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Monday, April 4, 2016

Leadership&Spirit

I recently read Leadership and Spirit by Russ Moxley (2000).


In this work, RM takes examines our humanness through four dimensions:  mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual.  He delves deeply into the spiritual component, particularly as it relates to leadership, to partnership, and to community.

My biggest takeaways:
> Fully engaging the spiritual/emotional in our work creates necessary congruence.
> Ignoring the emotional/spiritual ultimately results in commitmentless work.
> Leadership exercised devoid of attention to the spiritual dimension fails to plumb the depths of organizational achievement, experiencing only the shallows as result.
> We often say yes when we want to say no – a collusion derived from fear- or dependency-based environments.
> Only from honoring a diversity of viewpoints can a shared sense of purpose and meaning emerge. 
> Fully actualizing work should bring to us a sense of life, rather than the feeling of a daily march toward death.
> An environment of partnership, of community, which recognizes and invites differing gifts, skills, energies, and thinking, fosters high performance and worthy achievements, both individually and collectively.
> When we spend more time in human doing than in human being, we begin to understand the emptiness of the former and miss the power of the latter.
> Our inner life irrefutably affects our outer work. 
> Only when leaders learn to create space for honest dialogue, truth finding, shared decision making, does true partnership in the leadership process emerge.  
> Only through relationships and community do we come to fully make sense of our lives. 

Favorite quotes:
“... our practice of leadership either suffocates or elevates spirit.” (p. xii)

“It is my conviction that in the activity of leadership the who is more important than the what or the how.” (p. 107)

An excellent book, very well written.  Thanks for the recommendation, RP.

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