What: Understand the various leadership development stages.
Why: You will know what is most critical to focus on during each stage of your leadership journey, in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.
The Making of a Leader: Recognizing the Lessons and Stages of Leadership Development, by Robert Clinton (First published in 1989).
Our recommendation:
After reading his book back in the 1990s, we had to go to California to meet Dr. Clinton in person, and he is as gracious in person as his book is useful. Although written from a Christian faith perspective (with the belief that God loves and is working in the life of every person), Clinton lays out a basic character-skills-network development framework that all students of leadership will find helpful.
His exuberance to be precise has led to a bit of an excessive creation of new terms but the basic leadership development framework he lays out makes the read well worthwhile.
From Amazon.com:
After examining the lives of hundreds of historical, biblical, and contemporary leaders, Dr. J. Robert Clinton gained perspective on how leaders develop over a lifetime. By studying the six distinct stages he identifies, you will learn to:
- Recognize and respond to God’s providential shaping in your life
- Determine where you are in the leadership development process
- Identify others with leadership characteristics
- Direct the development of future leaders
Purchase from Amazon here.
