Education Rambler

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about leadership in another post just before I attended the Flippen Leadership Series: Human Performance in Houston, Texas.  In my post, I described some of my thoughts about leadership.  I’d like to take the time–now that I’ve thought about it for two weeks–to write about how well the Flippen Leadership Series (FLS) modeled good leadership, and gave me some leadership qualities to aspire to.

In FLS, the definition of leadership boils down to service.  In short, we lead by giving.  This concept was well modeled by our facilitator in that he kept reminding us that people who work at the Flippen Group have a motto: “Our goal is your success.”  He restated this several times over our three-day conference, but it came to life through actions.  Everything about the training was about how our facilitator could help us as participants to learn and grow.  His goal was definitely our success.

Throughout the training I began to think about leadership in my own life, and thought about missed opportunities to make my goal the success of students, colleagues, or the teachers I work with in professional development.  The truth is, I think everyone has these missed opportunities.  If my goal is someone else’s success, then when that person is successful, so am I.

There are many things to be learned about leadership through FLS, but one of my biggest take aways is the idea that leadership is service.  As a leader, it’s becoming increasingly important for me to find ways to bring success to the lives of people whose paths I cross.  Leadership is about using our power of influence to influence people’s lives in positive ways, but with every leader there are things that can be done to make that influence/service more meaningful.  To me, that’s what FLS was all about.

Attending other leadership workshops or reading books and articles about leadership, there are plenty of suggestions of how to build trust and meaningful relationships with people.  In FLS I learned that it takes a lot of work, and many times there are things holding us back from forming good relationships and from making those relationships successful.  During FLS I was made aware of some of my constraints (good news: everybody has them).  Although I’m not ready to write about them here, I’m committed to being more deliberate about confronting my constraints so that I can better serve the success of others.

I believe it’s not until we really take a long, hard look at ourselves that we find out what might be holding us back from being the best leaders we can be.  Of course the only way we can become better is when we choose to act upon those things.