Tag Archives: effective leadership

What Does Christian Leadership Look Like (Leadership Series Part 5)

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In the last few posts we’ve been discussing the idea of leadership.  We’ve looked at leadership in general.  We’ve looked at the difference between effective leadership and moral leadership – at least as we’ve defined it.  We’ve determined that there are many different styles of leadership that can be both great and effective.  And we’ve looked at how context plays a role in who ends up leading.

Today I want to look at what we might call Christian leadership.  Really at the end of the day that should be our goal as believers if we want to lead.  This is not as simple as “lead like Jesus” although obviously we want to look at Jesus who was without a doubt the greatest, most effective leader of all time.  And He still is.

So what does it mean to be a Christian leader?  How do we do it?

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The Circumstances Of Effective Leadership (Part 4 Leadership Series)

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Think about the following short list of people who could be considered great leaders in history.  People who were effective by my working definition of effective leadership: “An effective leader is someone who has followers and gets them, through his/her leadership, to accomplish something.  The more followers they have and/or the greater the accomplishment; the more effective the leader.”  Some of these are more moral than others but we’ll leave out the completely immoral examples.  Here’s the list:

  • Martin Luther King Jr
  • Walt Disney
  • Bill Gates
  • Winston Churchill
  • Nelson Mandela
  • Martin Luther
  • Pope John Paul II
  • Harriet Tubman
  • Mother Teresa
  • William Wilberforce
  • Joan of Arc

Now I could list a ton more people in every context.  Religious, business, countries and causes.  This is just a few that came to mind right away that I think most people would say had a huge impact.  They had lots of followers and accomplished real change in their context.

Obviously most of us, or more accurately probably none of us, will be on any future list like this.  But I think we can learn something here about leadership from these folks.  What do they have in common?  What made them effective leaders?

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Is There One Best Leadership Style? (Part 3 In A Leadership Series)

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We’ve been spending some time in previous posts looking at the idea of leadership.  Really what I’m trying to do is demystify the whole thing a bit.  I think we have been told a lot of things about leadership that aren’t necessarily true.  Last time we looked that the difference between being a moral leader and an effective one and how one really has nothing much to do with the other.

Today I want to talk about leadership style.  When I asked my friends on social media about who great leaders were I got a huge variance in answers.  I knew that I would because I have friends of all sorts of different backgrounds, ages and beliefs.  The secondary question was this; What makes this person you chose a great leader?  I got all kinds of answers.  Here are a few:

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Moral Leadership and Effective Leadership Are Not The Same (Part 2 In A Leadership Series)

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I’m blessed to have a lot of different types of friends from different walks of life.  Lately I’ve been asking some of them on social media questions about their opinions of leadership.  It’s been really good to hear different perspectives on who people see as a great leader, who they think is an effective leader and what they think constitutes good measurements of effective leadership.

As I shared last time, I think we often seem to lump a lot of different things into the idea of leadership and because of that sort of overthink it.  It’s not that any of these ideas are bad.  I’m just not sure they are leadership in the purest form of the word.  Also a lot of times they don’t really add up.  We mention things that we think make a great leader but then we mention “great” leaders that frankly don’t exhibit many of those things.  This is especially true when we list great world leaders.

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