The Law of Explosive Growth: 

“To add growth, lead followers. 

To multiply growth, lead leaders.”

As mentioned in John C. Maxwell’s book, this law is irrefutable. One can recruit a bunch of people to a cause, but if those people are simply followers, the cause will not grow as fast and well as if the recruits are leaders. This is because leaders are not content with following someone forever. Leaders usually want to recruit their own people to lead, and that is what multiplies growth rather than just adding to it. I feel like this quote is very important to my life and the lives of my fellow TALONS students because we are all striving to be leaders, not followers, and we want to be able to help our peers become leaders too. We also want our program and activities to be successful, but in order to reach our full potential we must be good leaders. This also ties into our leadership project and trip planning. The grade 10s help the grade 9s by leading them and teaching them to lead as well, so they can do the same for the next grade 9s. This may not multiply growth since TALONS has a limit on students, but it will multiply our success and enjoyment of the program. The multiplication of success is usually just as important, if not more important, than the multiplication of people. 

 Read more about the Law of Explosive Growth here.

 

“Leaders are hard to unite.” 

This quote caught my attention because it’s something I hadn’t thought about much before, but is very true. Leaders all have their own ideals and goals for the future, and it can sometimes be hard to unite them when working towards a common goal. If you gather a bunch of passionate leaders and tell them to agree on something, it can be very difficult because leaders are so passionate! However, when leaders work together, the results can be extraordinary, so it is important to try. I remember one day many years ago, when my class was learning consensus in elementary school. We all had to agree on one game to play in gym that day, but everyone had different goals and it was taking forever to decide. I don’t remember how this situation ended, but I like to think that we found a way to unite and had an amazing day at gym because of it. This shows how hard it can be for leaders to work together, and this can also be related to our TALONS trip and leadership project planning. In our program we are all very passionate people with unique ideas. In theory, it can be difficult for us to agree on something, but I am not able to think of any examples of this. I’m sure there are some, but they are likely not major. I think since our class has spent so much time together, we have learned how to collaborate and can work around the difficulty of uniting leaders! 

 As we just learned, it can be difficult for leaders to work together, but it is very important that they do. Learn about how to unite leaders here.

 

“Travel Agent Leaders send people to their destination. 

Tour Guide Leaders take people to their destination.” 

These two types of leaders are very interesting because they provide very useful insight into what are good and bad qualities in a leader. A travel agent leader simply provides advice to people but has never done what they are teaching! These types of people are not credible, because they don’t know firsthand what it’s like to use this advice. The tour guide leader is very different because they have experience with what they’re talking about and can take mentees with them on the journey. You can tell which leader is better to be, and this is important to me because I want to be that better, more helpful leader. I do not want to be hypocritical by giving advice that I don’t follow myself. Therefore, I try my best to be the tour guide. For example, when last year I was a mentor for digital art, I was able to give my mentee good advice because I had used it on my own art! Additionally, if I had just looked at an art tutorial and relayed the information to my mentee, there would be no reason for my mentee to get that information from me when they could have just gotten it from the source itself. This is very similar to our TALONS trip and leadership project planning because, for the grade 10s at least, we have to be mentors for the grade 9s. It is very important that we are tour guide leaders, so the grade 9s can have the most useful experience possible to prepare them for when they must be mentors.

Learn more about the differences between Travel Agent Leaders and Tour Guide Leaders here.

 

What have you learned from this blog post? Feel free to leave a comment!

 

Source: Maxwell, J. (2014). Developing the Leaders Around You. The John Maxwell Company.

Image Source: Mazzone, C. (2017). La Frase del Mes: John C. Maxwell. PressCoaching. https://presscoaching.com/la-frase-del-mes-john-c-maxwell/.