Flourish through your gifting - an overview and how to apply them so people can flourish in their shaping.
In this paper we provide an overview of how to think about shaping and gifts, building up to an understand of Romans 12. The idea that God wants us to flourish in our gifts we believe is a foundational belief in our faith.
We start with an old joke…
Introduction to Shaping - Rabbits versus Squirrels
There is an old story used as a business analogy that runs like this...
A rabbit has a problem and his friends advise him to go and see the Wise Old Owl. He does so, and shares his problem. Wise Old Owl asks for a couple of days to think about it.
Rabbit returns after a couple of days, and Wise Old Owl informs him, “I have given a great deal of thought to your problem. And I have come to the conclusion that the solution is that you should be a squirrel”. The rabbit looks at Wise Old Owl and says, “but how do I become a squirrel?”
To which Wise Old Owl says “I’m strategic – don’t bother me with implementation trifles”,
The story was originally used to disparage management consultants that offered solutions that were not practical to implement by an organization. But the principle this identifies – that rabbits can’t be squirrels – is as relevant in the way we deal with people. We are all shaped differently, and that influences what we can do, and as importantly what we cannot.
It is perhaps not surprising that people who are shaped for empathy and compassion are often not excellent at numbers. Equally, the mathematically gifted are often not shaped for communication.
How often do businesses hold people to account for failing to do something they were never shaped to do? Consider this – think of the thing you find most difficult to do, or dislike doing. Now imagine the business asks you to spend at least 50% of your time doing it, and your pay and career progression is now based on your performance at it. How would it make you feel? Do you feel like you belong?
Of course you don’t. You’ll feel like the business is setting you up to fail. But how many times have you seen just this happen in practice? An empathically gifted person is “held accountable” for weak financial reporting or metrics. A technically capable person is given a poor review for weak performance as part of a pitch team.
I intervened in a recent example of this. A young guy that works for me is a technical genius. He can solve very difficult problems, that others would perhaps never solve, in as little time as an hour. But his communication skills are not and will never be strong. In a conversation with his line manager (who is also a superstar) it transpired that the corporate plan was to put the young genius on a communication skills course to help him improve. The organization, as is its wont, had identified that as a weakness and sought to improve it. I have no quarrel with that – the organization should do that. But it is the leader’s job to work out whether that is right for his or her people.
So I said to his line manager “you will do none of those things. You will wrap him in cotton wool and create and environment in which he can flourish as the genius he is. So take him off the program and re-focus his path on getting better at how he is already shaped”. Why? Because there is no point seeking to put someone on a training path that will serve no purpose other than make them feel uncomfortable and like a failure. Focus on improving their strengths, and only improve weaknesses where these are an impediment to career development that the person wants.
Be very careful to match roles to how people are shaped. Reinforce the shaping. Individual’s weaknesses are usually better filled by others who are shaped in that way.
Why this is important
The easiest way not to honour someone is to put them in a role for which they are absolutely not shaped. More on this to come. Conversely, if you can match shaping to the role, then you find you’ve got someone doing something that they feel they were “born” to do. You get something the psychologists of performance call “flow”.
There is a more fundamental principle at work here. In the Bible, Romans 12 talks about seven types of gifts, and that we should each do what we are gifted to do. But the idea is broader – if we all do our respective gifting, under the headship of Christ, then everything just works much more effectively and efficiently. This is quite different than what we see in many organisations, where people are forced into boxes that “work” for the organization rather than the people themselves.
Now, I am certainly not saying that shaping is everything. Whether or not we are shaped for buying groceries, we all have to do it. Some things in an organization have to be done for basic discipline reasons. Also, you do have responsibilities to other people in the organisation.
So I would generally say when leading an individual that you are concerned about four things:
- Their values – such as integrity, going the extra mile, excellence
- Their attitude – are they generally positive to be around or do they bring everyone down?
- Their relationship to others – do they work well and constructively with others, or are they disruptive?
- Ther shaping – which speaks to how they best contribute.
These are inter-related – if you give someone a role for which they are definitely not shaped, there is a decent chance you will get a worse attitude and difficulty relating to others. Conversely, match shaping and role well, and usually you’ll get positivity, and great relationships to others.
In determining shaping, I have found nothing that comes close to being as helpful as Romans 12. More on what that means in a second. But note that within an organization, when you are helping evaluate someone’s shaping, this is about honouring someone but it isn’t therapy. You don’t have to get super deep into someone’s background and psychology to do this work. I have generally found that the simple act of being interested enough to understand someone’s gifting and to help them develop it within the organization is viewed very positively by the individual. Furthermore, when you do this I have found literally no difference between the generations – including no Millennial effect. Everybody responds well to your trying to understand them and help them flourish. Who’d have thought?!
