In this Expert Insight Interview, Richard Clinton discusses his work with leaders. Richard Clinton has been involved in many different things over the past 40 years, including planting and leading churches. Since receiving his Doctor of Ministry degree, he has taught and trained leaders in various settings, including serving as an adjunct professor in several graduate schools and as a leadership coach and mentor to leaders to help them get a perspective of what is happening to them.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- Richard Clinton’s work teaching and training leaders over the past 40 years
- The basic principles of the Leadership Emergence theory
- How the Western culture affects people’s self-awareness
Leadership Emergence Theory
When Richard Clinton works with leaders, the first thing he does is give them a perspective of where they are in the development process. He does this using a theory his father developed called a Leadership Emergence theory, a social theory based on grounded research, in which you do comparative studies of leaders.
Patterns and the time it takes for leaders to develop become ever clearer the more comparative studies you do. Based on all of those comparative studies, Richard has developed some generic timelines on what happens in a leader’s development and how long it takes.
Development Phases
Based on the timelines Richard has developed through the Leadership Emergence theory, he can pretty closely determine where a leader is in their development process. The commonalities he finds when doing the comparative studies break into phases.
For example, the “Foundations” phase generally encompasses the first 18 years. Following that is the “Beginning/Development” phase, which is another ten years or so, followed by the “Middle” phase, encompassing another 20–30 years, and finally, the “End.”
Self-Awareness
In the Western world, or America specifically, most people think of development as a race and believe that whoever gets there fastest is the best. Unfortunately, this is one of the values of our culture, which is not always helpful.
In Richard’s experience, most people see themselves as much further along than they are. Your typical teenager or young adult thinks they’re very mature and knows everything about everything, and it takes them a while to realize that they perhaps have more to learn. This is often the case with leadership development as well.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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