How to handle different talents? ...

Wednesday, Oct 26, 2011. There are many different talents. This also means there are different people. Some can do this, but cannot do that. For others it is the other way around! But how do we handle the different talents? How do we bring them together to operate in a coherent way?

How do we integrate different talents? …

There are people who can carry out development work very well. There are scientists, who can do science. They are good in sitting at their desk and writing programmes. They love to fully emerge themselves into the problem, work on it, be careful and thorough and work it all out, until the programmes do what they are supposed to do.

There are other people, who are more in communication. They do not want to sit alone in front of a computer. They want to sit in a group and talk. They are interested in bringing people together. They want to coordinate. They want to be in interaction. They are not interested in the details of programming work.

How do you bring such different preferences together? The answer is simple: there are people who are gifted in bringing people together. There are people who have their particular strength in leadership. They can do what both others cannot do: get them to work in a way which helps the goals of the project. The leaders might not be the best to write the programs. They might not be the best to do the communication to a particular group. But they are the best in leadership.

The image of a body …

Leaders are not more important than the others. It is a common misunderstanding of talents that there would be more important talents and less important talents. But it is not the case … all talents are very important. All of them are needed, otherwise the whole thing does not work in the long run!

The bible give a particular image, to capture the relationship of different talents and gifts. It is the image of a body. You have eyes, ears, hands, feet. They all fulfill different tasks. They have different capabilities. They are all very important. You cannot outweight the ear against the eye, the hand against the foot.

In the biblical image, it is Jesus Christ, who is the head of the church. He is the one who is guiding everyone. Then, there is no question of who should be the leader, since God himself through Jesus leads us all. That is a very healthy setup, it makes us all brothers and sisters, with our different talents and with our weaknesses. Then, we can integrate our talents under his guidance with the help of the gifts of leadership which he passes on to the human community. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts