Greetings and welcome to Living Water Leadership (LWL). I wish I could say that I know exactly what this will turn out to be, but that is not true in the slightest.
So, I’ll start from the beginning. My name is Bob Martens and I currently serve as the director of information technology at a small private college nestled in a small town in the middle of Minnesota. Being small has allowed me the opportunity to grow in any number of directions and lead in many more. Over the years I completed an MA in IT Leadership and a PhD in Leadership, and now I am looking for ways to continue to grow from that prior work.
However, I have grown a little impatient with myself, and so LWL is my attempt to create an outlet for my continued passion around leadership and to also offer my help to organizations in a variety of ways. That is not a lot to go on at the moment, but this post is meant as a stake in the ground for future development.
What can you expect?
That is an awesome question! Even more exciting is that I do not have an answer. For my dissertation I focused on two topics: burnout and servant leadership (Martens, 2023). While it would make sense to stick closely to those two topics, what I am really interested in is helping organizations become healthy, and using leadership as the catalyst. So here is just a smattering of topics I plan on covering over time (in no particular order):
Christian and Lutheran leadership
Servant leadership
Burnout
Team dynamics
Leading teams
Remote and hybrid work environments
Meetings
Collaboration
Communication
Project management
Technology as tool
Leading change and change management
1:1s
Original research on various leadership topics
Even more …
It gets pretty broad pretty quickly. This site is hosted on Substack, so I plan to cover the topics through posts, notes, chats, podcasts, and anything else that Stubstack comes up with over time. Normally I would host these items on a custom website, but I am trying something different this time around. There is a chance that paid subscriptions will be turned on in the future to encourage the development of a community around these items, but that will be for the future.
I also plan to offer paid custom consulting services as well. You can find the development of those over on the Offerings page and reach out if you are looking for some help. I enjoy getting to know more about organizations and have a special affinity for Christian and Lutheran organizations specifically. I anticipate that will come out more in the future.
That is about it … for now. I hope that you will stick around and read and participate over time, and always reach out with any feedback via bob@livingwaterleadership.com. I look forward to what the future holds, so I hope you subscribe!
References
Martens, R. (2023). Correlated outcomes and servant leadership behaviors in the Lutheran parish [Ph.D., University of the Cumberlands]. In ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/correlated-outcomes-servant-leadership-behaviors/docview/2787914132/se-2