The Making of a Leader: Recognizing the Lessons and Stages of Leadership Development

This is my third time reading through this book as I discuss it with a woman I have been meeting with for several years. I really love it, and reading through it this time, I realize how much of the principles in the book are so deeply ingrained in me that I forgot that I learned them from this book. I think I read it back in the 90s. It is probably my favorite book on leadership development. I use his "time lines" when I take people through the SHAPE process (Spiritual Gifts, Heart Passions, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences), as it is very helpful for people to see patterns and life stages of their own development. I highly recommend this book. It is much more readable than his Leadership Emergence Theory Self-Study Manual.

I haven't read a gaggle of books on leadership, but from what I'm told, most contain the same basic tenets and just add their own little twist. I don't know if that is true with this book, and thus I can't comment with any accuracy on how this book might interact with other materials on leadership development. I can, however, speak to how it has positively affected me in my own life journey.

I first purchased this book during seminary, and quite honestly, I didn’t like it at all. It was just another assigned book to read. I read it and put it back on the shelf, never giving it a second thought. But for some reason, I kept it on my bookshelf, even after I sold off a large portion of my books. I picked it back up again about a year ago, show more when I was trying to come to grips with my life situation in terms of my ministry calling. It was then that the book became very valuable to me. Clinton provided a timeline or matrix that I could use to plot my own course of development and identify where I was in terms of the making of a leader. And because each leadership stage was broken down into sub-stages and replete with real-life stories and examples, I could easily relate my own experiences to the right stage. In addition, the book provided lots of self-diagnostic questions that really helped me understand and navigate through various stages of growth. Even now, as recently as a few weeks ago, I was able to use a chapter in the book to help me work through some changes and feelings that I am currently experiencing. In fact, I plan on constantly referring back to this little gem of a book throughout the coming days and years, as a way to help me work through my own career/ministry development.

In summary, if you are in full-time ministry or are working toward that end, this is a great resource that can help you think through the course of your own leadership development. If you're just interested in it as another leadership handbook or if you've been assigned to read it for a class, then it will probably disappoint. show less

I am struggling through the difficult transition between phase 3 (Ministry Maturing Phase) and 4 (Life Maturing Phase), pp. 26-28. The book says this boundary processing can last "several years" (pg. 105)! It is helpful to recognize that I am dealing heavily with the integrity check process item along with the isolation process item, pp. 28-29.

The book is hard to read at times for the same reason it is so valuable - the scholarly work by Dr. Clinton has been quite rigorous over several decades.

In The Making of a Leader, Dr. Robert Clinton identifies the patterns God uses to develop a leader. By studying the lives of hundreds of historical, biblical, and contemporary leaders, Dr. Clinton has determined the six stages of leadership development, and he establishes checkpoints to clarify where you are in the process.

Any book that quotes C. Peter Wagner is already on my poor side. However, this book has sufficient reasons to dislike it. He draws a few interesting points, which are basically buried in a ridiculous number of self-defined terms and grossly over-structured descriptions of how all leaders develop.

Besides, he likes Peter Wagner. :-)

Very helpful

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