What does healthy leadership look like? How do we know? What behaviours, attitudes, words, and tones do we see in healthy leadership? How do we know when leadership is unhealthy? What difference does it make to the life of a community?
One of the strategic directions that the Presbytery has held in its life, has been to encourage and work towards healthy leaders who can engage in missional communities. The social landscape in which we find ourselves as church has been changing and we know we are in a different space. Church is no longer an integral part of family, or community fabrics. As long as we are there when someone dies, that is as much as we are supposed to be exist for. But we aren’t faith communities that are about death. We are called into a life lived fully with God and we need healthy leaders in order to do that.
So what does a healthy leader look like? What would your response be to this question? What are the things that someone does that means they are a healthy leader? What do they say? How do they say it? In a moment of conflict, where different opinions and thoughts are expressed, how do they respond? When there are emotive and disruptive factors going on in a conversation or decision making process, how do healthy leaders respond?
How do you feel around those who you consider to be a healthy leader? Where are the times when you have been that healthy leader?
How do you express your own sense of being a healthy leader in your communities of faith when it is needed?
If you want to delve further into this Google “Simon Sinek”. (There is a lot on You Tube too). He brings much to our understanding in a modern context of what healthy leadership is about, how it looks and the fostering of healthy communities with purpose and place in the world. As faith communities we have purpose and place, it is different from what we have known before.
Healthy leadership will assist us to understand this new place, and rise to the challenges before us, in being God’s people, sharing love, faith and life with the world around us, in new ways.
If you have insights you want to share, share them with us. Post your insights through the Presbytery Facebook page, or put together some insights that we can post online on the webpage, or even in here. Contact the office to do that. Or you might like to share them with another person in your faith community. See what they can contribute to the conversation.
If you would like Denise to visit your congregation, to listen and share around leadership formation, contact us via the Presbytery Office 6331 9784 or Denise 0427 647 395 or denise.savage@victas.uca.org.au