Steve Lyon: Editor-in-Chief, Moody Publishers



Steve Lyon: Editor-in-Chief, Moody Publishers

Warren Bennis. On Becoming a Leader. New York: Basic Books, 2003

Author Bio: University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School; Thomas S. Murphy Distinguished Research Fellow at the Harvard Business School; Visiting Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research. Chairman of the Organizational Studies Department, MIT's Sloan School of Management where Former faculty member, Harvard and Boston University, former provost and Executive Vice President of State University of New York at Buffalo and President of the University of Cincinnati from 1971-1978. 12 honorary degrees; has served on numerous boards of advisers, including Claremont University, American Leadership Forum, the American Chamber of Commerce and the Salk Institute. Served on four US Presidential Advisory Boards; has consulted for many Fortune 500 companies including G.E., Ford, and Starbucks. In 1996, Forbes magazine referred to him as the "Dean of Leadership Gurus."

Written or edited 26 books, including the best-selling Leaders and On Becoming a Leader, both translated into 21 languages. The Financial Times recently named Leaders as one of the top 50 business books of all time. His latest book, Geeks & Geezers, (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) examines the differences and similarities between leaders 30 years and younger and leaders 70 years and older.

Bennis is a keen observer of human nature—what makes people tick and how they react in the midst of groups and organizations. While some of the material in this book is repeats concepts one can find in other leadership books, there are nuggets that I found unique to his experience and learning. Chief among them is the …

Major Take Away value

“On Becoming A Leader is based on the assumption that leaders are people who are able to express themselves fully. By this I mean that they know who they are, and how to fully deploy their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses” p. xxvii.

Regarding how good leaders view leadership, Bennis writes, “First, they all agree that leaders are made, not born, and made more by themselves than by external means. Second, they agree that no leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express him- or herself freely and fully. That is, leaders have no interest in proving themselves, but an abiding interest in expressing themselves” p. xxix. Put another way, “We become free to express ourselves rather than endlessly trying to prove ourselves” p. 71.

“At bottom, becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself” p. xxxiii.

“So the point is not to become a leader. The point is to become yourself, to use yourself completely—all your skills, gifts, and energies—in order to make your vision manifest. You must, in sum, become the person you started out to be, and to enjoy the process of becoming” p. 104.

Naturally, this should be tempered by the biblical commitment to become more Christ-like. Still, this is a profoundly different orientation than many technique-driven, goal-oriented books on leadership—and I commend it to you as one of the most genuinely liberating leadership ideas I’ve encountered.

Table of Contents

Mastering the Context

Understanding the Basics

Knowing Yourself

Knowing the World

Operating on Instinct

Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything

Moving Through Chaos

Getting People on Your Side

Organizations Can Help—or Hinder

Forging the Future

Application

• Personal Context: Shy, timid. Ro. 12:10 “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love, give preference to one another in honor.” Experience has taught me one can be too preferential and at times, that’s been the case

• Thus, my tendency was to rely on others’ insights more than my own. Was true of leadership books and principles

• Pretty quickly, I became disconnected from technique-based leadership because it just didn’t ring true—yet I was pulled toward it because “well these people are leaders and so they should know.”

• Enter On Becoming A Leader. Bennis articulated what I had sensed, but was afraid to trust—and it was very liberating. I realized …

o The essence of leadership isn’t mastering technique—it’s mastering divinely-enabled and God-centered self-expression and

o That leadership is a by-product of that self-expression. So again, as Bennis says, the objective isn’t to lead, it’s to express yourself

● That requires an act of faith in these things:

o Comfort—and dare I say—joy in how God created us—and that He expects us to be us in the leadership positions we have

o That doesn’t diminish the need for us to conform to the image of Christ. But the creative freedom we have to express those attributes through our personality is one of the playfully wonderful things about our partnership with Him

o A reticence to conform to what others think ‘you’re supposed to be like’ in the position of leadership you have. You’re supposed to be you, infused by the power of the Holy Spirit

o Word picture: Our leadership is like a canvas. Everyday, we splash more color and imagery onto that canvas through divinely-enabled and God-centered self-expression. We should enjoy that and trust that effective leadership is a by-product of that endeavor

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