Publications
Dan Ebener researches and writes about various aspects of leadership and strategic planning. Find out more information or purchase these books by clicking here.
Leadership for the Greater Good - A Textbook For Leaders
A textbook devoted specifically to the activity of leadership, with a focus on how it can be practiced by those with or without authority. Ultimately, its aim is to change the way people lead and manage.
Part One challenges the reader to consider how leadership has evolved into the twenty-first century. No longer a matter of telling industrial workers what to do, leadership is a voluntary, interactive process that moves organizations toward adaptive change. It demands influential tactics that are less coercive and more engaging.
Part Two reviews historic “leadership” theories to put them into a twenty-first century context.
Part Three presents skills that are most needed for the practice of leadership in the twenty-first century, including dialogical skills, emotional intelligence, leading adaptive change, conflict skills, and strategic planning.
Pastoral Leadership: Best Practices for Church Leaders
In this practical, visionary, and accessible book, veteran teacher, author, and parish leader Dan Ebener explores what it takes to lead in a Catholic parish. He contends that anyone can lead change in a parish, with or without positional authority.
The premise of this book is that the Church needs leadership. In most places, the Church is over-managed and under-led. To turn this around, the Church need clergy to:
Provide more leadership and less management themselves.
Develop the leadership potential of the laity.
On the management side, the Church need clergy to step back and lay people to step up. On the leadership side, the Church needs lay people who can lead without authority and clergy who can lead from a position of authority. Readers of this book will find this book enlightening and useful in their approach to parish leadership.
Strategic Planning for Leaders: An Interactive Process
Strategic planning here is an interactive process in which leaders, managers, and followers create a common goal together. Dan Ebener and Fred Smith, using their years of experience as consultants and teachers, have distilled their knowledge into a simple step-by-step process that can be used in the three types of organizations: business, not-for profit, and public. The importance of planning and preparation, prioritizing needs, communication, and accountability in implementation are highlighted.
Blessings for Leaders
In Blessings for Leaders, Dan Ebener skillfully weaves an understanding of one of the most powerful and familiar Bible passages with insights drawn from his experience developing faith-filled leaders in churches and ministry organizations. Ebener reflects on how the paradoxes of leadership can be understood from a careful reflection on the Beatitudes: It takes wisdom, empathy, humility, justice, mercy, service, peace and courage to lead as a Christian.
Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager® and Lead Like Jesus - “Blessings for Leaders offers profound spiritual inspiration for every aspect of leadership. With thoughtful and encouraging examples of how the teachings of Jesus can be applied in any workplace, Dr. Dan Ebener has given a gift to leaders everywhere.”
Servant Leadership Models for Your Parish
Servant leadership is more than a passing fad or a recent phenomenon. It offers the wisdom of the ages to a world that desperately needs new approaches to leadership. It should be (and in many cases already is) a source of great interest in the church. Already the subject of many books, articles, seminars and workshops, and even scholarly journals, servant leadership has been adopted by many businesses as their corporate leadership philosophy. It needs to be endorsed by church leaders as our corporate approach to leadership as well. For those searching for how Jesus himself would lead, servant leadership is awaiting your discovery.