Leadership Guidelines

?"Leadership is a way of being in an organization that mobilizes people to tackle tough challenges and thrive." Ronald Heifetz

People are drawn to vibrant, living organizations and want to believe in the collective vision driving them forward. Now more than ever our Christian schools (and non-profit organizations) need leadership. Leaders who can guide their organizations to deliver their mission to their current stakeholders and beyond, in new and uncharted ways. 

In today’s challenging landscape, trust remains a leader’s most powerful tool. Good leadership centers around core foundational truths regardless of circumstance. The leadership qualities I share below have been developed over past years and I have sought to implement them with each leadership team I have served with. Even as I write this blog I am painfully reminded of the areas I need to improve and the importance of holding to these principles with my current team at Delaware County Christian School (DC). It is my prayer that the following leadership principles will encourage you today and further your ability to build trust.

These principles are not hierarchical, but rather work together simultaneously to generate effective leadership. Each principle is touched on briefly; each concept is worthy of its own course of study. The principles are expounded utilizing the words of key authors whose books have been influential in my personal leadership journey and are listed at the end to provide further study on each principle.

1. Spiritual Leadership - "Train yourself to be godly ... godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come." (I Timothy 4: 7-8, ESV)

The spiritual charge of leadership requires leaders to take time to foster their own personal faith. Gordon MacDonald in his book Building Below the Waterline exhorts leaders, “The forming of the soul that it might be a dwelling place for God is the primary work of a Christian leader. This is not an add-on, an option, or a third-level priority. Without this core activity, one almost guarantees that he or she will not last in leadership for a lifetime, or that what work is accomplished will become less and less reflective of God's honor and God's purposes. Spiritual formation involves cutting, weeding, digging, raking, and planting - not with a chainsaw or shovel, of course, but through the work of worship, reflection, prayer, study, and a score of other soul-oriented activities ... the spiritual disciplines.” MacDonald cites humility, productive compassion, steadfastness (not stubbornness), faith beyond sight, and self-control as key virtues to cultivate (pp 16-23).

Spiritual leaders experience the joy of finding God in the context of leadership rather than missing God in the context of leadership. In Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Ruth Haley Barton writes:

One of the things I know for sure is that those who are looking to us for spiritual sustenance need us first and foremost to be spiritual seekers ourselves. They need us to keep searching for the bread of life that feeds our own souls so that we can guide them to places of sustenance for their own souls. Then, rather than offering the cold stone of past devotionals, regurgitated apologetics or someone else's musings about the spiritual life, we will have bread to offer that is warm from the oven of our intimacy with God.

It is one thing to inspire people to visions of what the promised land is like; it is quite another to understand the stages of the journey between here and there so that we can guide folks through them and actually arrive at our destination. Understanding the stages that we have passed through on our own journey is excellent preparation for leading others on the journey with gentleness and skill (pp 25, 29, 88).

2. Ownership - The leader must own everything in his or her world. 

Willink and Babin in their book Extreme Ownership state, “The best leaders don't just take responsibility for their job. They take Extreme Ownership of everything that impacts their mission. This concept is the number one characteristic of any high-performance winning team, in any military unit, organization, sports team or business team in any industry” (p 30). Leaders take personal ownership of the delivery of their mission to their stakeholders.

Leaders bear full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team to properly and successfully execute. Responsibility does not equal execution and it is not about control. Ownership is balanced and only achieved with the leadership principles of servanthood and collaboration. When a leader personally owns her organization’s mission, it will drive the leader and team members to pursue excellence. This is true in times of victory and defeat. A leader, in humility, takes responsibility for mistakes when plans fail. These mistakes open the door for learning, growth, and improving a team’s performance.

Extreme Ownership requires leaders to look at an organization's problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans. It mandates that a leader set ego aside, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team (Willink and Babin, pp 30-31).

3. Servant Leadership –

Servanthood is a core value at DC. A true leader is one who first serves. We seek that all students graduate from DC with a sense of calling to pursue a life of service, a life that will positively impact others, and a life lived in collaboration with the world around them, engaging and simultaneously challenging culture (Mark 10:43-45).

In his classic The Steward Leader, Rodin reminds us as we undergo the transformation of our own heart in our response to the call to be a godly steward, we become leaders who are passionate about the hearts of our people. We create new ways of setting priorities for leadership that impact the goals for our people and, through them, our organization. As a result, our people are enabled to attain the richest expression of their God-given talents and empowered to live to the fullest their unique vocation. Setting each team member free to utilize their talents to the fullest supercharges a team’s ability to deliver on mission (p 104).

“Steward leaders invite their people to join them in deeper waters. They yearn for every colleague to take his or her own next deeper step in relationship with Christ. And they are not threatened when they look out and find a co-worker who has ventured even further than they. In fact, they are free to rejoice. This is real freedom, to have confidence in the depths into which God has called you, to winsomely urge others to go deeper with you and to rejoice when some find even deeper waters than your own” (The Steward Leader, Rodin, p 104).

Perhaps Andy Crouch summarized it best when he stated, “Leadership does not begin with title or position, it begins the moment you are more concerned about others’ flourishing than your own.”

4. Collaboration -

The principle of collaboration calls for teamwork not competition and connection not isolation. We will stand together; appropriately engaging in the tough conversations and unified in our decisions. We will “lean in” and assume the best about each other; we will go directly to each other when we have questions or concerns. John Kotter refers to such a team as a Guiding Coalition.

