The Kind Leadership Challenge

What are your leadership values? No really, I want to think about it. what do you believe, and how does those beliefs influence the decisions you make as a leader? ~~~ Get Early Access to Mastering Challenging Conversations: https://kindleadershipchallenge.com/12 (signup box on right side of the page) Join this Week's Challenge: https://kindleadershipchallenge.com/community ~~~ To listen to m...

Picture it: Tulsa, Oklahoma, early 2001.  I was an eager young marketing associate in my first job out of college, at a telecom company with a stick price soaring up the dot com boom’s exponential growth curve. The executives kept bragging on CNBC about how our customer list was growing, and our futures with it. No, we weren’t yet an Enron or a Worldcom, but we were right behind them! Well, they w...

It was day six of owning my shiny new Peloton. Being a gadget loving middle aged lady on something of a health kick lately, I was loving the heck out of my 45th birthday gift to myself, which I’d saved and planned for over the previous few months. I’d ridden every day since the bike had been delivered, and in another week or so I was planning to start a challenging daily routine to kick up my card...

It was the middle of March 2020, and I was livid. I sat in our apartment complex’s parking lot, one hand clenched around my phone, the other slamming into the side of my steering wheel over and over... ~~~ Reserve your FREE copy of Mastering Challenging Conversations (out 5/30): https://www.kindleadershipchallenge.com/ (Signup box on right sidebar) Join the Challenge Community:  https://www.kindle...

My fellow library and educational leaders, I come to you today with an uncomfortable truth. It’s time to listen to your shadow. We all have things about ourselves we don't like, or try to ignore. And us leader types we just tend to find a big ol’ black box, shove those shadows in, and slam the door tight. What would you say if I told you that your shadow might just hold the secret to becoming...

Education and libraries are helping professions! A lot of us go into these fields at least in part because we want to do work that has the potential to make the world a better place. And a few of us take the leap into leadership, at least in part, because we want to scale our impact in ways that will influence our entire school or library, and perhaps even the wider community it serves. But there’...

How can we achieve our big visions? In the leadership world we talk a lot about Vision. How I understand how vision works in the kind leadership model is that our vision is sort of, well, our understanding of the better world that we want to see and we want to help create through our work and the work of our organizations. It’s what keeps us going, especially if we can envision it in detail as wel...

Here’s one of those ugly truths about leadership that a lot of the gurus gloss over. You can only be as good a leader as your relationship with your team is, and your relationship with your team is only as strong as the ties of trust between you. But how can you tell that they trust you, or that you trust them for that matter? It can be a messy process of getting to know each other with lots of sl...

You have it. I have it. We all have it. The nagging problem with our team our or boss or a stakeholder that we’re too scared to face. Or maybe the change you see needs to happen, but doesn’t seem to be worth the organizational roadblocks standing in your way. So you delay the conversation, you make excuses, you hope it’ll turn around on its own. And every once in a while it does—or at least you te...

How can we as leaders wield our power in a kind manner? Ultimately we’re the boss, the head honcho, the big cheese. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that, especially when you’re juggling lockdowns, mandates, a burnt-out team and a frustrated community. But what if you actually have a lot LESS power than you think? That realization can actually be pretty empowering in itself. ~~~ Link...

Why is Kind Leadership all about healing? Most Leaders think the answer to creating a better school or library is fixing stuff. And every once in a while, things are that simple!  But that’s why focusing just on fixing can be so dangerous. I learned this from a pediatric cardiologist who was one of my first leadership role models. Healing yourself and others is more complicated than fixing problem...

What’s the first step to becoming a Kind Leader? Everyone likes the idea of being a Kind leader, but unfortunately they rarely see it in action. The good news is the first step I reveal in today’s challenge will automatically teach you the second step, and third step, and so on. And before you know it, you will begin to teach yourself how to heal yourself, your team, and your world. I had to re-le...

Learn about Sarah Clark, and why she launched the Kind Leadership Challenge. ~~~ To listen to more episodes , head to kindleadershipchallenge.com ! Ready to Take Today's Challenge, but not sure where to start? Download the free Next Steps Checklist! Want a likeminded community of leaders who'll have your back through thick and thin? Learn more about the Kind Leadership Guild.