There are questionnaires out there to help people understand their gifting (Romans 12 gifts are often referred to as Redemptive Gifts). Arthur Burk - perhaps the leading proponent of work on gifting – believes that questionnaires don’t really work. I agree – people tend not to be boxed that easily. But also, I think most Redemptive Gifts assessments are aimed at helping people as an exercise in ministry, to understand themselves, rather than in terms of how they might contribute to an organization.
Some care also needs to be taken on gifting – I have personally found my own gifting to be fluid, and it has migrating from one set of gifts to something different over the years. So it’s worth keeping an eye on whether people are evolving in light of experience.
As a process, I tend to try to approach gifting in two steps. Firstly, I have three questions I like to ask people that get to the heart of how they are shaped. This gives me really useful clues to understanding the essence of how they are shaped. Then secondly, I try to use this information to determine their redemptive gifts. This often requires a bit of follow up. The remainder of this note aims to describe these steps and what I have found to work practically in applying it. Ultimately there is no formula and as a leader you just have to practice intentionally and fix any mistakes. You will from time to time meet people who are very hard to determine because their gifting is quite broad. In these situations, take advice from people with more experience in this. But overall remember that people will generally respond well to any attempt to match their gifting to the role you’re giving them, along with the runway to improve significantly.
Step 1 - Helping people think through their shaping – THREE QUESTIONS
Earlier in the section on rabbits and squirrels I touched on shaping. It is worth spending some time on this because appreciating the shaping of your people, and how you are shaped, is important as you make decisions.
I prefer shaping as a concept to anything else for a reason I’ll come to. But it is not the same as purpose. For example you can be shaped for compassion and use that shaping for a variety of purposes. The purpose itself matters less than the shaping. Equally, the idea of being “wired” I find too broad. I can be wired to like sports, to enjoy camping, and be shaped for neither.
You can be shaped in a number of ways, but I have always found it useful to think of shaping as the benefit an individual brings to a group of people. For example, I talked about the analytical genius in the earlier section. That individual is uniquely shaped to analyse and solve problems, which are problems faced by a community. Others may well implement that solution, but his shaping is in conceiving that solution. It will likely take others shaped for communication to deliver that message, but that’s the benefit of being part of a group.
The reason I express it in this way is when you look at what someone is good at, that is not necessarily their shaping. For example, someone may be great at sales. Are they shaped for selling? Probably they are shaped in a way that happens to make them good at selling. Perhaps they are strongly empathetic. Or they are great at energizing people. Both are very helpful for people in selling. The shaping is the benefit conferred within a group of humans.
Shaping is a complex thing and specific to each individual, and there isn’t a formula for it. However, I have found three questions are very helpful in flushing out someone’s shaping.
Question 1 – what do other people say you are good at?
The majority of people have an answer to this. What you will find is that people have often not connected it to their shaping. If you think about it, that’s quite logical. The things you are shaped to do will generally be as easy for you as breathing. Most people rarely stop to think that those things aren’t as easy for others.
For example, if you are shaped as a communicator, and people tell you that you’re excellent at explaining things, you may write it off as nothing. Simply because it’s so natural. You may never have stopped to consider how difficult explaining concepts is to some other people.
But what is absolutely certain is other people will have noticed.
The flip side is also true. The pastor Rick Warren used a lovely example of this idea when he said that what he always wanted to be was a worship leader. He loved playing music and singing. The problem was nobody wanted to listen. Certainly nobody said he was any good at it. But when he spoke, that was a different matter, so he focused his time on speaking instead. The point being that, if you are good at something, someone will have noticed. So don’t pursue something that requires a shaping you would like, but that you don’t possess.
Question 2: what drives you really mad, to the extent that you know you shouldn’t be?
Just about everyone can think of something here. The point isn’t simply what makes you angry, but what makes you angrier than you should be. For one of my friends, it’s inefficient processes. He loses sleep if things aren’t efficient. Most of us wouldn’t.
In my case, it’s leaders not giving opportunities to people when it was easy to do. It drives me nuts, and it shouldn’t.
Quite a lot of people are driven crazy by any sort of injustice, however small.
But here’s the point – the flip side of what makes you mad is probably your shaping, or at least linked to it. Your shaping is reacting to it being done badly in others. In the case of my efficiency friend, he runs a business that operates like clockwork. His frustration with inefficient processes is a result of being shaped for efficiency, and his business is the beneficiary.
In the many conversations I’ve had with people about shaping, I think this question is what unlocks the shaping around half the time.