“No one individual, even a monarch-like CEO, is ever able to develop the right vision, communicate it to large numbers of people, eliminate all the key obstacles, generate short-term wins, lead and manage dozens of change projects, and anchor new approaches deep in the organization’s culture. Weak committees are even worse. A strong Guiding Coalition is always needed – one with the right composition, level of trust, and shared objective.

“It (Guiding Coalition) will have the potential, at least, to do the hard work involved in creating the necessary vision, communicating the vision widely, empowering a broad base of people to take action, ensuring credibility, building short-term wins, and leading and managing dozens of different change projects, and anchoring the new approaches in the organization’s culture” (Leading Change, Kotter, p 51-52).

5. Strategic Vision-

Rallying an organization around a shared vision is one of the most important tasks of a leader. Mission and vision are different. A mission statement articulates why an organization exists, and often remains unchanged for the lifespan of the organization. A vision statement articulates how the current members, who are stewards of a sacred trust, will accomplish the mission statement at a given point in time of the ministry’s existence. To take it one step further, a strategic plan identifies specifically what we will do to deliver the vision to stakeholders. A vision enables leaders to approach decisions and planning with “Backwards Design"; identifying desired outcomes and planning the necessary action steps. Vision enables leaders to prioritize tasks and accountability based on mission and strategic planning. Without vision it becomes easy to get lost in the details, to become sidetracked or lose focus on the bigger effort.

Strategic vision should always be generated from an organization’s DNA or organizational culture. An organization’s DNA are those core values often established by the founders and flowing from the organizational mission. Leaders face the challenge to ensure actual behaviors reflect our aspired values or DNA. John Kotter refers to this as organizational alignment. Our DNA represents a passionate purpose flowing from the mission.

Tod Bolsinger in his book Canoeing the Mountains states, “Leadership for uncharted territory is a shared, corporate learning process that enables the community to thrive and fulfill its mission in a new context, when the outside environment changes” (p 101). According to Bolsinger, “We know we are facing a leadership challenge if it requires us to grow as leaders and as a people, to be transformed into something more than we have been – without losing our core identity – in order to accomplish the mission we have been called to do” (Canoeing, p 42). Bolsinger refers to Adaptive Capacity (defined by Heifetz, Linsky and Grashow) as the resilience of people and capacity of systems to engage in problem-defining and problem-solving work in the midst of adaptive pressures and the resulting disequilibrium. Strategic vision ensures an organization’s mission relevance throughout changing times (Canoeing, p 89).

6. Innovation -

Vibrant, healthy, and effective 21st century Christian schools are marked by an ability to innovate. DC seeks to facilitate a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. A culture of innovation is one in which we design, implement, evaluate, improve, and redeploy, evaluate and assess, improve and redeploy, over and over again. Change is a marathon, not a sprint. True learning comes from reflection.

Organizations are living things comprised of invested stakeholders. People are drawn to vibrant, living organizations and want to believe in the collective vision driving them forward. Tod Bolsinger makes the following analogy for the church which I believe is just as relevant to our Christian schools: “Most of us aren’t that familiar with how God has designed all aspects of life – including corporate life, communities, families, organizations and churches – to adapt and thrive in changing environments. At the heart of adaptive leadership for the church is this conviction: The church is the body of Christ. It is a living organism, a vibrant system. And just like human bodies, human organizations thrive when they are cooperating with the wisdom of God for how that system is designed, how it grows and how it adapts to changing external environments” (Canoeing, p 100).

7. Leadership Development (Mentoring) -

Leaders actively look for and identify future talent for their organizations. Leaders intentionally seek to create structures which enable investment in team members with the goal to “mentor up”. In addition to routine operational matters in direct report meetings, leaders invest time to develop talent and for future strategic planning.

In regard to hiring practices, leaders seek to hire up, pursuing candidates who will not only achieve success in current responsibilities but grow into future opportunities. Employees will be hired to fulfill their immediate job description and a “plus one” – to encourage ongoing mentor-ship and investment into the lives of students, parents, and staff in the DC community. We will seek the genius of the “and” in our hiring practices.

8. Communication -

Leaders communicate clearly and often. In our interactions as a team and with stakeholders, professionalism is expected and confidentially protected. Engaged employees have the information that they need to complete their job with excellence. Not sharing information breeds skepticism and breaks down trust. Leaders speak truth in love (Eph. 4:15), even when it is difficult. 

Communication is a tremendous trust building tool. Communication for a leader is marked by three key elements: 1. Calm, leaders have a communication plan and timeline designed to instill confidence and reinforce vision among stakeholders. 2. Clear, leaders communicate clearly and often; when there are no answers leaders acknowledge the challenge, explain what is being done about it, and state when more information will be available. 3. Consistent, a leader’s narrative is in alignment with mission, vision, and past communications.

Resources for Further Study:

Building Below the Waterline, Gordon MacDonald. Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC, 2011.

Canoeing the Mountains, Tod Bolsinger. InterVarsity Press, 2015.

Crucial Accountability, Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, and Switzler. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.

Crucial Conversations, Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, and Switzler. McGraw-Hill Companies, 2012.

Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

Leading Change, John P. Kotter. Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Ruth Haley Barton. InterVarsity Press, 2008.

The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni. Jossey-Bass, 2012.

The Steward Leader, R. Scott Rodin. InterVarsity Press, 2010.