Leadership for 21st Century Faith Formation
Explore leadership approaches and skills for congregations and faith formation
A Framework for Change
Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard
Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Broadway Books, 2010)

Switch asks the following question: Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle, say the Heaths, is a conflict that's built into our brains. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results. In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switchshows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.
Article: Becoming a Change Leader
Guide: Switch for Organizations - A Workbook
Article: Becoming a Change Leader
- This article summarizes the key concepts and processes of the 3-part change framework developed by Dan and Chip Heath in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.
Guide: Switch for Organizations - A Workbook
Leadership Challenge - Practices & Commitments
James Kouzes and Barry Posner
Introduction to the 10 Truths of Leadership
The Truth about Leadership
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

In these turbulent times, when the very foundations of organizations and societies are shaken, leaders need to move beyond pessimistic predictions, trendy fads, and simplistic solutions. They need to turn to what's real and what's proven. In their new book, Kouzes and Posner reveal ten time-tested truths that show what every leader must know, the questions they must be prepared to answer, and the real-world issues they will likely face. Based on thirty years of research, more than one million responses to Kouzes and Posner's leadership assessment, and the questions people most want leaders to answer, the book explores the fundamental, enduring truths of leadership that hold constant regardless of context or circumstance - leaders make a difference, credibility, values, trust, leading by example, heart, and more; and shows emerging leaders what they need to know to be effective. Drawing from cases spanning three generations of leaders from around the world, this is a book leaders can use to bring about the essential changes that will renew organizations and communities.
Article: The Ten Truths of Leadership - James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
(Excerpted from: The Truth about Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart of the Matter Facts You Need to Know. Jossey-Bass, 2010)
Article: The Ten Truths of Leadership - James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
(Excerpted from: The Truth about Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart of the Matter Facts You Need to Know. Jossey-Bass, 2010)
- This article summarizes the 10 truths - the fundamental principles that inform and support the practices of leadership. “The truths we’ve written about are things you can count on. They are realities of leadership that will help you to think, decide, and act more effectively. They provide lessons that will sustain you in your personal and professional development. They are truths that address what is real about leadership.”
Introduction to the Leadership Challenge
The Leadership Challenge (5th Edition, 25th Anniversary)
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (Jossey-Bass, 2012)

For more than 25 years, The Leadership Challenge has been the most trusted source on becoming a better leader, selling more than 2 million copies in over 20 languages since its first publication. Based on Kouzes and Posner's extensive research, this all-new edition casts their enduring work in context for today's world, proving how leadership is a relationship that must be nurtured, and most importantly, that it can be learned. It features over 100 all-new case studies and examples, which show The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership in action around the world; focuses on the toughest organizational challenges leaders face today; and addresses changes in how people work and what people want from their work
Article: Leadership Challenge Overview - from The Leadership Challenge Book by James Kouzes and Barry Posner
(Wiley Publishers, www.wiley.com)
Article: Overview of Leadership Challenge Approach
Website: www.leadershipchallenge.com
Article: Leadership Challenge Overview - from The Leadership Challenge Book by James Kouzes and Barry Posner
(Wiley Publishers, www.wiley.com)
- In this excerpt from The Leadership Challenge Kouzes and Posner describe the five practices of exemplary leadership: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart.
Article: Overview of Leadership Challenge Approach
Website: www.leadershipchallenge.com
Adaptive Leadership
Ronald Heifetz & Martin Linsky
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
Ronald Heifetz, Martin Linksy, & Alexander Grashow (Harvard Business Press, 2009)