Question 3: if you suddenly had $100 million, what would you choose to do next week?
The point of this question is that, if you weren’t working for money, how would you choose to spend your time. Some people misinterpret the question and say “I’d give money away”. The point is more what would you choose to do if the shackles of money were removed. I chose $100 million as the number which, for just about everyone, there’s no doubt you wouldn’t need any more. I started using smaller numbers and ran into the problem of people debating whether it was enough…!
A good friend of mine used this question with someone he started mentoring and it unlocked everything. In that particular case, what the person wanted to do was completely different than they were doing. That has led to a very different and positive mentoring relationship. My friend has also proved to be the most natural mentor I have seen in a very long time.
In general, the three questions used together tend to give useful clues – and often much more than that – to ask follow up questions that allow you to hone in on someone’s gifts. Something incredible happens when a person is doing what they were shaped to do and growing in their ability.
This ties to a fantastic quote:
“Ask not what the world needs from you, rather ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is for people to come alive”.
As a leader, give people roles that match their shaping, give them runway, and watch them come alive.
Oh yes – and maybe get out of their way.
Step 1 - further ideas on shaping
In this first step, I have found the following additional ideas can often be helpful in understanding how someone is shaped, particularly in the context of the questions above:
- How does the person interpret the “world”? Some people interpret problems and issues analytically, and if they can measure and use numbers and facts, then all the better. Others do it through relationships and people, and will often express themselves as “I feel”. People are rarely black and white, but usually one of these will be dominant. Both have a place in team.
- How do people view right and wrong? I’m sure you can think of some people who are very black and white on right and wrong, and others who see shades of grey. What you can sometimes find is that people who find themselves frustrated regularly have a strongly defined sense of justice and are frustrated at issues that they see as unjust. These people are often great advocates for a cause. The idea is to harness it.
- Empathy for me is a big one. People who are strongly empathetic can, for example, feel other people’s pain as if it were their own. You want to know who your empathic people are, because you will need them in a crisis when everyone is worried. Or if you have a client problem and you want someone who can connect and work out what the real issue is. People who are not empathic are also helpful if you need someone just to fix a problem quickly.
- Organized versus fluid. Some people are highly organized and very effective at getting things done – in a sense they are gifted for administration. Some people appear to be the opposite. Many visionaries fall into this camp. There are lots of reasons why apparently disorganized people appear that way but in fact are not – the way they are organized appears in a different form. You may find, for example, that their minds are highly organized. This may seem strange, but it is simply a reflection of the fact that these people value their minds being organized above everything else, and aren’t especially bothered about their calendars or the state of their desks.
- Level of anxiety. Some people are worriers, and that has real value in identifying risks that need to be managed. Conversely, others seem to get calmer in a crisis. It is as if the things about which a normal person should be anxious bring them alive. Knowing this dimension about someone is helpful in determining their shaping.
I want to single out a particular shaping that often goes unnoticed. A relatively small number of people are uniquely gifted to glue together a community or team. In an organization, they sometimes appear to do less than other people, and can therefore find themselves on the wrong side of a traditional performance evaluation. The problem is that, when these people aren’t there, the team suddenly stops working effectively. They are the ones that seem to quietly smooth away issues. If you have someone like this in your team, be very careful to recognize what they are really contributing. In my experience, I wouldn’t have them as the overall leader – the ones I can think of have found it hard to make difficult decisions, because they are concerned about how everyone will feel. Unfortunately the leader does not always have that luxury.
Understanding someone’s shaping is obviously important for what they do within the team, but it is even more important for what development path you help them set. Candidly, I have found shaping most important in helping people avoid things they believed they wanted to do but would in actuality have been a terrible idea. One common example I’ve seen over the years is ambitious people wanting a path to becoming CEO, but who were either naturally anxious or gifted administratively but with no empathy. Being naturally anxious as a CEO means you won’t sleep much. People who have no empathy and are gifted administratively will expect others to be that way, and as a CEO some of their people’s lives will become miserable quickly. The same is also true for other roles. I’ve seen people aspire to technical roles when they are not gifted analytically, but rather are strongly relational, or motivated by serving. Making sure that someone’s career path allows them to improve their gifts, rather than remediate a lack of gifting, is the key.
Step 1 – Summary
If you apply the above, you will find you know quite a bit about the person on a number of difference dimensions. Are they black and white? Are they empathetic? Are they analytical or emotional? Are they organised or fluid?
You should also have some decent information about what their natural emphasis is. I would say in this process, you are looking for some kind of sense between whether they are driven by being around people, or whether they are driven by getting stuff done or intellectual pursuits. This type of distinction is quite helpful when it comes to applying the redemptive gifts in Step 2.
