I recently attended a couple of seminars on leadership led by Peter Kaldor, a consultant with New River. Peter’s known for his work with Australia’s National Church Life Survey, including a range of resources on community formation and leadership. His most recent resource, published by NCLS, is designed to engage with the main findings of NCLS leadership research, identify and develop each person’s leadership strengths, and identify personal foundations that will sustain leaders over time.

Peter worked with us using a range of exercises to identify twelve leadership strengths that are needed by any team. The point was that no one person holds within themselves all the competencies and capacities needed by the team.

The twelve leadership strengths are listening, connecting, envisioning, exploring, inspiring, empowering, structuring, communicating, optimism, acting, resolving and learning. The six personal foundations are spiritual foundations, clarity of purpose, sense of self, integrity, supportive relationships, balance and boundaries.

The resource includes a really helpful book, a workbook, and a booklet, each providing a new way to read about, workshop and reflect on the model.

Here’s the whiteboard list of leadership capacities we put together in the NCLS workshop at Ashgrove Baptist. Normally Peter looks for a bigger whiteboard – but this had to do!