Notes #31: Know thyself: Intro & Myers-Briggs

As leaders, knowing ourselves is an important aspect of leadership that is too often overlooked.   Do you have a good understand of what ‘type’ of person you are?  Are you an extrovert or an introvert?  Do you like working with people or with things?  Are you more a thinker or a doer?  Have you put any thought into the fact that the people you often like to work with or be around have similar traits to you, and that the people you don’t like to work with have different traits?  This is usually all lumped into the broad concept of “personality types” or “interaction styles”, of which here are many models.   While many people may get the chance to take a personality/interaction test at work or maybe school, not everyone gets the chance.

I should say that I am not a psychologist, and I have no training in this field.  I have been exposed to some of these concepts, and have spent some time doing further research for these articles, and so I encourage those who have an interest to seek out some of the resources I mention and take this further if they want to learn more.  This will be the first of a series on this topic.

Notes #11 Servant Leadership Works of Larry Spears

For many years, Larry Spears was the executive director of the Robert Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership.  Upon his retirement from that position, he soon went and started up his own group, the Spears Center forServant-Leadership.  While at the Greenleaf Center, he oversaw several publications, most notably, new collections of Greenleaf’s works and a series of 4 anthologies on servant leadership that drew from articles and speeches on the topic from a wide range of writers and experts in leadership.  The Center expanded under his leadership, doing annual conferences and the like.  I think in many ways, Larry Spears was responsible for the spreading of the ideas of Greenleaf.

The new Greenleaf collections were already covered in the Leaders Notes on him.