Ministry During the Disruption

[20] Leadership in the Crucible - Sandy Shugart

• InterVarsity Christian Fellowship • Season 1 • Episode 20

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Today's episode continues Peggy's interview with Sandy Shugart, President of Valencia College and InterVarsity alumnus. Sandy shares how his leadership journey has shaken him free from his illusions of control. Significant spiritual realities undergird our ministry during the disruption.

LINKS
We've created a website (updated regularly) full of resources to help you with Ministering Online Through COVID-19: intervarsity.org/online.   

Sandy's book "Leadership in the Crucible of Work" is available here: https://amzn.to/3eb1a6m

Unknown Speaker :

Hey everyone, this is Peggy cow and girly and you're listening to the ministry during the disruption podcast. Today we are continuing part two of our conversation with Sandy Schubert, president of Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. As we continue our conversation, Sandy shares some of his reflections about leadership and how it applies to a time like this. You wrote a book about leadership called leadership in the crucible, discovering the interior life of an authentic leader. say a little bit more about this analogy of a crucible and how you chose that

Unknown Speaker :

essential insight that I tried to capture in the essays in that book Look, is that the work we do? The habits of mind we bring to our work, the tools we use, what we do every day is forming us more powerfully than we're forming it. And I experienced this early in my career when I recognized that a lot of early success I was having was actually deforming my character. And I sort of woke one day to the idea that the crucible wasn't just a place of smelting where a crucible is where you purify metal, under heat, but it's also a place of transformation. I guess I had read a wonderful little novel called the alchemist, and in alchemy ik. It's a place of transformation where the if you can find the rarest of all substances the Philosopher's Stone, and heated in a crucible with a base or ignoble man at all, and the metal will be transmuted into a noble metal like gold or silver. And I thought, wow, that's wonderful. What if going to work every day could be transforming instead of deforming, and that Philosopher's Stone really is self awareness. It's doing the interior work of paying attention to who you are and who you're becoming, in my life, who I'm becoming as a disciple, and as an image reflector, or distorter of God, as a person call to love and not condemnation as a, as a father and as a husband and all those things but at work as a servant to the people both are organizations designed to serve and the people who work in it.

Unknown Speaker :

I think sometimes, the forming process is really slow that we aren't even aware that it's happening. And then we find ourselves decades later, not totally recognizing who we've become and not really expecting to have become this person. Hmm. But you had some of these pivots in your 20s. What helped to have more of that self awareness as opposed to just letting yourself be shaped?

Unknown Speaker :

Well, in God's good grace, I had a conversion as a freshman at University of North Carolina and was sort of pulled into a community of loving believers called intervarsity. Christian Fellowship,

Unknown Speaker :

heard of it?

Unknown Speaker :

Yeah. They were wonderful and odd and peculiar and all the right ways. And somehow I discovered that, that if they could love one another, there might even be a possibility they could love somebody as ugly as me. And so God began to shape me towards more of a mission orientation in my life. All through college when I got out College had couple of jobs and found myself at age 25 thrown into the deep end with sharks with a remarkable opportunity to serve in the C suite of a $2 billion organization. And that success was what was ruining me. I woke up one day I realized I wasn't who I wanted to be. And I was headed in the direction of real deformation. And all those guys is old, burned out husks of human beings that we young guys made fun of, after work over a beer started out just like me. And so I, I began looking for a way to be responsible in the world. That wouldn't ruin me. So I think early success, early preparation for a life of mission even though I was good at it, and early success in the world, set me up to ask harder questions early in my career, like how can I be responsible? In the world, without ruining myself and ruining other people.

Unknown Speaker :

It sounds like you had character as a priority. above a lot of other things.

Unknown Speaker :

I think that's part of the formation that that started, you know, before my conversion in college, in family and elsewhere. God was preparing me. But that formation occurred really powerfully in college and university played a big role in that.

Unknown Speaker :

I don't know that there's many leadership books that talk about doing inner work. That's not really what people think of when they think about growing as a leader.

Unknown Speaker :

That's true that

Unknown Speaker :

the first publisher, a really good publisher that I was interested in working with, read the manuscript and worked hard to get me to turn it into a how to book, you know, the seven steps or the five really good ideas or the 10 fundamental principles or whatever it might be. And we just had several conversations I said, I don't believe this is the way law life works. It's not a template, it's not a set of, it's not a checklist. So, I had to find the right publisher, who shared again, this notion of a sacred anthropology What does it mean to be human and, and a creature made by loving God?

Unknown Speaker :

So what have been some of your inner work projects?

Unknown Speaker :

So let me first say that my workshop has been largely in journaling and prayer. And they go together for me, I'm a little too peripatetic and easily distracted, to be still without a pen in my hand. And so I filled scores of journals with my musings, they're not for anyone else, but me. And they're deeply embarrassing, but that's where I do my interior work. That's my workshop. And I would say there are two, two areas that have really been consistent for more than 40 years and that work for me. One I would just call integration. That is to live a life this all of one piece of cloth. It's not. It's not siloed it's not separated. Even as a teenager, I noticed a lot of adults, that a work life and home life and a life with their friends and a recreational life and financial life and whatever, and they didn't seem very well connected. And I knew I didn't want to be like that. Like all 17 year olds, I could spot hypocrisy from 50,000 feet everywhere except in a mirror. And I read a poem back then called to Trump's at Mudd time by Robert Frost. It was about being whole being all of one. There's a phrase in there he says yield who will to their separation, my audience And living is to unite my avocation and my vocation, as my two eyes make one insight, for only when love and deed are one. And work is play for mortal stakes, is a deed ever really done for heaven to the future sake. This notion of avocation and vocation, delight and duty, when I'm called to do and what I love to try to find a way to have fidelity to all of myself and God in one as one person. And that continues, it's really easy to be fragmented. And to become someone that reflects your environment more than your interior truth.

