As I complete my PhD in organizational leadership, I can tell you that I have read well over 100 books on the subject of leadership over the past three years. They range from theoretical and academically inclined books for those taking a more scholarly approach to leadership studies, to those that are practical in nature and include step-by-step principles and practices for leadership. Personally, while I would not say that I enjoyed all of the books I have read, I do believe that each and every one has something to say about leadership and, in particular, leadership development.
While each book was chosen with ministry in mind, I also chose them because of the unique way they have contributed to our local ministry and leadership development. Moreover, I tried to choose each one based on the unique perspective it is written from.
Leadership: Theory and Practice, by Peter Northouse, is the most scholarly or academic book I have chosen. Frankly speaking, I don’t know if many people outside those studying leadership on a serious academic level will be reading this book. However, he does have a book that is more practically geared, called Introduction to Leadership: Concepts and Practice, that may be more appropriate for a general audience. What I love most about these two books is that they give a general introduction, history, and explanation to major schools of leadership theory and how it applies to real-life situations. Understanding the differences between transactional versus transformational leadership, the definition of servant leadership from an organizational leadership perspective, or team leadership models, has been extremely valuable as I seek to develop leadership in our youth ministry with our pastoral interns, adult volunteers, and student leadership. Moreover, having an overall picture of leadership theory has generally enriched and informed how I want to practice leadership development.
Peter Drucker’s seminal work, Managing the Nonprofit Organization, is a must read for anyone in ministry and considering leadership development. While the title presupposes the idea of management, Drucker has long been acknowledged for his more general contribution to leadership. The church is, of course, a nonprofit organization. Hence, Drucker’s work gives tangible principles and practices for directing and leading churches and ministry that can be used for leadership development and can subsequently foster an overarching vision for leadership and how we lead in our churches and youth ministries. As such, Drucker writes about topics such as organizational mission, performance, management, work relationships, and personal development in terms of leadership and management.
By far the most practical and easy-to-use book for leadership development is Essential Leadership, by Kara Powell and the Fuller Youth Institute. I have personally used this resource for leadership development for my adult volunteers, and I found it very beneficial. For starters, it comes with a leader’s guide and a participant guide. This is a valuable resource because it enables our adult volunteer leaders to better engage in their development personally but also from the perspective of the ministry as a whole. Second, the topics in this book cover a wide range that will equip those in our ministry to consider and grow in the wide range of issues that relate to our ministries and may even stretch our ministries. Finally, I found that using this comprehensive resource has enabled our volunteer staff to become more than just people who show up to youth events and activities. Rather, they have moved to becoming true shepherds and leaders.
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I have a confession to offer: I neither look forward to reading nor do I even like leadership books. I’ve read a few, like Seth Godin’s Tribes and Nancy Beach’s Gifted to Lead. And, yes, I’ve read a few others, but I don’t like them and don’t get much out of them, and I say this as one whose pastor, Bill Hybels, is a leadership guru. Yes, I read Ruth Tucker’s Leadership Reconsidered because it sorted out models of leadership for me and gave me a handle on the discussion.
It’s not that I think the books are bad or that leadership is a bad idea. I’m just not wired to think the way leadership books think. My biggest complaint, and it doesn’t apply to all of these books or to any of them from cover to cover, is that they too often go in the wrong direction. They move from leadership models in our world and then find biblical verses about elders that say more or less the same thing. Or they find examples of leaders, like Joseph or Nehemiah or Jesus or Paul, and show how they did back in Bible days what leaders are now just finding—with the tone and implication that if leaders read the Bible, they’d have known this long ago. The movement I see too often is from here to there. It’s the wrong direction. We are called to move from there to here.
But there’s another leadership approach, and it can be called the deconstructive approach. Some say leadership is servant leadership, and they go to Mark 10:45, I didn’t come to be served but to serve, and show that Christian leadership is completely otherwise. That’s helpful, but I get cranky and cynical when I read this sort of thing because I wonder what’s next. Will they then slip in the leadership models into that servant leadership model? Sometimes they do.
Yet, I know there are more or less leaders in the Bible, and there are clear guidelines—say, in the Pastoral Epistles—about how the church’s leaders are to operate and guide and mentor and lead. Yet I’m still not satisfied. Maybe I’m just cranky.
So I want to put my idea on the line and see where it leads us. We have one leader, and his name is Jesus. I want to bang this home with a quotation from Jesus from Matthew 23, where he seems to be staring at the glow of leadership in the eyes of his disciples, and he does nothing short of deconstructing the glow:
But you are not to be called “Rabbi,” for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth “father,” for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Instead of seeing myself as a leader, I see myself as a follower. Instead of plotting how to lead, I plot how to follow Jesus with others. Instead of seeing myself at the helm of some boat—and mine is small compared to many others—I see myself in the boat, with Jesus at the helm.
Maybe I just have not read enough of the leadership books to know that I’m repeating what leadership books say. Maybe not. What I do want to say, though, is that leadership too often places the pastor or some person in the front and having others be guided (and following) that person, and that, I dare say, distorts the entire gospel. Jesus was willing to say that his followers didn’t have a rabbi of their own, didn’t have a human father in a position of ultimate authority, and they didn’t have an instructor who was their teacher. They had one rabbi and one instructor, and his name was Jesus, and he was Messiah. They had one father, and he was Creator of all. They were to see themselves as brothers, not leaders. That’s straight from the lips of Jesus.
There is something so profoundly deconstructing about Jesus’ words here that we need to take them much more seriously every time and any time we begin to talk about leaders and leadership. My contention is that we are not leaders but followers; that Jesus is the leader; and that any leading we do is by way of following.
That’s a rant. It happens to be one I believe.
Oh, the three books on leadership. How about four: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!
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Here are the three leadership books I recommend and why.
1) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter Senge. Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline in 1990. This book continues to be a seminal work on a systems-thinking approach to leadership and organizational culture. Senge discusses five disciplines that nurture a productive learning environment:
1) Personal Mastery. I think this is congruent with spiritual disciplines. A leader in a learning organization must be a learner. A leader must know herself and be self-aware. A leader must be willing to pick up his cross, pursue Jesus Christ intimately, and pour out his life for others. A leader must be able to hyper-focus on her vocation and not become diffused by trying to do too many things.
2) Mental Models. We all have assumptions deeply embedded in our minds about how the world works and what we think we must do to make things happen. Often these mental models are false constructs of how the world around us actually works.
3) Shared Vision. Creating a shared vision as a community of people stimulates synergistic engagement instead of sterile compliance.
4) Team Learning. In situated learning theory, I would call this the activity of a “community of practice” that leads to genuine learning and creativity.
5) Systems Thinking. This is the “fifth discipline” that allows one to integrate all of these disciplines into a new way of thinking and viewing reality.
I would put The Fifth Discipline in my list of top 20 books that have had the most influence on my life and the way I think about how the world works. This book provides an excellent paradigm for seeing beyond the seeing to comprehend and grasp dynamic complexities and the non-linear ways that systems work. This book has helped me better understand the complexities of leading a large organization, working in the church, dealing with challenging interpersonal issues, thinking about youth ministry, building relationships, and developing a rhythm of spiritual formation.
2) The Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, by Edwin Friedman. In many ways, Edwin Friedman takes what Peter Senge developed in The Fifth Discipline and advances it. The Failure of Nerve was actually completed after Friedman’s death. Friedman was a rabbi and a “family systems” therapist. He deals with the lack of leadership that exists in our organizations, homes, churches, and businesses because of our safety-conscious and data-driven culture that waters down and subverts true vision, risk-taking, and excellence.
Friedman describes how leaders are sabotaged by the people and organizations they lead and therefore must have the nerve and courage to nurture their own maturation, commitment, and skills in order to provide strong and firm leadership in their cultures. The book talks a lot about the important leadership characteristic of being a “non-anxious presence.” Friedman calls on leaders to rely upon their competencies and intuitive skills over and beyond reliance on the need for “more data” to fix problems. He values leadership stamina, confidence, and decisiveness over technique. One of the most significant contributions to the book is an examination of the concept of empathy and how too often this becomes an exercise of enabling dysfunction. This book adds an important element to the conversation concerning the tension between what it takes to build genuine community without dumbing down the organizational culture to the lowest common denominator.
3) The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. As I write this, I’m really struck by how related yet different and (at first glance) contradictory these three book recommendations are, especially The Failure of Nerve versus The Starfish and the Spider. Whereas Friedman calls for a strong, decisive, and self-differentiated leader who is willing to make an intuitive decision for the organization, church, community, family, or business; Brafman and Beckstrom are proposing a “leaderless organization.” I’m assuming most of the readers of Slant33 are familiar with the concept of the starfish/spider metaphor, so I won’t go into the content of this wonderful little book. I have used The Starfish and the Spider in numerous university and seminary classes I have taught on missional theology, leadership, and ecclesiology. It resonates with much of the emerging generation who are not interested in being in authoritarian environments. However, I believe it takes a strong leader, like the one Friedman talks about in The Failure of Nerve, who understands the dynamic complexities Senge talks about in The Fifth Discipline, in order to create the kind of cultural environment that Brafman and Beckstrom describe in The Starfish and the Spider.
What do you think? What books on leadership would you add to the list? Make your suggestions below in the comment section.
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Comments
So many leadership books and conferences now are aimed at people becoming the leader who holds the vision and direction. I wrestle with that because in the paradigm I'm most comfortable with I see the leader as being the one who "releases" instead of "controls". In Chouinards book he teaches how to both have conviction but to give space.
Scott I appreciate a good rant and think you did a credible job of perpetuating the church myth that you are probably going to be right 85% of the time if you answer any question within the church with "Jesus" as the answer. I don't disagree with you at all but I think that perhaps the follow up column would need to expose us to some thinkers/leaders who are trying to do what you are promoting and how it is practically worked out in their day to day experiences. I'd probably add much of the work of Nouwen to your list as he did exactly what you're advocating and wrote about the difficulties and the successes of trying to do it well.
Danny- I think it's got to be a huge struggle to constantly be wrestling with the books you mention to figure out what people actually mean when they say "Leader." I'd argue that the words "leader" and "manager" while very different have been combined much more closely in our society and many wrestle with differentiating what is unique about each. The tough aprt as I see it is that most organizations say they want a leader but really are more comfortable with a manger. Churches too. We want you to lead us but we don't want you to change anything. Even many of the New Paradigm churches fight through this problem when they get "comfortable"
My thoughts. Some good. Clearly some need more thought.
Lars
I think I resisted even thinking about "Christian" Books on Leadership initially for the reasons mentioned in Scot's rant, for much the same reason that I wouldn't think about "Christian" Music if I were asked to list my favorite music.
Tim Keel's book on leadership focuses on Intuitive Leadership and is undergirded by theological reflection. He understands that Leadership is an art. This is what I was trying to get at by the mix of the three books I mentioned.
Peace.
I think I resisted even thinking about "Christian" Books on Leadership initially for the reasons mentioned in Scot's rant, for much the same reason that I wouldn't think about "Christian" Music if I were asked to list my favorite music.
Tim Keel's book on leadership focuses on Intuitive Leadership and is undergirded by theological reflection. He understands that Leadership is an art. This is what I was trying to get at by the mix of the three books I mentioned.
Peace.
http://www.outofur.com/archives/2011/01/is_leadership_b.html
A great gut check for those of us who get carried away with the influence of our own leadership.