out.

W. Austin Gardner:

Now let me just say a word to the mentee, but also to the mentor, and that is Bernard Shaw made the comment beware of false knowledge, it's more dangerous than ignorance. And boy isn't that true. So often when you're helping a guy, he has to unlearn. He has to unlearn before he can learn. It's amazing. I've been dealing with missionaries for a long time, and when they're brand new, starting deputation, they don't know anything and they're begging for help. But once they get a little support and people start looking up to them, they begin to get a really high and mighty feeling. And now it's time to learn the language. And they just don't had one man look at me and say that culture shock was for carnal Christians and he would never deal with it. And then I saw him run off up the hill, sit under a tree and cry like a baby. I saw another one throw his book at the teacher language school book at the teacher. In other words, knowing too much can be dangerous. You want to keep a learner's attitude. You want to not be caught up in knowing too much.

W. Austin Gardner:

Great mentors are often overwhelmed by the demand of their mentees. It seems like they never can match the need and I'd just like to say to you you're only there as a guide, you're not the big teacher. That's the Holy Spirit's job, that's the Word of God, and you don't need to have all the answers, but you need to know how to find the answers. And you don't have to know everything, but you ought to be able to point them to someone that can help them. Other people, the Bible, whatever needs to be done to help them learn and remember this they ought to aim as high as they possibly can. They ought to have the greatest amount of dreams possible.

W. Austin Gardner:

Michelangelo said the greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it's too low and we reach it. So help them reach for the stars to accomplish all that God would have them, to Help them dream of very big things that God might use them to do. Now then another danger you know we've got the danger of burning out. We've got the danger of being overcommitted. I am currently mentoring several young men in different countries than Latin America, and I have to put a cap on it because I know I can only take so much giving without some time to refresh and recuperate and be ready for the next time. Between the Society of Mentors and doing this podcast and then working right now with about nine different people. That's pretty well going to keep me hopping, I feel like.

W. Austin Gardner:

But another danger is the poor match, and that is that we're not matched up together. There's ineffective communication and the relationship is challenged because we're not matched up together. There's ineffective communication and the relationship is challenged because we're just not the kind of people that really want to work together. Maybe our personalities don't gel, maybe you are threatened by the mentee's reluctance or the way they act like or don't act like they're listening.

W. Austin Gardner:

I often say this and I'll repeat it to you again you got to get past the skin and get past the sin and see the real person. You got to get to the inside and see who they are, and so a mismatch can happen. It can happen because they don't want what you have to give, or you don't have what they want you to give to them. It could be because you have different goals. You know, I knew, and I know even now, that my goal was always to train people, to train people. So my real goal wasn't soul winning. That doesn't mean we don't believe in soul winning and practice it. It just means that I wanted to train somebody not to be a soul winner, not to be a Sunday school teacher, not even to be a pastor, but I want to train people, to train others, so we can make a big difference. And so I would just say to you look at it and make sure that you've got a match.

W. Austin Gardner:

Now remember this mentors stretch the minds of their mentees. They help people grow. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr said A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. So once you learn and stretch, boy, that's one of the greatest things about learning another language, crossing a cultural barrier, traveling to other countries, meeting new people is it stretches you. If you get out of the cocoon, you may find that you can fly like the butterfly instead of living like the worm, all wrapped up in the cocoon. God has big plans for you and I don't want to see you miss those plans. That leads me to another danger, and that danger is a lack of clarity of the mentor-mentee relationship, and that could confuse so many people and cause a strain.

W. Austin Gardner:

Sometimes you think you're mentoring, but they think you're their friend. You think you're mentoring, but they think you're their friend. You think you're mentoring, but they think you're their friend. You know they think you're just giving your opinion. They didn't come to you with the attitude and the heart of I'm here to learn from you. Over the years I have dealt with so many different people. I had one young missionary say to me one time who elected you as the leader here, and I said, oh, getting here 10 years before any of you did maybe had something to do with it. No one else was here and that happened to make me the leader. Then he asked me why we couldn't reelect leaders and maybe he could be leader one year.

