Leadership & Other Things...

After sitting through 8 hours of leadership training today, I've been mulling over a few thoughts.

(1) We broke up into small groups to brainstorm and discuss who we thought was the world's greatest leader. An interesting exercise. Bearing in mind corrections is a paramilitary environment, it came as no surprise when the likes of Collen Powell and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf surfaced. Others named included the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Alexander the Great, Gandhi, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Princess Diana and the Pope. But our state trainer wasn't prepared to hear us ultimately give the distinction of greatest leader to Jesus.

(2) I observed how tragic it was that contemporary or current leaders were absent among the names that surfaced. Is there no one out there that instills hope and inspires us to greatness?

(3) Our trainer kept equating supervision and management with leadership. I suggested that this was wrong. The mere fact that someone holds a position of supervision does not make him or her a leader. I believe that a leader is "begotten, not made." I believe that in the workforce and in any group there are persons who will be recognized by the group as natural leaders, as the ones with vision who inspire and move the group.

(4) My definition of a leader? Someone who is a team builder, who recognizes the gifts and talents of individuals and empowers them to share these gifts, who is proactive rather than reactive.

(5) During another group exercise we were asked to list examples of leadership styles that don't work. Among this list was the practice of promoting the wrong people. When a participant asked why this happened, the trainer went around the group and asked if our spouse was like us or our opposite. What struck me was that out of 60 participants, 55 declared there spouse to be their opposite! The trainer suggested that we shouldn't therefore expect any better from our employer. I observed that we don't choose who we want for our supervisor like we choose our spouse.

(6) I was bothered by the 55 out of 60 statistic. What could that mean? Then I figured it out (I think). We don't choose our opposite to be our spouse. We choose someone who feels like our soulmate, our complement. After the ceremony and honeymoon is over we settle into the nitty gritty of married life and we begin to recognize the flaws in our spouse that romance left us blind to. These "new" (are they, really?) discoveries lead us to question our choice or what we got ourselves into. When we say our spouse is our opposite, aren't we merely saying that my spouse isn't the person I thought I was marrying? This stage I believe is where so many marriages fall apart. First sight of the flaws and we want to bail out.

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