Practical Tips for Developing Leaders In All Sorts of Organizations: A Bookmark Edition Podcast

Your Leadership Story

An uncountable number of books have been written about leaders and leadership. Unfortunately, too many of those books fail to focus on one of the core tasks of leadership — developing other leaders.

In some cases, leadership development focuses on training people for their initial leadership roles. In other cases, leadership developing involves equipping people to exercise their leadership skills in a new context.

In this fascinating Bookmark Edition, John Kramp interviews David Atchsion about lessons he has learned about developing leaders, using his experience with RCN as a case study. David started the Retail Christian Network in 2007 as a loose connection of people in the shopping center industry, focusing on a meeting once a year in conduction with one of the major industry meetings in Los Vegas. Since that time,RCN has grown and David has involved other leaders to expand the organization’s influence. Today, RCN continues its annual meeting but has expanded its work with multiple regional meetings and launched its international work this year.

Using the growth and development of RCN as a case study, David shares lessons he has learned about developing leaders that can help any leader in any type of organization. While listening to this episode, here are some of the lessons you will learn.

• The level of structure and personnel support needed to launch an organization
• Why exerting a measure of “control” is important in the early days of an organization
• When “controlling” things helps and when it begins to hurt and limit the organization
• The importance of drawing on the strengths and capacity of people attracted to an organization’s vision
• When must a founding leader be directly involved and when can he or she entrust more leadership to others
• How to capitalize on the natural momentum and growth of an organization
• The secret to spotting potential leaders and enlist them to specific roles
• Why it’s important to ask, “What do you think we should do?” rather than saying, “Do this.”

Every endeavor rises and fall on leadership — not only on the leadership capacity of the individual in a key position but also on the degree to which that leader develops other leaders. If you want to expand your leadership influence, this episode will give you some practical tips you can use.