Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder's Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits for Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead is another book on leadership that turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Warner and Wilder avoids all the superficial layers of activities, techniques and strategies, in favor the habits that make for genuine Christian leadership: (1) Return to the joy of Christian community; (2) Act as our Christian selves; (3) Remain relational; and (4) Endure hardship.Rare Leadership is less about a particularly unique ("rare") type of leadership. It's more about the acronym that describes those four habits.
One of the most intriguing things about Rare Leadership is the generous amount of models readers will find. Warner and Wilder have drawn upon their own experience in Christian leadership -- rare people who have learnt to lead from a depth spirituality than from the typical axioms of leadership literature.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Rare Leadership is the emphasis on identity -- on who and Whose we are. This particular aspect is the most elusive in leadership literature precisely because leadership literature often takes a business model instead of an ecclesial one. This leads to lots of emphasis on activities, programs and other visible displays of one's ability. By going back to the roots of Christian identity, we learn about leadership as real people in the Christian community of which we are a part.
That makes Rare Leadership one of my favorite books on leadership.
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I received a free copy of this book from Moody Publishing in exchange for my honest review here.