I don’t know about you, but I experience a tinge of skepticism when I hear about an upcoming “motivational seminar” or about someone who is said to be “a great motivational speaker.” I know folk who have come away from such events feeling their lives had changed for the better. My question, however, is always, “How long will their euphoria last?” The problem is that quick fixes rarely alter the root of the problem and,…
At the heart of how I define leadership is change. All leadership is about being an agent of change. While organizations need someone to maintain a smooth running operation, by itself this is not leadership. Leaders see problems and want to solve them. They see possibilities and want to achieve them. They see wrongs and want to make them right. They see opportunities and want to take advantage of them. They see threats and want…
Kenneth Blanchard, the renowned management expert who wrote, “The One Minute Manager,” and who developed the Situational Leadership model, once said, “The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority.” Jesus was the greatest leader of all time and the world feels his influence today just as much or more than when he walked this earth nearly 2,000 years ago. We can learn a lot from Jesus. I have been a student of both Jesus…
Trust is another aspect of indirect leadership. For Christians, it begins with personal trust in God, but also includes trust in the natural forces God has placed in the universe. Our senses may tell us not to trust what cannot be seen. But trusting our position or personal power to get things done is even more precarious and ineffective. When we don’t trust these natural forces, we try to “help” people get things done. Helping…
For a class in Critical Thinking that I teach, I have students do an Action Research project. They are to put the pieces of the project together as the semester progresses and present a final report at the end. This is because Critical Thinking is not just a course in logic; it deals with thinking about one’s life, identifying problem areas, using one’s critical thinking faculities to develop a simple plan of action, following through…