Unknown Speaker :

Were you tempted to become fragmented? Or how does that happen?

Unknown Speaker :

The Great temptation of course, of boss hood is the illusion of control. And when I I've got a great idea or I think I see the direction things need to go. And people aren't following. They're not going they're not doing what I thought they were going to do. The great challenge there is to think, how do I get this problem solved with the use of power. And, you know, there's a time for the use for the right use of power, but it's a dangerous tool. And everyone pays a price for its use. So there may be a part of my life where I become foul and difficult and grumpy and so on. And then I come home and I'm wonderful. Or I might be, you know, a thoroughly thoroughgoing servant leader at work and come home and be grumpy and a jerk. You just have to cultivate this constant interior conversation.

Unknown Speaker :

Yeah, that sounds challenging, and vulnerable, and even kind of scary. To pursue that,

Unknown Speaker :

it's a little bit like any disease. The earlier you catch it, the easier it is to cure. It's when you when you deny its existence and let the process go too far that it's really painful to be healed. I always think of the scene in CS Lewis is great divorce with the one of the characters has a dragon on his shoulder, which is an image of a certain kind of sin and angel that he confronts as I can take that creature away from you, if you want. And he's so afraid of a lifetime of cultivating this sin with how much it's going to hurt for it to be removed. And I think Yeah, that's true. And we all have Sims that run that deep, but it's also possible to recognize them quickly and deal with them before they dig too deep into your heart. And then the surgery is alive. more minor, it's more like outpatient. And so the other project for me is to say, How do I live every day knowing that this is a thin sliver of reality that we're in. And the thinnest possible veil separates us, from the universe of whose glory is so overwhelming, that we'd be blinded to look at this huge spiritual reality that it's hard to, to keep in mind all the time because everything we deal with is like practical quotidian, daily stuff. And to me, it means like, every time somebody gets on the elevator with me, I have to remember that the most important thing I do this day this year, this lifetime might be a word of kindness to this stranger in God's economy, rather than all my strategic goals, because the larger reality will differ, determine the value You have the life I live Not, not the thin sliver that we're in. So keeping a sense of transcendence without being demagogic about it. I think there's been a big project too.

Unknown Speaker :

That sounds like it requires a lot of discipline. How do you maintain that?

Unknown Speaker :

I don't think of it as discipline what feeds me most with a sense of the, of the transcendent and other people and in the universe's music, and poetry and art and nature and so on. So I think feeding part of your responsibilities to take care of your soul is to feed your soul with more than the world wants you to have. what the world would like to distract you. God wants you to have bread that nourishes water that refreshes. He wants you to eat the real food of the universe. And I think that includes God's Spirit speaking to us through all those wonderful gifts. That was largely trying to either devalue or distract us from. So if there's discipline, it just means creating time. But when you do it is so joyful, so nourishing.

Unknown Speaker :

Why wouldn't you do it?

Unknown Speaker :

Yeah, I'm just thinking about just the idea of making time for that. I mean, people often cite dizziness and the ability to choose. I think it's true that when you experience the goodness of that you tell yourself, I don't I do this all the time. But then you get into a slump again and you forget how good it is. So how can we remind ourselves or better make that choice?

Unknown Speaker :

So I used to be a runner. I'm too old for that stuff now, but I learned so many things from that experience, and one of them was that I loved drawing I love the feeling of being out there. And the fellowship that I had. And I love the I guess it's the endorphins, but whatever it was that made me feel that sort of runner's high. And I remember going to see my sister one time when I was out of the habit for a couple of months. town outside of New York City, she said, Let's go for a run. And I said, I didn't tell her I had been running lately. But we both got out there in our shoes. And we started running through her village. And she said, You know, I haven't been running for a while. And I said, You know, I haven't either. And she smiled and said, Yeah, but today, we're runners. It's always there for it's waiting for you to do. And the moment you get back to it, you're a runner again. Well, I think all of our interior work and our religious show God's like that to what a gracious father we have. Who never says you can come home but only after you've done your chores.

Unknown Speaker :

There's something About that identity piece that I just really resonate with, because I think especially in this pandemic, well, I'm tempted to think of, you know, myself as a

Unknown Speaker :

sack of dough.

Unknown Speaker :

Because they're not getting out, we're not moving.

Unknown Speaker :

But there's ways that even if I'm not able to do some of the things I love right now, there's a reminder that that identity is still there.

Unknown Speaker :

If you're a runner, it wouldn't hurt just to put your shoes on.

Unknown Speaker :

Just, you know, just to remember, these are the shoes aren't running, I think prayer fellowship with Gods the same way. There are times when it's difficult when I'm traveling, crazy travel schedules. It's especially difficult except, you know, I have a choice to make. I can close the window thing on the plane and and turn my shoulder away from The person next to me for a few minutes and find that interior place where God's always waiting to have the conversation and habit to interior life is there for every human being were made to live there. We all have the tools to do it. We all have the time to do it. We just have to do.

Unknown Speaker :

Thanks, Sandy, for speaking to us today. I feel like there's just ways that I want to go back and listen to her conversation and even take down some notes for what you've said that, especially during this time, the kind of inner work I can be doing instead of just waiting for this time to pass is really a good challenge.

Unknown Speaker :

Well, the way you just phrased it challenges me back so I happen to have my guitar right next to my desk here and I plan to play it for an hour when we're done.

Unknown Speaker :

Thanks, Sandy.

Unknown Speaker :

Thank you, Peggy. It was a delightful time to be with you. And let me say to you and all of your InterVarsity colleagues, I'll never be able to tell you how grateful I am for the way God has used you in my life. And millions of other young students who are now old guys like me.

Unknown Speaker :

Amen.