What three books do you recommend on the subject of leadership development and why?

Danny Kwon


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.

Scot McKnight


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!




Mike King


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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Formation.Books

Other than books developed specifically for youth workers, what kind of books should a youth worker be reading on a regular basis?

Chris Folmsbee


If we are going to move toward becoming more and more about holistic youth ministry (think: the whole of people, not programs), then youth workers must be reading books (and blogs, journals, magazines, etc.) in a variety of genres.

Before I list what I believe are some very important genres to be reading and interacting with, let me first give a few reasons why I think reading helps youth workers. For many youth workers it isn’t so much a question of which genre to be reading but whether one chooses to read at all. Last week I asked a youth worker if he had read a certain book. His response? “I don’t have time to read.”


5 Very Simple Reasons Why Youth Workers Should Read


Reading can ignite your imagination. We all know the importance and effects of an active imagination. I speak to youth workers who often tell me they are bored with their jobs. While working with people is different all the time, the ways that these youth workers work with people is often ordinary and repetitive. Reading can help lift you out of the mundane and inspire you to new ideas and practices.


Reading can help you become a better communicator. Regularly interacting with the thoughts of others through reading can help you develop a better vocabulary, better understand how to construct sentences, provide examples of ways in which to bring new definition to an old word, etc.

Reading can help you become a better communicator simply because you interact more with language and words. Experiencing the use of words through others can help you build a meaningful array of useful words to use in your own context.


Reading can help you stretch you. We’re all lifelong learners, or at least should be. So reading the thoughts, ideas, etc., of others can often lead you to think about topics you might not normally think about. For me, it is often the ideas of others that lead me to thinking beyond myself. Most of the time I am forced to think about new and challenging things through reading the thoughts of others, not through my own discovery.


Reading can be a stress reliever. Because so many of us take on the stress of others and pile it on our own stressors, we need to have direct outlets of relief. Some fish, hunt, golf, or play Wii. Some read. Reading can stimulate your mind and at the same time be a creative and healthy way to relax. Some of you already know this because this is how you relax. Others of you have never tried it. If you haven’t tried to read for relaxation’s sake, give it a try. You might be surprised how it helps you.


Reading can help you do your job better. A lot of what we read is either directly or indirectly the experiences of others through story. Often the experience of others can help us realize our strengths or weaknesses. You can learn about yourself through reading, and you can learn a lot about how to do your job better through the successes and failures of others. The most recent example of this for me is the book Rework, by Fried and Hansson.


Book Genres Youth Workers Should Read:

• Theology: because youth ministry is a theological endeavor.

• Leadership: because we all need to be better leaders.

• Education: because so much of what we do is teach.

• Sociology: because the world and people change, and we need to know how and why.

• Religious: because other faith traditions have good thoughts on life too.

• Art/Culture: because the creative expressions of others can help you be more creative yourself.

• Politics: because youth workers are citizens too.

• Anything else that makes you smile, laugh, or just plain have fun and relax: because if you don’t, one day the stress will become so overwhelming that you’ll think throwing in the towel is the best solution. It may be the best solution, but let it be because you decided it, not that another factor or set of circumstances decided it for you.







Mike King


Youth workers: Please read books other than books developed for and marketed toward youth workers. Rarely does a specific youth ministry book come out that legitimately deserves the label “must be read by youth workers.”

One of the recent books deserving the must-read label for youth workers is Andy Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation.

With that out of the way, I will organize my response to the question above into two categories.


First Category: Books that help you become a better youth worker.

I believe there are books that should be read by youth workers who are involved in the Christian formation of young people in the realm of an ecclesial context. Yes, this category includes books written specifically for youth workers directly, but I believe this category should primarily be made up of books not written specifically for youth workers. We should be reading books that help us think more deeply about faith, ecclesiology, anthropology, sociology, adolescent development, culture, history, business, leadership, communication, economics, psychology, and above all, theology.

Books like Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization and Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix helped me to become a systems thinker and shaped me as a leader of a complex youth ministry organization.

Reading books about the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Erik Erikson, and others help me gain a fuller understanding of the dynamics of adolescent development.

Books like Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and anything by Lesslie Newbigin broaden my horizon concerning the church and the mission of the church in our culture.

The books in this category broaden my understanding of how the world works, how people interact with one another, how I can communicate better, how conflict is resolved, how to organize, how to interpret the changing landscape of culture, how to think about what it means to be a faithful church in the culture in which we live, and on and on.


