After careful consideration, you’ve decided to offer your group a leadership academy rather than a conference or a summit. Great choice! By choosing the academy approach, you can combine a number of teaching methods from classes, to online learning and even on-the-job training. When all the requirements are met, your “graduates” will enjoy the accolades and a growing sense of accomplishment. A recent article in Inc describes how the military academy West Point imparts leadership lessons to their cadets. Consider offering these topical teachings at your next event.
Learn to lead by learning to follow. West Point teaches leaders must begin their careers by learning to follow. Obviously, in a military situation, that would be demonstrated by a “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” and the appropriate salute. In the workplace, teach servant leadership. Leaders must learn how to serve the people they lead.
Enhance communication skills. Your leadership academy must tackle the communication issue. How can leaders solicit the results they want? Sometimes, it’s not leadership skills that are lacking but communication. Teach your “cadets” how to communicate with angry customers and how to have those difficult talks with employees. Knowing how to handle these situations can build great leaders.
Teach your team how to make decisions–and how to put them into action. Sometimes the disconnect between making a decision and enacting it can lead stagnation. A missed opportunity is forever regretted! Follow West Point’s lead and guide your team through some decision making scenarios. Once the “decisions” have been made, give them some tips on how to put implement them. This may include adjusting software, managing orders in a new way or changing the way you handle a sale.
Even if your leadership academy lasts only a few days–or weeks, you can impart greater knowledge to your team in a powerful way. Contact us for more topical ideas for your leadership academy.
Kruse says leadership has nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the organization. It certainly has nothing to do with titles. Oddly, leadership has nothing to do with the personality of the leader, though certainly some of the most famous leaders in history have had outsized and extroverted personalities. But there are many styles of leadership that doesn’t rely on those kinds of personal attributes. Finally it has nothing to do with management. Mangers manage organizations. Leaders lead people.
So what is the definition of leadership? Kruse states that
“Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.”
The Business Dictionary defines social influence as how “the actions, reactions, and thoughts of an individual are influenced by other people or groups.” In the context of leadership, it means persuading people to perform as part of a group toward a common goal. The process has nothing to do with power or authority.
Kruse is also careful to use the word “maximizes” rather than “organizes” in his definition. By “maximizes”, he means persuading people to perform above and beyond their previous tendencies toward the common goal.
The aspect of a goal–commonly accepted and clearly understood–is crucial. A leader must know what the goal is and the definition of achieving that goal and communicate that definition to the people he or she is leading.
As an event organizer, what’s more rewarding than hearing, “Gee, I got so much out of that!” Not that you’re angling for compliments, but it’s good to know that after all that hard work, your Christian leadership training sessions empowered and ministered to the group.
For good coverage, plan teachings that cover both newly-emerging topics like “Harnessing Social Media for Ministry” to more tried and true ones like “Guiding a Fallen Leader Through the Restoration Process.” If you’re not sure which ones to choose, peruse these 10 relevant subjects and go from there!
Decision-making and the Christian Leader: Demonstrating grace is part of the Christian faith but what happens when that impedes important decisions.
Introverted and Extroverted Leadership: Every leader is different! Do you know which category you fall into?
Listening Like Christ: Leaders need to fine-tune their active listening skills in order to prescribe a solution accurately.
Servant Leaders: Teach your team how to serve and love one another like past servant leaders.
When Tragedy Strikes a Congregation: From natural disasters to family tragedies, they do occur. Does your staff now how to minister to the congregation during times of grief.
Communicating Effectively with Your Ministry Team: You like to email but he prefers Skype. How should leaders communicate?
Starting a New Ministry (or Reviving an Old One): How do you start a church in the current culture? Can you revive a dying ministry?
Establishing a Church Web Presence: Everyone is one the web but should they be? Find out the best way to establish a web presence for your ministry.
Recruiting, Training and Managing Volunteers: Learn how to attract and grow those crucial volunteers
Witnessing in the 21st Century: Leaders may need a brush up sharing their faith. Present new ideas for witnessing to others.
If you’re thinking of providing your ministry team or church staff with a training series, let us help you! Our winning coaching staff can bring fresh perspectives and ideas that will excite your group. Give us a shout! We can start planning today!
P.S. Now you can get 10 additional topics for your church leadership conference. There are all sorts of leadership conferences around the world, and this trend is not likely to let up anytime soon. As leaders yearn to improve their leadership capabilities, they often find themselves attending way too many seminars, retreats, workshops or team-building sessions that promise to deliver on a particular topic. While attending these gatherings may be highly recommended, ministry leaders must be careful in their selection to avoid wasting time attending training that does not suit them or redundant training disguised as different topics. Otherwise, the ministry’s operational budget will suffer amidst minimal or no returns.