W. Austin Gardner:

So there's this attitude that they, you know, they don't know what's going on. There's a confusion about this relationship. So you want to have a little bit of clear discussion and talk. You know, if you're going to coach and you're going to mentor, they might ought to understand that that's what's happening as you're doing that. So let's just say that if you don't make it clear, somebody's going to get confused. You don't have to be ugly about it, but they need to understand. I'm here to help you. Now I want to say this to you right now, before I go any further they're only going to use you until they learn what they need to learn and they're moving on. They're not moving in to become your friend. They're not moving in to become a part of your family. They are being mentored. So they want to be able to walk away and go do their own thing. There's nothing wrong with that. You can't get angry, you can't get upset. You've just got to let that happen.

W. Austin Gardner:

Now, boy, there's some learning stagnation. That's a major danger. Just because you're ahead of the curve doesn't mean that you are still learning and moving and growing fast enough. Different people grow at different speeds and growing fast enough. Different people grow at different speeds and so, if you're not careful, you will reach a plateau and you'll quit growing. That's why you need a mentor. You need a mentor to help you continue to grow and you need to be mentoring to help them continue to grow. You need a personal growth plan. You don't want to have a plan where you go to. You want to have a plan where you grow to. You want to have a plan where you grow to. That's a John Maxwell thing, but it's so very, so, very, very true. So you want to always be growing. How many books are you reading? How many podcasts are you listening to? Who are you seeking out to help you grow, so that you know more this year than you knew last year?

W. Austin Gardner:

As you can help people as they continue to grow, you're going to have to realize that people grow quickly and they'll catch up to you. You know, when you think about it, it takes about 18 years for your children to reach what we would call adulthood in the United States of America. But within a few years they'll be parents and, honestly, you'll kind of get shifted to the back seat. You'll become a grandparent. It's a nice way of saying you're off the stage, you're not the main feature here, you're not in charge anymore. They've grown and caught you and that doesn't mean they know as much as you do. But in the mentoring world you've got to keep growing. If you want them to, you've got to keep proving that God's using you and you have something to teach them.

W. Austin Gardner:

Now they need well-endangered you don't have well-defined objectives so that you can deliver the desired outcome you see it needs to be. I know how to help you, whatever. Raise your support. Or I know how to help you learn a language. I know how to help you cross cultural boundaries. I know how to help you get a church started. I know how to help you learn how to study. So you've got to have in your mind these clear, defined outcomes. And then you've got to have in your mind these clear, defined outcomes and then you've got to realize that they're going to basically graduate from your program. They're going to move on to do other things greater and bigger than what you have in mind right now.

W. Austin Gardner:

Now danger is becoming disengaged. You know you can get a little bit discouraged. You can be like man I don't think they're listening to me and they think you're not showing that you care. And there's this misunderstanding going on. You think you're showing love and respect and they think that they are being ignored and so it undermines the whole effectiveness of the program. So you've got to work at keeping good communication. You've got to work at keeping things on a plane where you can both talk and you can learn and grow. Otherwise you'll slowly drift apart and you'll wonder if there was ever anything going on there.

W. Austin Gardner:

Let me just pause here to throw in a quote. I think it's wonderful. It says Arthur C Clarke said the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Can you imagine what would happen if you trained as many people as you could train and they trained as many people as they could train? We could change the world. I remember years ago hearing the first time about some major discipleship, not minor stuff like we do in churches with new believers, but where Dawson, trotman and the Navigator said if you take one man and train one man for a year and he becomes pretty much equal to you, and the two of you train the next year two people until they become pretty much equal to you, and then four, and then eight, then 16, then 32, and then 64, it's almost impossible to imagine what could happen as we train people.

W. Austin Gardner:

Now, if you're going to have a mentor-mentee relationship, a danger is not taking responsibility, not being any accountability. So you know, I have it set up with the guys I'm teaching that if they miss three times, I'm going to take them out of my program. Now this is being done by Zoom and I've got a lot of people waiting in line. But you know it has to be. I'm serious about this, it has to be. I will do the work. So for a long time I've taught this.

W. Austin Gardner:

What you want to do is take the ball and put it in your court. See, you can't make a person learn and grow. You know you can lead a horse to water, learn and grow. You know you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. So what you do, what I like to do, is I like to give a responsibility, give an opportunity and see if they respond. If they respond, they give it back to me. So it's like I put the ball in their court. They return the ball to me, I return the ball bigger, with more responsibility, and we keep doing that until, all of a sudden, we're in this relationship.

