Yesterday, the Catholic Church celebrated the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. In light of this celebration, my prayer focused on how faithfully I serve my King. I was reminded of a powerful reflection I heard a few years ago about how Jesus never called anyone to lead. Instead, His invitation was to follow.
Ever since then, I have bucked against a secular view of the importance of leadership, acknowledging that my King and my God has called me to service.
As such, they are worthy of being followed.
Build a Unifying Vision
The first practice of impactful leaders involves building a unifying vision for the organization. Connected to this important picture of the future, the organization's mission plays a pivotal role in determining where it should head. Whereas the vision centers on the organization's aspirations, the mission functions as its reason for existing. When combined, the mission and vision serve as the vehicle (the mission) and the destination (the vision) for an organization.
Taking time to consider our missions acts as the starting point to crafting compelling visions for our futures. Continue to keep the mission of your respective organizations in the forefront of your hearts and minds allowing it to inform your decisions, inspire your words and actions, and fuel your ministries.
After beginning His public ministry, Christ remained singularly focused on His mission:
- "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord" (Luke 4:18-19);
- "For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth" (John 18:37).
Translate the Vision into Strategy
The second practice of effective leaders focuses on translating the unifying vision for an organization into concrete and detailed strategies.
Play close attention to the strategies that will allow you to advance your school's mission. Do your best to keep the urgent at bay through timely doing, delegation, or dumping in order for you to stay committed to what is most important to your organization's purpose. Be ruthless in your efforts to align all that you do to your organization's mission. Root out practices, policies, procedures, programs, and personnel that fail to advance the mission. Graft in those ways of operating that more authentically live out your organization's core purpose.
From performing His first miracle at a wedding, to proclaiming His identity to the woman at the well in Samaria, to healing the man's hand on the Sabbath, to every single thing He did, Jesus acted on purpose for His purpose.
Recruit, Develop, and Reward a Solid Team
Ashkenas and Manville's (2018) third strategy entails recruiting, developing, and rewarding a solid team. The most compelling mission (the first practice) and the best designed plans (the second one) require competent and committed people to do this important work. Remember that mission and communion are intimately connected, "interpenetrating and mutually implying each other" (St. John Paul II, 1988, para. 2).
Catholic school leaders must collaborate and coordinate the efforts of the faculty, staff, and stakeholders across your communities.
Simultaneously, and more importantly, Catholic school leaders must trust that Jesus has invited you - as He did the apostles - to cooperate in the miraculous! In turn, we are compelled to invite others to purposefully participate in God's work. Fill the stone jars with water, roll away the stone, collect the leftovers.
Conspire with Jesus and each other to do the impossible.
Focus on Measurable Results
The fourth skill of effective leaders (Ashkenas and Manville, 2018) centers on measurable results. After establishing a clear mission and purpose, designing a strategy to execute it, and recruiting, retaining, and developing faculty and staff to help you in these efforts, you must devise ways in which you will know whether or not you are successful.
Leaders must think about how you can prove to your stakeholders - students, teachers, families, benefactors, prospective families, detractors - that you are advancing the school's mission. Humbly consider ways to show the gap between the school's current reality and where you want it to be. Transparently communicate the successes and the challenges to those who have a hand in making improvements. These metrics can help to take next steps, devise new strategies, and refine what success looks like.
Foster Innovation
Innovation serves as the fifth skill of effective leaders (Ashkenas and Manville, 2018). This fifth principle, innovation, occurs as a result of ongoing learning and growth.
Innovation, for Catholic school leaders, entails an openness to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. It requires the humility Jesus describes, "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted" (Mt. 23:12). The Christian virtue of humility promotes God's glory and recognizes God's graces in any of our efforts to do so. Far from a deprecating view of self, humility acknowledges our need for God, our connectedness with others, and our constant pursuit of God's truth.
Humility serves as the open door for God to enter into an idea and take it from good to great. Humility acts as the spirit willing to ask others to synergistically collaborate and offer their gifts and talents in meaning ways. Humility allows us to die to our tired traditions and worn out ways of operating so that we can "accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine by the power at work within us" (Eph. 3:20).
Stay humble in your efforts to keep getting better. Remain open to the work of the Holy Spirit to transform our water into wine. Continue to innovate in apostolic ways, trusting that God is at work in us and through us.
Lead Yourself
The final skill of effective leaders includes a leader's knowledge of him/herself, efforts to grow his/her abilities, self-care, and willingness to share her/his gifts and talents beyond the organization (Ashkenas and Manville, 2018). Put more simply: know yourself, grow yourself, care for yourself, and share yourself.
Ashkenas and Manville (2018) cite this set of introspective skills as the culminating factor in its suite of leadership attributes: mission, strategy, personnel, results, and innovation.
In the midst of all that you have to do, continue to harness your own gifts, talents, wellness, and willingness to contribute to the larger field of education, other sectors, and/or the mission of our Church.
Doing so, much like Christ going off by Himself to pray, can provide the restoration, rejuvenation, and recreation needed to do the rest of the work for which you are responsible.
