Rosa Say is running an interesting set of invited postings about leadership at her blog. They all are interesting, but this post by Kevin Eikenberry about learning and leadership caught my eye. Most Extension Professionals place a high emphasis on life long learning – at least for our clientele. My first reading made me think about how we as Extension Professionals need to keep on learning to add to our leaderships skills. Glen Hiemstra points out that when we find ourselves simply reacting to things we are often still looking backwards at past structures and models (see Glen’s Preferred Futuring concept in his book).
Kevin addresses this very directly: “The status quo requires no leadership. Think about it. If everything in the current situation was great – if there was no need for change – how much leadership would be needed? Leadership is required because we want to move somewhere.” Other good tidbits include brief discussions on modeling learning and how being a better leader leads to becoming a better human.
It’s also a good post for Extension Professionals working with leadership and management groups. You might want to also check out the other posts on Rosa’s blog and take a look at what Kevin is saying on his blog.