I have been having students in the current "Leading for Change" course read the introduction and first chapter of a book by Barbara Mackoff and Gary Wenet, "The Inner Work of Leaders: Leadership as a Habit of Mind". This book is available to you through the UNBC library as an electronic resource - you can find it easily in the online catalogue and you just need your 14 digit library number and your 4 digit PIN to have access to it. I would like you to read the opening to this book to help you understand why I've asked you to look at your leadership in a personal way, through your Self-Portrait assignment. In your first posts, both of you have identified specific leadership lessons in personal experiences - this reflective process is the "inner work" that supports strong self-understanding that translates, in social situations, to more effective leadership. In comments to this post, I would like you to select quotes from this reading and connect them to your narratives and the "life lessons in leadership" that you've shared. I think it works well to use a comment as a paragraph - one main thought per comment! This reading will also take us nicely into the Leadership Mindsets book by Kaser and Halbert. The examples from the lives of leaders in the Mackoff and Wenet book are similar to those in "Mindsets". For me, the main lesson in both, as well as in Senge's books about the 5 disciplines of systems thinking and Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (also his principle-centred leadership, based on the 7 habits), is that, as leaders, we think in certain ways and develop the beliefs that are the foundation of our actions. This thought is expressed more strongly in a different way, in a concept that is central to the field of school improvement: We cannot have sustainable change in practice without a corresponding change in beliefs. We'll come back to that idea, I'm sure!
