10 Ways to Lead Your Family

“Leadership” is a huge buzzword in 21^st Century America. Corporations and institutions spend gazillions of dollars annually on classes and training seminars designed to teach and facilitate leadership skills in employees. Why? The business world knows that organizations function best when people take ownership of the opportunity and the responsibility to lead.

Likewise, family dynamics become more conducive to harmony, healing, productivity and positive growth when the people charged with the responsibility step forward and actually lead. Too many parents are reluctant (or scared, or lack the confidence, or feel ill-equipped) to take on such a role. However, no matter what your family configuration, making the effort to guide and lead the way is a most critical step toward family health.

Is it easy? Certainly not! How about straightforward? Not on your life! Leading your family is far and away less demanding, less complicated, and less taxing emotionally than taking the proverbial “pass.”

All Pro Dad suggests these “10-Ways” to get the ball rolling in terms of “How should I lead my family”?


1. From the front:
   We’re talking about being an example. Model the respect, responsibility, trust and family fidelity you’d like to see across the board.
   
2. In partnership with your wife:
   Don’t try to be an island. Don’t make the mistake of always assuming unilateral authority. Leadership is something you must agree on together.
   
3. Like a Servant:
   “Servant Leadership” means to take heed of great advice from a Leader who said such things as, “The last shall be first.” “If you want to be great, act like a servant”, and “He didn’t come to be served, but to serve.”

Read more at All Pro Dad

Accountability: Hallmark of a leader
Posted on 08:43 PM, November 10, 2010
By Dennis L. Berino


Several months back, an icon in the local and regional world of business, much sought after not only in business and industry due to his business acumen and leadership skills but also in sports, philanthropy, and education, drew flak because a commencement address he had delivered had been littered with unattributed quotes. 

He could have fingered one of his speechwriters, but true to his sterling leadership qualities, he did a class act by owning up to the mistake, apologizing for the inadvertence, and resigning from the chairmanship of the board of the school where he had delivered the commencement speech.

Read more at Business World
 

Following God in Obscurity

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/preachingworship/preaching/godinobscurity.html

John Koessler | posted 11/01/2010

 

 

"Mary, I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. I'm going to leave this little town far behind, and I'm going to see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. Then I'm coming back here, and I'll go to college and see what they know, and then I'm going to build things. I'm going to build air fields. I'm going to build skyscrapers a hundred stories high. I'm going to build bridges a mile long." So says George Bailey in the Frank Capra classic It's a Wonderful Life. As it turns out, George is wrong. What he is supposed to do tomorrow is pretty much what he did today. God's plan for him is to do the ordinary thing—which, of course, is the last thing that George wants to do.

I don't think much about God's will because, like George Bailey, I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year. (At least I think I do.) Get up and go to work. Come home and have dinner with my wife. Take a walk. Try to think of something to write about for my blog. Goals that are, for the most part, pretty low on the horizon.

Here is the irony: I am doing everything I dreamed of doing when I was in college. I am married to someone I love. And I'm teaching, writing, and preaching—but frankly not to the extent that I imagined when I wondered what God's plan for my life would look like. In those days I was aiming for the moon. God's will, revealed through the constraints and necessities of ordinary life, have compelled me to lower my expectations. His agenda for me seems far more commonplace. This has not always been easy to accept.

In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson recounts the story of the fourth century church father Gregory of Nyssa whose brother Basil had arranged for him to be made bishop of Cappadocia. "Gregory objected," Peterson writes. "He didn't want to be stuck in such an out-of-theway place. His brother told him he didn't want Gregory to obtain distinction from his church but to confer distinction upon it." Is this not what Christ wants for us as well? To seek the good of the small places in which he has placed us and to confer distinction upon them by serving him with humility there? The path of glory is often an obscure one. It is the way of the cross.

—John Koessler, "George Bailey Lassos the Moon," on his blog A Stranger in the House of God (3-18-10)

Find thousands of additional illustrations, sermons, and resources at PreachingToday.com.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.