By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute It’s time for a confession. When I wrote The Catholic Vision for Leading Like Jesus back in 2009, I didn’t develop the theme of Steward Leadership as much as I would have liked to. Over the years, I jotted down notes to do more with it here in The Catholic Leader and on our website, but like so many things on my innumerable “To Do” lists, I have never gotten around to it. Now I’m glad I didn’t. Because Pope Francis has done it for me. And better than I ever could. You’ll find his thinking on the call to – the ...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute It’s safe to say that Servant Leadership has taken the world – or at least very large parts of it – by storm. Businesses, government agencies and non-profit organizations have been jumping on the bandwagon since Robert Greenleaf first coined the phrase – and described the phenomenon – in an essay back in 1970. His seminal book, Servant Leadership, followed in 1976. This approach to effective leadership took on an explicit and distinctly Christian flavor when Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager and 50 other books, an...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute Have you ever noticed how people who fail spectacularly are more often brought down by their gifts than by their shortcomings? It’s true. When you’re in school, you’re plagued by the things that come hardest to you. But once you’re out in the “real world,” it’s your strengths that can actually trip you up. The problem is that once we can put our weakest links off to the side and concentrate on what we know and do best, we can forget that we live in a complex support system and can begin to attribute our success solely to ...

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By Carlos Hidalgo CEO World Magazine Both employers and employees are continually looking at how to improve productivity. I often hear from many clients that there “are simply not enough hours in the day to get the work done.” This was confirmed again when I recently spoke at a conference and asked the audience of about 300 how many feel they need more time to do their jobs? More than half the room raised their hands. The thought of needing more time is not foreign to most and is one of the reasons many bring work home, get up early, and work on weekends. It is also leading to longer workweeks and has ...

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With October comes a new season of webinars from the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute. Two are already scheduled, and more are on the way. In addition, the Institute also offers recorded access to many earlier webinars it has already produced. The new webinars scheduled for October are: Vital Balm: Apologizing, Forgiving and Accepting Forgiveness, Thursday, Oct. 17 at 1 p.m. CST; and, Building High-Performance Parish Teams, Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 1 p.m. CST. “We’ll be announcing more webinars for November and December soon,” says Dr. Owen Phelps, Director of the Yeshua I...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute Without the generosity of our benefactors, the Yeshua Catholic International Leaders Institute would not exist. I shared that reality with several of our benefactors at our first-ever Benefactors Mass & Brunch on Aug. 10 at St. James Parish in Rockford, IL. How could I be so sure? Because for several years my wife Jane and I ran the Institute as a division of The Durand Corporation, our own for-profit consulting and publishing business. No, we did not expect this new division to make a profit. That wasn’t our intent at all. Our intent was that the co...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute There’s one thing that makes our efforts to be Jesus-like Leaders especially challenging: We can’t focus on self-improvement. What? Isn’t any effort to be better than we are all about improving oneself? Surely, trying to be more of a Jesus-like Leader involves self-improvement. Yes, of course that’s true. Self-improvement is a part of the puzzle. But it’s only a part. It can’t be the central feature. It can’t be the focus. To speak in terms of making one’s own improvement the focus of our efforts is to look in th...

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With October comes a new season of webinars from the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute. Two are already scheduled, and more are on the way. In addition, the Institute also offers recorded access to many earlier webinars it has already produced. The new webinars scheduled for October are: Vital Balm: Apologizing, Forgiving and Accepting Forgiveness, Thursday, Oct. 17 at 1 p.m. CST; and, Building High-Performance Parish Teams, Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 1 p.m. CST. “We’ll be announcing more webinars for November and December soon,” says Dr. Owen Phelps, Director of the Yeshua I...

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As part of its mission “to serve God by helping all members of Christ’s body to love and lead as Jesus loved and led,” the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute offers people access to a wide variety of free webinars and videos on its website, www.YeshuaLeader.com. The site’s Video Gallery includes 44 videos accessible for no fee – most of them under five minutes long. Different titles are targeted to different audiences, including priests, lay ministers and parents, consistent with the Institute’s teaching that “all of us are leaders some of the time.” ...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute After decades of reading what various experts – business leaders, HR specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and organizational behaviorists – have had to say about what people need and/or want from their work, the best description I have ever encountered fell into my hands this summer quite by accident. Or was it Providential? I’ll let you make the call. Let me settle for providing the details. One quiet summer morning, casually perusing the porch that runs along the length of our cabin overlooking a small, quiet lake, I noti...

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