Transforming Leadership - Top 10
Posted Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Today started our 2nd annual GLA Divisional Staff Conference, which will last until Thursday. I was just starting my sabbatical last August, so this is my first year with this conference. I’m really enjoying it.
The focus of this year’s conference is Leadership Development. One of the “pre-course” assignments for the conference was to read Leighton Ford’s book - Transforming Leadership. Good book. Below are my top 10 quotes and my top 7 leadership lessons from the book.
Quotes:
- – “Transactional leaders work within the situation; transformational leaders change the situation… Transactional leaders talk about payoffs; transformational leaders talk about goals. Transactional leaders bargain; transformational leaders symbolize. In short, the transformational leader motivates us to do more than we expected to do, by raising our awareness of different values, by getting us to transcend our self-interests for the cause and by expanding our portfolio of needs and wants… The same dynamics which can lead people to better things can also be used by leaders in ways that bring great social disorder.”
– “He was made what we are that he might make us what he is himself.” - Irenaeus
– “Solitude is the furnace of transformation,” the place of the great struggle and the great encounter, where we learn to deal with compulsions of the world. In solitude we get ride of the scaffolding, those artificial supports which keep us from being real.” - Nouwen
– “To touch the whole world, Jesus had to begin by deliberately focusing on a few.”
– “Written codes of ethics or standards are important, but the institutions that best set the tone do it by telling stories which embody their shared values.”
– “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” - Soren Keirkegaard
– “Vision for Jesus was seeing how the truth, as his Father showed it, touch life as Jesus lived it…. Our task is not to dream up visions or to develop strategies, but to see Jesus’ visions and understand what the Father’s strategy is for our lives.”
– “Power is the ability to make others do your will even if they would not choose to. Authority is the ability to get others to do what you want because they recognize (through your life and words) that what you ask is legitimate and right.” - Tony Campolo
– “Our attitudes to the unimportant person, the outsider and the other followers show our grasp of our leader’s mission.”
– “Here is the heart of leadership in Christ. We do not start at the cross and go on to bigger and better things.”
Lessons:
- • To touch the whole world, we begin by deliberately focusing on a few.
• We must be “being made” in order to properly shape & influence Jesus’ way in others.
• Story telling & parables are keys to leadership development.
• Vision comes from listening to God in the midst of life as we see/live it. In this way, “vision” is both mind-boggling & conceivable, both tangible & unfathomable.
• Leadership is primarily about people – their good, their development, their potential, their conflicts & shortcomings, their influence. Leadership is secondarily about people. That never gets supplanted.
• The standard & bar of commitment for leadership is set not by a qualifications list, but by the example of the one calling for commitment.
• Our attitude towards the least & the last in our midst is the starting point for servant leadership.