Future – Engage – Deliver

There are two points I want to reinforce about this chapter.

The first is 'Keep it Simple!' We seem to have a tendency to overcomplicate many things and the 'leadership industry' does far too good a job of this! I strongly recommend that you have a framework about leadership that helps you make sense of all the ideas that you come across on the topic. The framework of Future – Engage – Deliver does it for me. Use it if it works for you or create your own.

Charles Handy and Oliver Wendell Holmes advocate that this simplifying will significantly help your understanding.

Second, make sense of leadership ideas by putting them into your context - you have to make the ideas real for you. Don't keep this topic academic or theoretical. Make it real for you. You'll grow fastest by keeping your focus on your leadership, not just leadership in general.

Henry Mintzberg puts it this way:

Pushing concepts onto the student may be appropriate for some structured material. But management / leadership is not very structured, and managers hardly learn in such passive ways. Active learning happens when the learner pulls the new ideas into his or her realm of experience – to connect them, see them in context, use them naturally.