When change requires you to challenge people's familiar reality, it can be difficult, dangerous work. Whatever the context, whether in the private or the public sector, many will feel threatened as you push though major changes. But as a leader, you need to find a way to make it work. Ron Heifetz first defined this problem with his distinctive theory of Adaptive Leadership in Leadership Without Easy Answers. In a second book, Leadership on the Line, Heifetz and co-author Marty Linsky highlighted the individual and organizational dangers of leading through deep change in business, politics, and community life. Heifetz, Linsky, and co-author Alexander Grashow are taking the next step: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a hands-on, practical guide containing stories, tools, diagrams, cases, and worksheets to help you develop your skills as an adaptive leader, able to take people outside their comfort zones and assess and address the toughest challenges.
Article: Becoming an Adaptive Leader - Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky
Article: A Survival Guide for Leaders - Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky
(Harvard Business Review, June 2002. www.hbr.org)
Article: Becoming an Adaptive Leader - Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky
- This article summarizes the key concepts and processes of adaptive leadership as developed by Heifetz and Linsky.
Article: A Survival Guide for Leaders - Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky
(Harvard Business Review, June 2002. www.hbr.org)
- It’s exciting—even glamorous—to lead others through good times and bad. But leadership also has its dark side: the inevitable attempts to take you out of the game when you’re steering your organization through difficult change. Leading change requires asking people to confront painful issues and give up habits and beliefs they hold dear. Result? Some people try to eliminate change’s visible agent - you. Whether they attack you personally, undermine your authority, or seduce you into seeing things their way, their goal is the same: to derail you, easing their pain and restoring familiar order. How to resist attempts to remove you-and continue to propel change forward? Manage your hostile environment - your organization and its people - and your own vulnerabilities.
Eight-Stage Change Process
John Kotter
Leading Change
John P. Kotter (Harvard Business School Press, 1996, 2012)

Leading Change is widely recognized as his seminal work on leading transformational change, and is an important precursor to his newer ideas on acceleration: effectively managing operations while seizing new opportunity. Needed more today than at any time in the past, this immensely relevant book serves as both a visionary guide and a practical toolkit on how to approach the difficult yet crucial work of leading change in any type of organization. Kotter describes an eight-stage process of change: 1) Establishing a sense of urgency, 2) Creating the guiding coalition, 3) Developing a vision and strategy, 4) Communicating the change vision, 5) Empowering people for broad-based action, 6) Generating short term wins, 7) Consolidating gains and producing more change, and 8) Anchoring new approaches in the culture. Freshly designed and with new commentary by John Kotter, "Leading Change" is a true leadership classic.
Leading Change-What Transformations Efforts Fail - John Kotter
(Harvard Business Review, January 2007. www.hbr.org)
Leading Change-What Transformations Efforts Fail - John Kotter
(Harvard Business Review, January 2007. www.hbr.org)
- Most major change initiatives generate only lukewarm results. Many fail miserably. Why? Kotter maintains that too many leaders don’t realize transformation is a process, not an event. It advances through stages that build on each other. And it takes years. By understanding the stages of change-and the pitfalls unique to each stage-leaders boost their chances of a successful transformation. In this article John Kotter introduces the eight stages of the change process.
The Heart of Change Field Guide
Dan S. Cohen (Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

John P. Kotter's Leading Change outlined an eight-step program for organizational change. Then, Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen's The Heart of Change introduced the revolutionary "see-feel-change" approach, which helped leaders understand the crucial role of emotion in successful change efforts. The Heart of Change Field Guide provides leaders tools, frameworks, and advice for bringing these breakthrough change methods to life within their own organizations. The guide provides a practical framework for implementing each step in the change process, as well as a new three-phase approach to execution: creating a climate for change, engaging and enabling the whole organization, and implementing and sustaining change. Hands-on diagnostics-including a crucial "change readiness module" - reveal the dynamics that will help or hinder success at each phase of the change process. Both flexible and scaleable, the frameworks presented in this guide can be tailored for any size or type of change initiative.
Make It Stick-Embedding Change in Organizational Culture - Dan S. Cohen
(Excerpted from The Heart of Change Field Guide: Tools and Tactics for Leading Change in Your Organization. Harvard Business Press, 2005)
Make It Stick-Embedding Change in Organizational Culture - Dan S. Cohen
(Excerpted from The Heart of Change Field Guide: Tools and Tactics for Leading Change in Your Organization. Harvard Business Press, 2005)
- To make change last, new behaviors need to become a part of the formal and informal systems, practices, and habits that form the organization’s culture. The key elements that make new behaviors stick involve: 1) achieving tangible results as quickly as possible, 2) showing how the change is working, and why the old ways won’t work; 3)measuring and supporting the sustained performance; and 4) ensuring that leadership will support and model the new behaviors. This article from The Heart of Change Field Guide provides practical tools for making a change stick.
Culturally-Intelligent Leadership
David Livermore
Leading with Cultural Intelligence
David Livermore (AMACOM, 2009)

