Start Your Own Leadership Blog
Why Blogging Works & What to Do About It
Experience is great teacher. In fact, most of what you know about leading well has probably come from experience – both successes and failures. We all have experiences every day, but do we always learn from them? If you have ever found yourself in the same sticky situation twice or more, then you understand that experience alone is not always enough. We keep on being given the same lessons (experiences) in life until we learn from them. Blogging helps you distil key lessons from your experiences so that you can consciously apply those lessons in the future. And, because others can read your blog, you help them as well. Most importantly, it is free and it does not require any more technical savvy than it does to use a word processor.
What Is Blogging Anyway?
Blogging involves writing short articles called posts. Typically, blogs have a theme (e.g. effective leadership) and each post or article is about a specific topic (e.g. 3 Ways to Prepare for an Emotionally Charged Encounter).
Today there are blogs about everything, from personal diaries through to website design. However, some of the first blog users were people like William Snyder and Etienne Wenger, who saw blogs as a way of building a shared body of professional knowledge. For further details on their ideas, read their book Cultivating Communities of Practice published by Harvard Business School Press.
How Do You Start a Blog?
It is actually very easy. You create your own blog for free simply by signing up for an account with a blog provider such as WordPress. Once you have signed up, you set up your profile and customize the ‘look and feel’ of your blog with very little technical knowledge. If you can turn a computer on, you should be okay. Then you start writing your articles (posts) and off you go. Programs such Microsoft Word 2007 even allow you to type your articles in Word, and publish them to your blog at the click of a button.
Why Blogging Works
Blogging will help you become a better leader because it taps into the often-neglected aspects of experiential learning theory. Put simply, we learn from experiences and we learn even more if we take the time to reflect on the lessons they contain. This is why journaling is such an effective technique. However, blogging goes further. It involves you into distilling the lessons from experience into tangible models about how to lead well. By using simple headings in your blog such as ‘5 Things to Avoid When Starting in a New Role’, ‘3 Steps To Follow When Giving Feedback to Staff’ or ‘The 10 Commandments of Ethical Leadership’, you create models of leadership that reflect your experience. Unfortunately, this ‘model making’ stage of experiential learning is frequently overlooked. Of course, no single model will fully capture the complexities of leading well, yet they can be quite helpful – both to you and others. John Kotter’s ‘8 Reasons Why Change Fails’ is casa living testament to this.