Step 2 – Redemptive Gifts
There is so much written on redemptive gifts, but I’m going to do a simple practical summary. The table below lists the redemptive gifts, along with some commentary around what I’ve seen in people expressing these gifts.
I have done them out of order for a particular reason I’ll explain below.
Prophet
Prophesy just means insight and in this context does not refer to the “Office” of prophet addressed in Ephesians 4. Generally prophets are black and white, they are quite analytical, they have clear ideas about things and they are quite comfortable with changing the world as long as that’s an improvement. They can often get frustrated at others no understanding things quickly enough - “it’s obvious isn’t it?”
Teacher
Probably the easiest one of the gifts – we’ve all seen people who are gifted teachers, especially pastors. When this expresses in a pastor, these are the people who love to spend 20 hours a week in the Word to give a fabulous sermon on Sunday.
Servant
Typically expresses in a couple of distinct ways. Often servants are the people who love to do hospitality – they are brilliant hosts. But you also have the quiet servants who just live to help, be it serving in church or as a volunteer.
Exhorter
These are the people who love being around people. They walk through a room and collect five friends in five minutes. They’ll sit down next to someone on a bench, and the person next to them will tell them their life story. They’re happiest when they’re around other people and they aren’t always happy in their own company.
Mercy
Highly compassionate people. Generally they’ve got huge hearts for others. The thing to realise about Mercy gifted people is they often appear very weak at making decisions. But this isn’t really true – they just have more information coming at them than the rest of us, and as a result they have a lot more to process. Mercy people need to be protected by their leaders and they provide natural ministry to others within a team. Again it can express in a range of different ways, from the minister to the nurse to a range of other situations.
Leader
This gift is sometimes called “Ruler” but I prefer the original. It obviously expresses in different ways and in a later section I’ve described the different types of leadership I have seen in practice.
Giver
This is by far the hardest to identify because it turns up in different forms, often with other gifts. I would tend to say the defining characteristics of a giver – beyond the actual giving (!) – is they think long term/multi-generationally. They do things for the good of those that follow, so that a much broader range of people might be blessed. They are quite happy “going first” and giving into something that looks crazy to everyone else – but it make sense to them.
I’ve written the descriptions relatively inexactly – but my purpose is more to write it in a way where in each case you can think of someone and say “that’s them!” That will help you – to have people you know as examples in each category is very useful in evaluating others, because you’ve got a benchmark against which to do it.
The reason I have taken the gifts out of order in the table is I tend to think of the gifts like this:
- The first two – prophet and teacher – tend to be the intellectual/”how to” giftings
- The next three – Servant/Exhorter/Mercy – are the relational giftings
- The final two – Leader/Giver – sit in categories of their own.
Generally when I’m trying to determine someone’s gifting, I’m going through the following process:
- Are they a leader? Generally it’s pretty obvious if someone has real leadership skills because they slip into them easily. You need to understand the types of leaders. More often than not, leader is not the answer – there are fewer leaders in general than the other giftings for obvious reasons.
- Can I exclude giver? Giver is pretty rare in my experience. For me it tends to come down to whether there is any evidence that they are thinking multi-generationally. I would say the most likely givers you will come across are the natural mentors. Generally these people have been mentoring others since their teens – they can’t help themselves and because they’re good at it, people will have been seeking them out.
- If I’ve excluded leader and giver, then I’m really trying to determine whether this person is dominant relational or analytical/getting stuff done. Determining that will allow you to drill down in that category to the dominant one.
Some of the above are easy – Teachers and Mercy in particular. I would also say as a general rule, the servants tend to know who they are if you ask them whether they like hosting others or serving as a volunteer.
Go through this process with the information you have from step one, and you should getting pretty quickly to the gifting. There is a little more complexity on this I want to address below. But first I want to turn to the question of different types of leaders.
Step 2 – Redemptive gifts – different types of leaders
I’ve observed four distinct types of leadership in organisations.
- The “enforcer”. This tends to be the person who draws the boundaries of behaviour and sets direction. Usually the CEO needs these attributes, although sometimes a CFO or COO has them instead.
- The “glue”. These are the leaders who glue the people together. They are the unsung heroes, because often the benefit of what they do isn’t seen until they’re gone. People like this care profoundly about nobody being left behind – if someone is on their own in a room, they’ll go and engage them.
- The mentor. These leaders live for developing people.
- The “example”. These people lead by example because they are exceptional at what they do. More often than not, you don’t want them responsible for people because their motivation is for doing the job well. But their example inspires others.