Second Category: Books that help you become a better human being.

These types of books should inspire you to be a better person, to be more fully human and more fascinated with life, love, and faith. What are the subjects and interests that make you feel alive? What fires your imagination and fills you with passion? Read books that inspire you. Maybe it’s science fiction, a compelling biography, the beauty of poetry, or the classics that stir your soul. Keep reading. Be a lifelong learner.

Often the two categories I’m using to classify what youth workers should read overlap for me. I find few things more deeply moving and spiritually energizing than reading theology. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God, and N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God challenge my faith and move me deeper into love and life with God.

I find that often when I feel closest to God, I’m drawn to poetry. English Poet William Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

It is really sweet when I find treasure in a book that combines several of my interests into a feast of literary delight. My favorite novel accomplished this for me. I was in my early twenties when I first read The Source, by prolific American novelist James Michener. The Source is an epic novel tracing the history of the Middle East, beginning in the Stone Age and going up to the modern state of Israel. The story unfolds through fictional characters who are creatively linked to archaeological artifacts that are uncovered at various levels of a modern-day excavation of an ancient tell by a group of archaeologists. This book is absolutely fascinating, exploring such themes as the development of monotheism, culture, religion, politics, etc., over millennia of history.

The Source fired my interest in history, archaeology, the geography of the land of the Bible, world religions, Scripture, and much more. In my office I proudly display my collection of archeological antiquities I’ve gathered over the years. I’m passionate about the history, politics, and cultures of the Middle East. In 21 trips to the Middle East, I’ve taken hundreds of young people and youth workers with me in hopes that they would become as fascinated with this part of the world and its connection to our heritage as I am. Pretty powerful ramifications emerged for my life and ministry from “just a novel.”

Read, read, read…

I saved the best for last—Scripture, the Bible, Sacred Text, the Word of the Lord—whatever you want to call it is okay with me. Just read it, love it, live it, study it, meditate on it, embrace it, embody it, rediscover the beauty and power of the story of God at work in the world. God’s story is not for yesterday. It is the continuous unfolding of the Spirit’s transforming narrative in our current reality.





           

Dave Rahn


Based on my conversations with youth workers, our lives are too full of über-urgent activities to read. Too bad. I’m my best version of myself when I’m regularly reading.

It’s still important for me to read something from God’s Word every day. I don’t beat myself up when I miss, like I once did. But this is the intake that trumps all other reading as nourishment for my soul, which is, by the way, my chief reason for reading. I don’t want my innermost Dave to shrivel up for lack of sustenance.

There is another category of books I recommend for constant nibbling. Some books are rooted in Scripture and aspire to teach, coach, and encourage me. Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God and Counterfeit Gods are both new titles that accomplish this end. Whatever John Stott writes also gets me there, as do the works of Watchman Nee. I come away from this sort of reading having been taken on a deep-dive tour guide through some portions of the Bible, satisfied because of the unique power of God’s Word and more prepared to live faithfully.

I think God also enriches our vision when we read books that are theologically upstream from our current assignments. Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger messed me up at a time when I thought all I was supposed to do with kids was attract them to meetings where I could challenge them to begin a personalized relationship with Christ. Howard Snyder wrote a few books, including The Problem of Wineskins, that both anchor and stretch how I understand a local church’s form and function. Though these books are not directly written for youth workers, they can help us move into the mature depths we need to lead well.

I happen to be a student of leadership formation, the process of change, and organizational culture. Books in this category are often not explicitly Christian, but they have sure been relevant to my world. A while ago it was Peter Drucker and Chris Argyris; now Patrick Lencioni, Stephen Covey, Tom Peters, Peter Senge, Jim Collins, and Seth Godin crank out books I value. I’m not sure everyone should share these particular interests of mine, but I do think it is wise to cultivate diverse reading interests that have professional application.

When the rare research-based book is published with youth ministry relevance, I am eager to pore over it. Christian Smith has made fabulous contributions lately. (By the way, I don’t tend to put Barna in this category—he does solid research but overreaches too often for my taste when it comes to implications.)

I also love reading a few books each year that are pure fun. These need to be page turners, books I have trouble putting down, wonderful stories of escape. There was a day when fantasy novels did the trick. More recently, John Grisham mysteries are my taste.

I don’t know about you, but the creative part of my soul enjoys the chance to soar over varied landscapes now and again.






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