What is CQ? And why do leaders need it in our increasingly connected world? Why are some leaders able to create trust and negotiate contracts with Chinese, Latin Americans, and Germans all in the same day, while others are barely able to manage the diversity in their own offices? The answer lies in their cultural intelligence, or CQ. Packed with practical tools, research, and case studies, Leading with Cultural Intelligence breaks new ground, offering today's global workforce a specific, four-step model to becoming more adept at managing across cultures: 1) Drive—show the interest and confidence to adapt cross-culturally; 2) Knowledge—understand how differences such as religion, family, education, legal, and economic influences affect the way people think and behave; 3) Strategy—monitor, analyze, and adjust plans in unfamiliar cultural setting; and 4) Action—choose the right verbal and nonverbal behaviors, depending on context. Practical and insightful, this indispensable guide shows leaders how to connect across any cultural divide, including national, ethnic, and organizational culture.
Article: Becoming a Culturally Intelligent Leader
Linn Van Dyne, Soon Ang, and David Livermore
(This article first appeared as “Cultural Intelligence: A Pathway for Leading in a Rapidly Globalizing World” in Leading Across Differences edited by K. Hannum, B.B. McFeeters, and L. Booysen. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2010, pp. 131-138).
Website: http://davidlivermore.com
Article: Becoming a Culturally Intelligent Leader
Linn Van Dyne, Soon Ang, and David Livermore
(This article first appeared as “Cultural Intelligence: A Pathway for Leading in a Rapidly Globalizing World” in Leading Across Differences edited by K. Hannum, B.B. McFeeters, and L. Booysen. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2010, pp. 131-138).
Website: http://davidlivermore.com
Cultural Intelligence: Improving Your CQ to Engage Our Multicultural World
David A. Livermore (Baker Academic, 2009)

As twenty-first-century society grows increasingly complex, pluralistic, and multicultural, it behooves Christians to communicate effectively between and among diverse populations. Research indicates that missions often fail because of cultural collision and lack of empathy and understanding between different peoples. David Livermore proposes a meta model—based on sound research principles and social science methodology—for helping Christians intelligently navigate the multicultural maze in Cultural Intelligence. The much-needed skill of Cultural Intelligence (CQ) both at home and abroad is the ability to work effectively across national, ethnic, and even organizational cultures. Livermore explains that CQ is not simply learning how to externally modify behavior but is based on inward transformation. His work is replete with assessment tools, simulations, case studies, and reflective exercises.
Networked Leadership
Article: Working Wikily - Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, & Heather McLeod Grant
(Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010, www.ssireview.org)
Article: Working Wikily 2.0 - Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, & Heather McLeod Grant
(www.workingwikily.net) (Monitor Institute, www.monitorinsitute.com)
(Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010, www.ssireview.org)
- Most nonprofits use social media like Facebook and Twitter as an ancillary part of what they do. A few organizations, however, are using these tools to fundamentally change the way they work and increase their social impact. Working wikily is characterized by greater openness, transparency, decentralized decision making, and collective action.
Article: Working Wikily 2.0 - Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, & Heather McLeod Grant
(www.workingwikily.net) (Monitor Institute, www.monitorinsitute.com)
- The new social networking tools are only the beginning. The deeper news is actually about the networks behind the tools, and how these networks are fundamentally changing the way we live and work. In other words, it’s not the wiki; it’s how wikis and other social media tools are engendering a new, networked mindset—a way of working wikily—that is characterized by principles of openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action.
Leadership from the Community Up
Paul Schmitz
Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up
Paul Schmitz (Jossey-Bass, 2012)

This new book envisions new leadership possibilities within all people and their communities. It also offers a set of practices that will help leaders be more effective at bringing diverse people and groups together to solve problems. While many leadership books today focus on how to lead organizations, this book is about how to lead communities. It outlines five leadership values that are essential today: diversity and inclusion; teamwork and collaboration; recognizing and mobilizing assets; continuous learning; and integrity. The book offers a path of hope for all those who want to build and engage the diverse leadership our communities need today. The book is organized around a new definition of leadership: It is an action everyone can take, not a position few hold; it is about taking personal and social responsibility to work with others on common goals; and it is the practice of values that engage diverse individuals and groups to work together effectively. Not everyone can lead in every context, but everyone does have the capacity to step up, take responsibility, and work with others to make progress on the issues they care about.
Article: Chapter 1 from Everybody Leads
Website: http://everyoneleads.org
Article: Chapter 1 from Everybody Leads
Website: http://everyoneleads.org