Five approaches to leadership

Alan Roxburgh writes: “I have been involved in developing leaders for over 30 years. The answer is simple! You do not develop leadership by learning ‘about’ leadership. You develop leadership by leading. This sounds like the proverbial ‘chicken and the egg’ dilemma. It’s the perplexing question: “Where do we start?” The answer to that question requires a real paradigm shift in our thinking about leadership.”

Alan goes on to write about five different approaches to training leaders to lead:

the ‘learning about’ model,
the ‘throw them in the deep end’ approach,
the ‘learning the gaps’ method,
mentoring leaders,
leadership action teams.

The last three meet with most approval from him, particularly number five, which he explains in more detail in a post entitled Five Approaches to Leadership.

Communicating Leadership

John Maxwell's site has had a face-lift, and now appears to be called, Giant Impact. There are two short articles on leadership on the site, one of which focuses on communicating expectations to those you're leading, and the other on communicating vision.

Each article contains six points which can serve as a reminder to anyone in leadership that just telling people what to do doesn't quite cut the mustard.

Regarding the first point of communicating expectations, Maxwell writes: A primary responsibility of leadership is to communicate expectations, both with words and actions. When leaders carefully and consistently set expectations, they engineer a flourishing work environment. However, when leaders abdicate their duty to communication expectations, chaos ensues. Here are six rules of thumb to follow as you set expectations in your organization.

And in relation to the second he has this to say: Nothing motivates an organization like a clear and compelling vision. But it can be tricky to paint a picture of what's in your mind so that others can see exactly what you're seeing. As a leader, how do you enable others to glimpse your vision and how do you inspire them to adopt it?

Blog Action Poverty Day 2008

By the time you read this, Blog Action Poverty Day will be well over. This is just a bit of feedback on some of the stats related to this rather amazing day in which thousands of bloggers around the world raised some consciousness regarding world poverty, by all writing about it on the same day (Oct 15th). I missed doing so on this blog, but did write about it on one of my others, a couple of times.

The day brought 12,800 Bloggers together on the same topic.
They wrote 14,053 Blog Posts, big and small, important and not so important.
There were some 13,498,280 Readers - don't ask me how that was figured out, but it's pretty impressive.
17 Top 100 Blogs were involved, along with lots of non Top 100 Blogs, like my own.

If you go to the Blog Action Day site, you'll find a bunch of the posts, and how they focused on ways the world has been helped, who helped, and how it was done.

Through this Action Day, Kiva was brought to my attention. It's the online equivalent of World Vision or CCF, except that through it people can lend money to individuals or groups around the world who need some additional funding to improve their lifestyle. It's a superb approach, and easy as pie to join. Recommend it highly.

Not 'either or'

It is not a matter of engaging in both the gospel and social action, as if Christian social action was something separate from the gospel itself. The gospel has to be demonstrated in word and deed. Biblically, the gospel includes the totality of all that is good news from God for all that is bad news in human life—in every sphere. So like Jesus, authentic Christian mission has included good news for the poor, compassion for the sick and suffering justice for the oppressed, liberation for the enslaved. The gospel of the Servant of God in the power of the Spirit of God addresses every area of human need and every area that has been broken and twisted by sin and evil. And the heart of the gospel, in all of these areas, is the cross of Christ.

- Christopher J. H. Wright
International director of John Stott Ministries (from Knowing the Holy Spirit Through the Old Testament)

5-10-5-10

Since 2006, several groups of people from around New Zealand have been developing a new style of community group which aims to inspire and support a greater citizen engagement on social, economic and environmental issues.

Some of these groups have taken the name ChangeMakers ... and have been following a "5-10-5-10" framework of active citizenship.

5 - spend 5% of your time on active citizenship tasks

10 - do ten actions in the next year on your personal passion in citizenship action

5 - spend 5% of your income directly supporting citizenship action that inspires you

10 - join with ten other people to create a learning community to support each other’s work for change

Sounds like an idea that many Christian groups/churches could take up.

NZ Suicide Prevention Action Plan

The NZ Suicide Prevention Action Plan 2008-2012 was released on Monday 17 March.

The Action Plan builds on the NZ Suicide Prevention Strategy 2006-2016 released in 2006, and provides more detail about how the high level goals of the Strategy can be achieved over the next five years. The Action Plan is made up of two companion documents, which are best read together:
The Summary for Action outlines what the actions are, who will do them and by when.
The Evidence for Action discusses the evidence and context underlying the actions
- read Action Plan
- read Hon Jim Anderton's speech at the launch of the Action Plan

The Lesson of the Three Monkeys

There's a story about three monkeys sitting under a tree. One of them decides to climb the tree and get a banana. How many monkeys are left sitting under the tree?

Answer: Three. It takes more than a decision to change anything.

As someone who is addicted to having ideas ("Hey, I know! Maybe I could climb that tree and get a banana!"), I understand this story very well. Yes, the idea is important, but things change only when we turn it into action. Speaking of which:

ACTION: Keep a journal of all your ideas so that your mind is encouraged to stay fertile - I believe that if you ignore your ideas, they stop flowing. But also make a firm decision about which ones to act on and then stick with those until you've seen them through.

Courtesy of Jurgen Wolff's Brainstorm E-Bulletin

Photo courtesy of Jeff Jarrett: Barberry Apes from a series of Gibraltar apes