Hero Making with Paul Magnus

Paul Magnus has been teaching leadership in some form or another for more than 50 years. Currently a professor of leadership and management at Briercrest Seminary in Caronport, Sask., Paul has noticed a shift in leadership management not unlike any we’ve seen this past half century.

It goes by leadership multiplication — and it’s not something you would’ve learned in math class.

“Initially, for the first 15 years into the 21st century, we were still focused pretty much on the leader being the hero,” Paul says. “But what’s happening right now in the literature is that the leader is to become a hero-maker, which means that we, as leaders, we’re actually doing our very best to shift to a multiply and multiplier orientation … those of us who are trying to help grow leadership, capacity, competency, and for that matter, confidence, we’re being invited to address the word: multiply.

“It starts by a mindset change where we are determined to multiply levels of engagement. And to multiply levels of engagement, we need to actually change up all our processes. Now our processes shift to inviting people to engage, not only in giving us insight, but in co-creating the path that they will live out in execution and in co-creating the execution. We’re multipliers now. We’re multiplying down. We’re multiplying people. But more than that, we start by multiplying engagement.”

Leadership multiplication is not your grandfather’s idea of what leadership is supposed to be — but it works. Listen to the podcast below to get further insight from Paul into the idea of co-leading, co-owning and co-creating as a leader.