Download our free Christian leadership training ideas guide, where we expand on the ideas listed above and give you another ten conference topic ideas suitable for your next conference.
By hosting a leadership summit, you’ll provide your team members and employees with the opportunity to sharpen their leadership skills. However, these gatherings only benefit the people who choose to attend them. So how can you encourage attendance to your summit and thus improve your group’s leadership abilities?
First remember it’s a summit! With this type of event, you must bring in some fresh faces. Summits typically suggest a gathering of leaders who hash out common business issues and present solutions. You must have an exciting keynote speaker or speakers.
Post about it. If a packed house is the goal, you’ll have to talk it up. It does little good to have a summit if you’re the only one there. Beginning six weeks to one month before the summit, post topical teasers. For example, “How many times have you wondered how you could improve your workflow?” Follow the question with a blurb about how your summit will tackle these questions.
Send out a press release. You’ve got top speakers traveling in from around the country–everyone should know about it! Ask the event manager to create a press release that includes points about the speaker’s accomplishments, the full name of the event, date, time and admission details.
Target your LinkedIn connections. Besides those in your immediate group, do invite connections from your LinkedIn page. You can message fifty people at a time! That’s a great way to get the word out.
Tweet about it! Of course, you don’t want to over do it but you need to share the excitement about your summit. Share backstage and prep photos and possible highlights from scheduled speeches. Do use a hashtag with your event’s name behind it.
Give something away. A good giveaway or door prizes often attract people who might drag their feet about attending. These giveaways are a fun way to build attendance.
P.S. Need more ideas on how to fill your Christian event? Seek and ye shall find! See our ample post ‘18 Best Event Marketing Ideas‘!
For many leaders, the ability to lead a group of individuals does not come naturally, but rather is something that must be learned. However, having the ability to effectively lead is an imperative skill that the leaders of a business or organization must possess. This is what makes enrolling your leaders in a leadership training course so vital. Doing so will ensure that your business or organization will thrive under a network of educated and resourceful leaders. In case you are still doubtful that your leaders could benefit from taking leadership training courses, here are a few of the benefits that these courses provide.
Benefits on the Individual Level
Leadership training courses help individual leaders in a wide range of areas that will help them to grow as overall leaders. They learn to evaluate the way in which they have been communicating with their subordinates in order to determine if there is a way they could better assert themselves as leaders. They will also go through a wide range of workshops that will help them to learn the best leadership styles, which will help them to more effectively lead their team. Leaders will also benefit from receiving feedback on their current leadership techniques, which will help them to see in what ways they can improve as leaders.
Benefits to the Business/Organization
Enrolling your leaders in a leadership training course will provide your business with a wide range of invaluable benefits. Leaders who attend such courses will have a better understanding of how they should interact with their subordinates. This helps to create a better, more efficient working environment, as groups will be able to better communicate with each other so that they can work as a team. After enrolling your leaders in leadership training, you will see a drastic change in the overall environment of your business or organization, which will lead to an improvement in productivity.
While it is said that learning to be an effective leader takes leadership experience, those who have enrolled their leaders in leadership training will not argue that such courses can have just as great an impact on improving leadership efficiency.
Contact us to learn more about the benefits of leadership training, and to find out about enrolling your leaders in a leadership training course.
According to comScore, the leading source of analytical data about the internet, Google has cornered sixty-seven percent of the online searches done in the United States, as well as the majority of searches done internationally. Furthermore, several e-commerce studies have shown that search engine traffic coverts better than any other source of online traffic. People searching for something specific in a search engine already know what they want, and if they find it at the site they click on, they are more likely to buy it. For online businesses, this means that ranking well in Google is an essential part of any online marketing strategy.
Businesses building a new website, as well as businesses trying to create a better presence online, often don’t understand all the steps that are necessary to rank well in Google. The owners of these businesses may read about various search engine optimization strategies but whey they try to apply them, they may miss crucial steps to make them succeed. To rectify this situation, you will find a step by step tutorial below on how to rank a website in Google.
Step 1: Get a Good Domain Name with Good Web Hosting
Yes, “free” sites are available from Weebly.com and from Google’s Blogger.com. However, to rank well in Google, you will need to register a domain name and find good web hosting for your website. Don’t worry, this is quite inexpensive. Check with Levaire.com for reliable web hosting. (Oh WAIT!! That’s US!!) Be sure to register your domain name with a reliable service. Often, it’s easier to get your domain name through your hosting company where everything can be managed by one entity you trust.
