Leadership Types- 2
I’m still on a short break from writing this weekly leadership blog. Below is an excerpt from George Barna’s book, A Fish Out of Water, with his understanding regarding the characteristics of two of four leader types – Team Building leaders and Operational leaders. Enjoy!
Team Building Leaders
- Able to identify & pursue appropriate people, determine their gifts, & knit them into complementary work units
- Provide the emotional energy to keep teams going
- Love the interactive dimension of the chase
- View people as puzzle pieces for the vision
- Love to enable & empower people
- Blend vision & personal ability by organizing people
- Inveterate networkers
- Being with people energizes them
- Energize others
- Make others feel heard & understood
- Use charisma & popularity to motivate people to get involved & to excel
- Don’t like meetings, paperwork, or memos
- Tend to ignore anything on paper
- Tendency to waffle on details
- Can invest too much trust & confidence in others—“get burned”
- Inattention to structure & management burns others
Operational Leaders
- Structural architects and masters of process
- Develop systems around the vision, resources & opportunities available
- Create new routines that serve the purpose
- Excel at creating dissonance to facilitate change
- Craft a persuasive case
- Get everybody moving in the same direction
- Build systems that tie contributions together
- Provide stability, predictability, & consistency
- Create new opportunities & solutions (unlike managers, who tend to refine processes)
- May be well-liked; low-key & low profile
- Initiate, coordinate, integrate, facilitate, evaluate & enhance the efforts of others
- Hate inefficiency, loose ends, communication break-downs, cost-overruns, missed deadlines & legal crises
- Concrete thinkers
- Focus on practical operational details
- Sometimes champion the mechanics of a system rather than the vision
- Dislike conflict; may surrender too easily
- Avoid delivering bad news
Developing Kingdom Leaders - Tom Yeakley 