Some of these roles can mix in particular individuals. Mentor can mix with either of the other two. But enforcer never mixes with glue. This is because people who fulfil the glue role should never be put in a position where they have to make hard decisions about people.
And now a confession – one of the reasons I developed this model is because I was pretty sure I had made the mistake in the past of evaluating a leader in the wrong way. This has helped me not repeat it (yet). It is very easy in particular to evaluate a glue leader as an enforcer, and find them wanting. But that completely misses the point. Great glue leaders are very rare and need to be treated like gold dust. Mentors are similarly rare. Examples are valuable but are often given people to manage, and that simply makes both parties miserable. I’ve made that mistake too.
This leads me to the natural corollary. If you are a leader, it is worth you contemplating what kind of leader you are. Get some feedback from others to confirm – or otherwise – what you think.
As you take on more responsibility you will need to create a management team, and this should be diverse both in terms of experience and background but also by leadership type. If you have a leadership team and you don’t have this diversity, that’s your immediate problem.
There are different types of leaders and they’re all valuable HOWEVER – an example leader is not a leader in redemptive gifts terms. They are far more likely to be a prophet. The reason I have included it above is because there are so many example leaders in POSITIONS of leadership. Don’t make the mistake of assuming someone in a position of leadership is gifted for it.
I want to ram this point home a little further. One of the biggest issues in the church more generally is we take brilliant teachers, and expect them to be brilliant leaders as well. It’s unreasonable and not Biblical. Until we address this issue, we are not going to solve some of the church’s challenges.
Just to finish this off:
- Enforcers could be a mix of giftings
- Glue leaders will have leader mixed with something relational
- Mentor will also have leader mixed with something relational and often giver.
Step 2 – Redemptive Gifts – some more complexity
Where this can sometimes get difficult is where we see elements of multiple gifts in different people. People can blend – there are plenty of Mercy people who are also prophetic. Leaders can be exhorters too. So don’t be afraid of seeing different giftings emerge.
One way of bringing this multiplicity together has been developed by Arthur Burk and a colleague, and I have found this very insightful. The basic idea is this:
- You have a dominant gift, ie the think you do.
- You have a secondary gift (a different one) which is how you do the first.
- You have a tertiary gift (different again) which is your motivation for what you do.
I think as you become more experienced that this is a very effective way of thinking about gifting. A couple of examples…
When I went through the above process for myself, the answer I got was this:
- Primary – LEADER
- Secondary – GIVER
- Tertiary – PROPHET.
What this means is that my primary gifting is Leader, but I lead through giving (which in this case means mentoring). That’s on the money. And my motivation for all of this is prophetic, which in this case pulls out the idea of doing new things, changing and improving thinking, etc. That’s also very accurate. It sums my gifting up better than just “Leader”, even though technically Leader is correct.
I helped a friend at church go through his gifting recently. I already knew him reasonably well, so I could jump straight to Step 2. It was easy to exclude leader and giver. And I also knew that, even though he had done an analytical job, that he’s got relational gifting written all over him. The question was what.
He had been a hospital chaplain in the past, and some of his friends were advising him to consider being a therapist (he wasn’t sure, which was why we were doing this exercise). That background can lead you to Mercy but I asked him about whether he loves being around other people. He said absolutely. I asked, “Do you love being around people just because you love being around others?” Yes, which is getting us pretty quickly to exhorter. And then I asked him “Do you like hosting people?”, to which I got the unexpected response “I absolutely love it”. I hadn’t known that about him, so in the above model I’ve now got Servant as the Secondary. A few questions later and I’ve Mercy as the Tertiary.
That simple understanding of his gifting has given him a completely different way of looking at the right job, and he’s appropriately elevated the hospitality piece of his gifting, which was missing before.
I share these examples simply to illustrate how multiple giftings can fit together. You’re really just looking for clues to help draw out giftings that seem important.
Final, final point – Jesus had all gifts expressed, so as we are conformed to the image of Christ, our giftings can become more balanced. At which point we are more mature and the gifts themselves matter less. But equally, at this point, people don’t need much leadership. Those that need the most help and honouring generally need their gifting articulated as a means of allowing them to flourish.
Overall Summary
Hopefully having read this note you have a good overview of shaping, its importance, and how it fits alongside other desirable characteristics of someone in an organisation.
The redemptive gifts are the most powerful tool I have found to help understand gifting, and they have the benefit of being Bible-based. Much work has been done by others in applying these ideas and in my view the primary/secondary/tertiary model is very useful indeed.
People are complicated being though, and therefore there is no substitute for practice in developing the skills as a leader to understand people’s gifting.