Summoned to Lead

So, me and a couple friends are going through this book by Leonard Sweet. So I'm putting my thoughts about it on here. My friend Brian is doing the same thing. You can find the link to his site in my sidebar. So here are my current thoughts...

Sweet opens up with the idea that we have gone about this whole “vision thing” the wrong way. In this age we have learned so much about leadership (10 K books on it out there), but there is so much corporate scandal. So, where have we gone wrong? (11)

He suggests that leadership isn’t about seeing things, but about hearing, and about hearing the summons to lead and following it (interesting that in leading, we would be following).

Leadership is something that we are put in by the situation we are in. (12)
This concept is helpful in helping others see that they can change and affect the situation that they are in.

I love Collin’s metaphor of the flywheel. (16) It takes a bunch of pushes for it to get spinning. But you can’t tell which push was the final one to make it spin the fastest. Not sure where to head with that one. What I like about it, is that it seems that there is no “key” to leadership. All the components come together in the end. Does that mean that there are no specific “keys” to leadership? Does that mean that leadership just happens?

Sweet points out that humility is the guiding force. We’ll always hear this.
“It is the intentionally humble and quiet leaders who truly do make a difference. Humility can win out over more powerful organizational forces.” (16)

Humble leadership is a participatory, not a performance, act. It is like a conductor, guiding a group of people with various talents to play a certain tune, instead of a performer who plays his instrument for everybody else to hear. (19)

But going further with this metaphor. Sometimes the conductor has to hum out the tune so that others can get it, so that the other performers will hear that they need to play. This isn’t a controlling thing, it’s a releasing thing. It says this is what it can sound like, but what you’ll do is much better than my hum.