Ten years ago I read an article by Peter Drucker that was printed in Christianity Today.  I typed out his seven observations about effective leaders and kept in taped to my desk.  Over the years it has become tattered and worn as I pulled it up for leadership tune-ups.   The 7 statements have proved helpful to me in ministry and leadership.  Last night we reviewed these 7 observations in our Leaders Fellowship at Cityview as 7 things I wish you knew about effective leaders.  This cheeky title really comes because I feel some urgency about these observations. The leaders in our church are called to lead.  These behaviours play out in so many realms of leadership:  home, neighbourhood, community, church, business.  I am finding that many people downplay their leadership responsibility because they have confused leadership with charisma; they think they must be hyper attractive, likable, or dramatic. In Drucker’s article he pushes back on this saying that effective leaders “had little or no charisma and little use for either for the term or what it signifies.”  I also appreciate his observation that effective leaders are not persons who are loved or admired.  Rather their followers are people that “do the right things.”  Each of the seven observations can also be observed in Jesus and his disciples and Paul and those he mentored.  What do you think about these 7 observations?  Which of these behaviours constitutes a growing edge for you?  (A link for the article is at the bottom of this post.)

Peter Drucker has observed that effective leaders behaved in common ways:

1.        They did not start out with the question, “what do I want?”  They started out asking “what needs to be done?”

2.        Then they asked, “what can and should I do to make a difference?”  This has to be something that both needs to be done and fits the leader’s strength.

3.        They constantly ask, “what are the organization’s mission and goals?”  What constitutes performance and results in this organization”?

4.        They are extremely tolerant of diversity in people and do not look for carbon copies of themselves.  It rarely even occurred to them to ask, “do I like or dislike this person?”  but they were totally intolerant when it came to a person’s performance, standards, and values.

5.        They are not afraid of strength in their coworkers.  They glory in it.  Their motto is what Andrew Carnegie wanted put on his tombstone:  “Here lies a man who attracted better people into his service than himself.”

6.        They submit themselves to the “mirror-test”—that is, they make sure the person they see in the mirror in the morning is the kind of person they want to become and respect.  This fortifies them against the leader’s greatest temptation—to do things that are popular rather than right.

7.        They are does.  Effective leaders delegate a good many things.  They have to do this or they drown in trivia.  But they do not delegate the one thing that only they can do and this, lead.

This is the link for Peter Drucker’s article at Christianity Today that was published in Leadership Journal ten years ago.