Simple leadership. I have spent the last few years trying to think both deeply and simply about leadership. In this post I want to give a very simple overview of the basic framework of my thinking. Later I will go into more on how and why I ended up here. For now, conceiving of leadership in three connected practice areas as a triangle was influenced by “triple constraint theory” used by our IT team at Triple Creek. Quality in project coding is determined by balancing three essential elements: cost, time and scope of the project. In a similar way, leadership impact is visualized by the area bounded by the leader’s mastery of three areas:
- Personal- Identity, awareness of strengths and weaknesses, competencies and skill sets.
- Relational- Communication, developing others, setting culture, building teams and community.
- Missional- Setting vision, direction, values, strategies, while inspiring others to join the noble cause.
A growing leader is continually expanding their mastery in all three areas. However, the personal dimension is foundational, because it is the primary constraint of one’s relational capabilities. In a similar way, a person with a big vision but poor relational IQ, will never reach their peak impact. However, a good person, with decent relational skill, will be a underachiever if they never stretch their vision beyond the status quo.
The long-term goal of the simpleadership.com project is to provide a simple, transferable way to develop leaders in your organization. I use these ideas and models in my own personal mentoring meetings and in the teaching on leadership I do in my context (both business and Christian non-profit work). The following video lesson is intended to both give you an overview of these basic ideas and model how you can simply teach these concepts. You notice a few things about the resources we will produce:
1 – They are simple. This video lesson was produced on a free app, Educreations, which is wonderful but has no editing capabilities. The goal is not to be slick but give both information and model how you can use this material in mentoring coversations and short teaching sessions (hence the back of the napkin illustrations).
2 – They are NOT copywrited. While I hope that those who “riff” off of these ideas will give me some props, I want people to be free to modify anything here to fit their own leadership context and produce much better resources than I can.
Click here to view introduction to simpleadership.
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