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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Brayden has been working for months on putting together a convention with a limited budget and limited personnel. He has worked an average of 90 hours a week planning, organizing, coordinating, and preparing. The convention is for training of and cooperation between the faculties of independently-owned charter schools. This will be…
You want to make a positive change. You attack the problem head-on, thinking you will solve it quickly but things get worse. You try harder but, instead of making progress, people get more resistant, the situation more tense, and the change more distant. So, you decide to give it everything…
Leadership is all about influence, but the pursuit of influence, for its own sake, can be disastrous to the soul of the leader. It’s important to understand the nature of influence because it is a core component of leadership–but it’s also important to understand the dangers of pursuing influence as…
