Thursday 7th February 2008
This is a trilogy of books about leadership from Simon Walker.
Simon trained at Wycliffe, was a curate in Abingdon and since then has been both an artist and a leadership consultant. Out of his own experience and in the light of thinking and reading Simon has developed a fascinating model of leadership which he uses in training programmes and one to one leadership mentoring.
In the first two books of the trilogy Simon introduces his psychological model as a way of understanding how we develop as people and how that impacts on our leadership. Simon Walker obviously loves developing models and working with them and if you like his model, and many do, you will find both these books a fascinating read. The model that is central to these books is the idea of each of us having both a front stage and a back stage. Front stage is where we do our performance and where we want people to see us and back stage is where we sort out and keep hidden all the things we don’t want anybody else to see about us, and which sometimes we don’t want to know about ourselves. Of course, both front and back stage are, in effect, the same stage and what we do in public and what we do in private is connected and how they are connected lies at the heart of this book.
The undefended leader receives life as a gift and is able to give away trust, be aware of the critical decisions of the moment, take risks, be vulnerable and be free to receive or not to receive. In his second book this model is developed to make sense of power and how we use it.
Both books have delightful diagrams and pictures to explain the model and really well worked examples of both public leaders and leaders who he has worked with. These are a great addition to anybody’s library of books on leadership.
Keith Lamdin is director of Stewardship, Training, Evangelism and Ministry in the diocese.