W. Austin Gardner:

Please remember you're not trying to mentor people that are on the same level as you. I mean, if both of you are first year administrators, you both probably need to be students together. But if one of you is way down the road and one of you is learning the language and one of you is planted at one church or multiple churches, that changes that. But you both got to take responsibility. I've got to take responsibility to say I'm going to keep learning, I'm going to keep reaching out, I'm going to keep showing interest. The mentees got to take responsibility to say I'm going to respond and listen and be ready. I love what Mark Twain said it's not the size of the dog in the fight, but it's the size of the fight in the dog. So isn't that the truth? So let's find people with a hunger and a passion and a desire and a fight to get the gospel out Now.

W. Austin Gardner:

Dangers, time constraints you know, when you're a very busy church planting, leader training, missionary time can get away from you and you can't find the time. That's why I suggest, especially when you're on the field together, that you never do anything by yourself. Go together to do stuff. Let them walk with you, let them watch you do it, listen to you do it, see, you do it. Let them slowly imitate what you do. Then let them take over and do what you do. But you know time is going to be something you wrestle with all your life. That's why you want to learn to delegate. You want to take parts of your work that others can do and give it to other people. If somebody can do the job 50% as well as you can, two of them can do it as well as you can. So train people and delegate things out so that you can continue training. Don't let things step in your way and keep you from doing your job.

W. Austin Gardner:

Henry Ford said obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. So don't look at why it won't work. Look at why it will work, and work at training other people to carry forward the message, to start more churches and to get the job done for Jesus Christ. Well, let me give you the last of the dangers that I wanted to mention today, and that is misaligned expectations. You know, sometimes mentors honestly believe they're building a coworker and somebody's going to help them and somebody's going to be in their ministry, when they need to realize that they're building a person that's going to move off and leave them. And sometimes mentees think you're going to take them under your wing and give them everything they need and they don't want to pay the price to lift up and do things, and so it's a mismatch all the way around and it leads to great disappointment. It can lead to fussing and fighting and arguing and disagreements, and that's not what we want to have happen in the ministry. So Dale Carnegie said the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. Isn't that so true?

W. Austin Gardner:

So I say all this to you today to say mentoring is dangerous, it's hard, it's scary. You can make friends, but you can lose friends. People can say you're using them and abusing them. It's always so funny. The one guy who looks at them and says everything you're doing is the right thing, you're doing great, even though he knows it's not true. And that guy's loved and if you take enough care about them and love them enough and say to them no, actually this is something you're doing wrong. Let me help you with it. You may lose a friend.

W. Austin Gardner:

I want you to know that it's dangerous because you're opening up your heart, you're opening up your mind, you're being transparent and you're being vulnerable and you're letting someone else into your life. They're seeing the inside, they're seeing the real you. They're seeing what happens inside of you. They know you and that's dangerous, isn't it? If they want to, they'll hurt you. They know you and that's dangerous, isn't it? If they want to, they'll hurt you and they may. So that's one of the dangers, but it's well worth the risk.

W. Austin Gardner:

It's still dangerous to be a mentor. It's dangerous because they could kiss you and turn you over to be killed, like they did Jesus. It's dangerous because they could be like Korah and say who made you the big shot over us? And God had to protect Moses. There was no other way. It could be dangerous, like it was with Paul, when some of his own people turned against him, and he literally calls their name out in public and in writing, saying that they're wrong.

W. Austin Gardner:

So I want you to know it's dangerous, but I want you to know it's well worth it. I want you to know that I wouldn't trade it. I wouldn't go back. You'll be misunderstood, you'll be hurt. You'll hurt people, but if you help them do more for Jesus than they've ever done before, it'll be far worth the effort. It's really what it's all about. It's about you teaching others to do great things for God. So don't you let the danger stand in your way. Step out and do something. Now.

W. Austin Gardner:

I want to thank you for listening. I hope that I'm adding value. I really work at making this podcast a blessing to you. I really do. I may not be doing a good job of it, but I promise you I feel like God wants me to do it and I feel like I'm doing the best I can, and I'm working at getting better at it every day. I don't mind you telling me. You know this would help add this to it. Change this. I'd be more than happy to listen to you because I want to do the best job I can do for the cause of Jesus Christ. There's a world dying and going to hell, and very few people are that worried about world evangelism. But we are, aren't we? And so I want to challenge you to do more to get the gospel message of Jesus Christ around the world. Thank you for taking the time to listen. Thank you for praying for me. This is the World Evangelism Podcast. I'm your host, w Austin Gardner, and I am very blessed to have this chance to be with you. Thank you.