The field of Leadership Studies is obscured by “experts” who claim to have discovered the “essence” of leadership. You can check this out for yourself by doing a Google search on the phrase “the essence of leadership.” I came up with 436,000 hits. Such claims often come couched in terms that demean the use of this word by others who define it differently. This effort to monopolize the word “leadership” is misguided. It fails to…
Even if you are not a Christian, I’m sure you have some ideas about Jesus Christ: who he was, what he did, what he said. Christians, of course, worship him as the Son of God and hence see him as very present in their lives today. But what I have found is that most people have little understanding of Jesus as a man. In particular, he is seldom mentioned as a historical model for leadership.…
The church can be arrogant at times and one of those times is in its response to leadership studies. Geoff Surratt wrote an article awhile back for ChurchLeaders.com titled “Why Leadership Training Doesn’t Work.” Let me be clear; I am not saying Geoff’s article came across as arrogant. In fact, I agree with his main points. But I want to use his article as a springboard to discuss an issue I have with many church…
It has been twenty-two years since Jay Conger wrote “The Dark Side of Leadership,” an article that rocked the world of leadership studies. The premise of the article was that the very qualities that propel an individual into leadership also contain the seeds of destruction that, once germinated, can bring down both the leaders and the organizations for which they are responsible. Was Conger right? What do you think? The article focused on three major…
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 a goal in itself. Influence is the process by which our ideas and our personal presence contribute to change in other people, in an organization,…
