Leadership Simplified Synthesis

Leadership is a lifelong process,

As captured by Chris Lowney in his book the Heroic Leadership. It is in this spirit that I shared my derived an simplified version of the accumulative process of leadership to a group of 5 freshmen students who participated in the Ateneo Campus Leadership Discovery on January 9, 2011.

In all the references I’ve read on the topics of leadership, I can synthesize them into 3 simple and general approaches which I guess reflects the leadership process.

Know: the primarily starting point is knowledge. It is grasping a

nd articulating who you are, what you value, what you believe in, what your vision is and why you do it which stirs us towards action. It was beautifully articulated by Fr. Arrupe when he said that:

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
that is, than falling in love
in a quite absolute, final way.

What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you
out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,what you read, who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in love; stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

One practical consideration for knowing yourself is the practice of blogging or journal writing after a 15 minute reflection. This practice captures the feelings and thoughts that you have in that moment. If you do it in about 3 months and review it, you begin to see patterns about who you are. It is in this knowledge that you begin to see the graces, the gifts and will then lead you to ask yourself what you can give to the world.

Develop: the next practical step after having an understandable picture about ourselves is to nurture the knowledge that you have substantially gained after a concentrated effort to know they self. Read books, expand your knowledge in the context of your desires, and take note of your skills and what you want to develop further. This is where practical innovations happen when we desire to nurture what is given to us.

Multiply: Building the community naturally flows from a person with competence and knowledge in his mission. Multiplication deals with you unlocking the potential of other people. It is coupled with love and the deep faith on the potential of the human person that drives leaders to nurture other leaders. In the process, influence is further cultivated and our interior nurturance begins to bare good fruits. A practical application of multiplication is to be active in a specific social advocacy.

This does not end in multiplication. Once you think less about yourself and more about others, we begin to empty ourselves. This “emptying” then leads us to further deepen our desire to know more about ourselves and ultimately our creator. Then it starts all over again. This cycle grows the influence in us and this helps us amplify and spread the reach of our mission throughout the world.