Don’t worry if your target keywords are not in the domain name as Google no longer gives this much weight. However, you should try to get a domain name with a primary common extension like .com. You can also use .org if your business is a non-profit or .edu if you plan to run an education site. However, Google no longer gives a ranking advantage to sites with domain extensions like .biz or .info. You should also keep your domain name as short as possible so that people looking for information in a search engine will be able to view the entire domain name as well as the directory structure of your URL. Google will truncate a URL if it is too long.
Step 2: Create At Least a Dozen Pages Initially
When you put up a new website, make sure you create a minimum of a dozen pages right away, more if you can. We’ve heard one-page websites almost never rank well in Google. (Yes, that’s what we’ve heard. Ehem.) Also, with a dozen pages, you will have eleven internal links pointing to your home page right away. Google counts internal links pointing to a page, similar to how they count external links pointing to a page. The more links pointing to a page, internal and external, the higher Google will rank that page. Some people call links to a website “link juice,” with more links pointing to a website equaling more link juice.
Step 3: Add To Your Content Slowly and Steadily
Many business owners put up a website and then just let it stay stagnant. They do not add additional pages for months or even years. However, you should keep in mind that Google strongly favors sites that add a steady stream of new pages. In fact, if you add a slow constant stream of new webpages, this is better than adding a large number of new webpages all at once. Once a site is indexed by Google, it sends out its Googlebot spider frequently to see if new pages have been added. If the spider detects that new webpages are consistently added over time, Google will reward the site by ranking it higher in the search results for relevant keywords and key phrases.
Step 4: Be Sure to Change Your Webpages Regularly
A good gardener regularly tends to their garden. They pull weeds. They prune plants. They till the soil. In other words, they maintain their garden so it will grow more beautiful and prosper. Google favors sites that are tended to on a regular basis just like a good gardener tends to his or her garden. Google determines how regularly a website is maintained by checking to see how often pages are modified. This doesn’t mean big chances necessarily. Make sure the changes you make add something of value and make sense. Some websites have a special message that they change with the season and/or holiday. Also, you don’t have to make big changes. You can just make small little tweaks on some of your pages to see a huge improvement in your Google search engine rankings.
Step 5: Design Your Website as a Magnet for Natural Links
While link juice is great for improving your Google ranking, not every link provides the same amount of link juice. Google’s engineers constantly modify their algorithm to distinguish between the highest quality links, quality links, and poor quality links. If you can achieve a natural pattern of quality links, plus get a few high quality links, you can seriously improve your Google rankings. This assumes, of course, you don’t have links in bad neighborhoods, i.e. you don’t have links on websites Google has identified as suboptimal pages, pages with spam and/or thin content.
To achieve a natural pattern of quality links, you need to remember that achieving quality links in a natural way takes time. Therefore, if you pay for instant or automated link building techniques, you should not expect to get your money’s worth. In fact, as a matter of point, if Google’s spider discovers multiple new links that point back to your website that don’t follow a natural pattern, this may result in your website being demoted in Google’s search engine rankings. It may also result in your site being banned from Google. Alternately, if you provide useful resources on your website, users of these resources will build natural links to your website that will show up as a natural pattern in Google’s eyes. Surfers who discover good resources often post the URLs to these resources in online forums, on their personal blogs, on their social medial pages, and on their websites. A link to your resource(s) could even end up in a print magazine that then gets hyperlinked and archived on the print magazine’s website.
Website resources that draw natural links can be in a variety of forms. These include original articles that provide useful hard to find information, tutorials and FAQs, fun and quirky content that makes people laugh, original photographs, hand-drawn illustrations, honest and informative reviews, useful YouTube videos such as product demonstrations of cooking demonstrations, “how to” tips, a fishing report, a surf report, a real estate forecast, or anything else you can think of that would be useful and/or fun and that people will want to recommend to others. Ask yourself, “If I discovered this resource, would I want to tell others about it?” If in your heart of heart you know the answer is yes, then your resource will likely attract natural links but you’ll have to be patient for this to happen.
Final Thoughts
While it may be difficult to be patient and wait for your Google website rankings to improve naturally, methods that focus on the long-term cultivation of a website will ultimately rank a website better in Google than almost any quick method you come across. Although some fast methods do deliver high Google rankings right away, this is almost always short-lived as Google usually views these methods as a form of spamming. Thus, the next time Google updates their algorithm, they will usually deflate any ranking advantages obtained by fast methods that are not earned by building a quality website. Sticking to the five steps outlined above will put your website in good standing over the long-term which is ultimately the best thing for your business.
