Lessons for Corporate Leaders from the New Testament Local Church
Hi Andrew. I have been reading a lot of books on Leadership as I am motivated to becoming a better Servant Leader. You can see many of these books on our bookshelves at home like:
These are all great books and I would recommend you read them regardless of whether or not you choose to be a manager or corporate leader. Somewhere in your lifetime you will become a leader and you will find these books to be of value to you.
I recently finished a leadership book that I found to be very helpful and enlightening: Spiritual Leadership. The book covers a lot of the leadership principles from the books I have listed above and it confirmed for me that even in a spiritual context they are valid principles. The author does go one step further by defining how spiritual leadership extends beyond corporate leadership. You can read my review of the book on Amazon to see what I mean.
But rather than seeing how secular leadership principles apply in the functioning of a local church, I would like to show how the organization and leadership principles defined for the local church in the New Testament 2000 years ago are the principles that are making today's great corporations great. I believe that the local church, when operating at its fullest potential, is the most effective organizational structure in history. Therefore, we have much to learn from highly functioning New Testament local churches.
Let's start by looking at five leadership tools that we are instructed to use to serve members of the church in assisting them in become more mature Christians. Although they might seem very similar, they are significantly different. We need to understand these differences and effectively implement each, whether in the church or in our corporations if we are going to have great organizations.
(Please scroll down to the table below. Blogger is inserting excessive line breaks into the HTML, creating this big gap in the posting.)
In my next several postings I will fill out this table and expand on each of these tools of leadership, starting with Preaching.
Preaching? In corporate America? You'll see what I mean...but I don't mean anything that resembles Steve Balmer's 'Developers Developers Developers Developers'.
- Leadership and the New Science
- The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership
- The Serving Leader
- The Leader's Handbook
- Great Boss Dead Boss
- Solving Tough Problems
These are all great books and I would recommend you read them regardless of whether or not you choose to be a manager or corporate leader. Somewhere in your lifetime you will become a leader and you will find these books to be of value to you.
I recently finished a leadership book that I found to be very helpful and enlightening: Spiritual Leadership. The book covers a lot of the leadership principles from the books I have listed above and it confirmed for me that even in a spiritual context they are valid principles. The author does go one step further by defining how spiritual leadership extends beyond corporate leadership. You can read my review of the book on Amazon to see what I mean.
But rather than seeing how secular leadership principles apply in the functioning of a local church, I would like to show how the organization and leadership principles defined for the local church in the New Testament 2000 years ago are the principles that are making today's great corporations great. I believe that the local church, when operating at its fullest potential, is the most effective organizational structure in history. Therefore, we have much to learn from highly functioning New Testament local churches.
Let's start by looking at five leadership tools that we are instructed to use to serve members of the church in assisting them in become more mature Christians. Although they might seem very similar, they are significantly different. We need to understand these differences and effectively implement each, whether in the church or in our corporations if we are going to have great organizations.
(Please scroll down to the table below. Blogger is inserting excessive line breaks into the HTML, creating this big gap in the posting.)
| Leadership Tool | Purpose in the Church | Purpose in the Corporation |
|---|---|---|
| Preaching | ||
| Teaching | ||
| Training | ||
| Mentoring | ||
| Discipling |
In my next several postings I will fill out this table and expand on each of these tools of leadership, starting with Preaching.
Preaching? In corporate America? You'll see what I mean...but I don't mean anything that resembles Steve Balmer's 'Developers Developers Developers Developers'.
posted by Tom Looy, Tacit Knowledge PM at 11:10 AM
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