Our Weekly Freebie Friday: #274

My friends over at LeaderTreks have developed a free leadership style assessment tool for youth workers. Answer some questions and get a helpful report about your leadership style and some of the implications that go along with it.

I asked LeaderTreks’ founder and President, Doug Franklin, a few questions about this tool and leadership styles among youth workers.

TIM: One of the things you guys do very well at LeaderTreks is helping youth workers develop students into leaders. What have you learned over the years about leadership styles that caused you to create this free tool?

DOUG: After partnering with youth workers for a number of years, several things became apparent regarding youth workers’ views on teaching their students leadership. The first is that many youth workers wanted to teach their students about leadership, but didn’t feel like they knew enough about the subject in order to properly teach it. The second is that youth workers often didn’t feel like they themselves were properly equipped to be leaders, or had no real idea how they led. This lack of knowledge created a lot of frustration for them and it presented us with a real opportunity to help fill a need. That’s a lot of the idea behind why we created our seven different leadership assessments.

TIM: Why is it important that a youth worker know what their leadership style is? What difference will that make in our personal life and in our ministry?

DOUG: Self-awareness in leadership is key. When we know how we operate and we lead, we can be so much more effective. Knowing the style in which we lead is crucial because it allows us to lead in our strengths, while at the same time remembering to compensate for our weaknesses. If we know we put tasks ahead of relationships, we need to work on how we communicate and care for others. If we know we put relationships ahead of tasks, we need to work on challenging ourselves and our followers to get the job done and do it well. Knowing our leadership style is essential, but it’s the application of this knowledge that will actually improve our leadership.

TIM: What will the information that this leadership assessment provides actually help us as youth workers do or become?

DOUG: That’s a great question Tim, but to be honest, this assessment in itself won’t do anything for youth workers; only the application of this information matters. If we take this assessment, get our results and learn our leadership style, then get up from the computer and walk out the door not changing anything in our leadership, then the time you put in to taking it is useless. This assessment is an amazing catalyst to change if we take our action steps seriously. Share your results with your spouse, your friends, your senior pastor, your mentor, and let them help you come up with a plan for moving forward. If we take this plan seriously, we can become more balanced leaders who value deeply the mission in front of us and the people alongside of us. And that is an amazing thing.

NOTE: After completing the assessment, you’ll have to part with some limited personal information and your email address to have the results sent to you.

Take LeaderTreks,’ Leadership Style Assessment Tool

Posted on March 30, 2012