Stepping into Leadership

From Youthblog on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 @ 7:41 AM PST
in the "Blog" Category.

I am fascinated by the art of leadership, particularly the notion of servant leadership (as opposed to wielding power). Leadership learning, training and practice is at the heart of what the department I reside in, does and enables. It's a vibrant place to work ... and in which to be stretched and challenged.

One of the challenges though is that you can't just teach a 'how to do leadership,'course,
it's a learning process becoming more aware of both self and others, growing as a person (leading from values), encountering and reflecting on different and diverse tools and techniques. It's a learning and an unlearning, a discovering what you don't know that you don't know, seeing where your own strengths and weaknesses are, while gaining a greater understanding of others. Gaining skills from a huge body of theories and techniques.

OK, I'm waffling a bit but I'm trying to make sense of what follows.

I've just been listening to Bill Hybels talking about 'The life cycle of a leader' in which he brilliantly illustrates the beginning of the leadership journey. He makes the point that (and this is true for me, and I suspect other Youth Ministers) we often start out in leadership when we are reasonably young, and at that stage we basically have passion and enthusiasm, but little in the way of leadership skills. We lead chaotically and assume others will want to follow, we have little awareness of the impact on others, we have a very fledgling idea of team.
He also makes the point that we can do this for a while, people will follow enthusiasm and passion. But we can't do this forever, people get fed up of it, it leaves casualties in it's wake and it doesn't produce lasting change.

I loved this as it it was such a helpful way of celebrating the steps into leadership as well as being a warning that we need to learn and to grow (and continue to do so)

This really reflects my experience where I was that firebrand UNTIL I attended some training that was around 'team roles'. My team accomplished the task EXTREMELY well but in the process I completely alienated and demoralized the team and they fed this back in the de-brief with some gusto. I was crushed BUT it opened up a huge amount of learning having realised how much I didn't know i didn't know!

Funny now, but a huge OUCH at the time.
An ouch I will be forever grateful for though.

Most of this post was me exploring some stuff in my head. I'm doing a lot of thinking and preparing for the DEPTH 2 retreat and I'm guessing that leadership will be a recurring theme on the blog for a few weeks. I'm really excited about this though as I think youth worker/ministers have to lead on such a variety of fronts:

1. Leading young people and at the same time enabling chance for them to lead
2. Leading a team of volunteers
3. Being part of the leadership team of the Church
4. Leading change

Any leadership STUFF, ideas, themes, reflections etc that you would like to lob into the comments would be fab, or e-mail me.