New initiative encourages faculty and staff to embrace their calling as leaders.
In a seminar on leadership, Trevecca Nazarene University president Dr. Dan Boone told an audience that one of the secrets to leadership is to make sure the person following you will be ready to lead.
Head of School, Dr. Mike Hayes, was among those who listened closely to Boone.
“(Boone said) he and his cabinet go on a retreat every summer, and he asks them to identify three potential successors within the organization,” Hayes said. “There was a lot of wisdom in that.
“When I first became the head of school here (in July 2022), I knew there was a need to cultivate leaders, not just to elevate leadership across the board, but also to make sure we have enough people on the bench who are ready to move into roles that require great leadership skills.”
To meet that demand, Hayes and Dr. Erica Van Dop, Assistant Head of School, selected 16 faculty and staff members who applied to participate in the school’s first Leadership Academy this year. Among the program’s objectives is to “invest in faculty and staff by developing them as leaders and to encourage faculty and staff at all levels of the organization to embrace their calling as leaders in their current roles—to lead where they are—and perhaps beyond.”
“It’s basically intended to deepen our leadership bench at WC,” Hayes said. “The idea is to help our staff lead from where they are, and secondarily, it’s to help prepare leaders for future roles that they might fill down the line.”
Allie Elifritz, a sixth-grade science and social studies teacher and the science department head, was one of the 16 members of the inaugural Leadership Academy. Elifritz said she was able to incorporate many of the ideas discussed in the meetings.
“Both in my classroom and the school system, the Leadership Academy has helped me view leadership as serving others and trying to build cultures and habits that will last beyond the time we spend together,” said Elifritz, who has worked at Worthington Christian for five years. “It has also helped me analyze how and why I lead and has shifted my mindset in many ways.”
From September through April, the 16 Leadership Academy members met monthly for 75 minutes to explore key leadership thinking, literature operations, and career development ideas.
“We allowed the participants to wrestle around with what they thought some of the underlining assumptions of the school have been in certain areas,” Hayes said. “They jumped right in. They had no problem trying to identify some of those issues, and we talked honestly about them.”
According to Hayes, the Leadership Academy was originally going to be open to eight participants, who had to apply to be a part of it. However, after he and Van Dop received so many outstanding applications, the two decided to double the enrollment.
“We were thinking if we got 10-12 candidates, then we’d defer the people who didn’t get selected for the first one,” Hayes said.
“However, the number and the quality of the applicants compelled us to take all 16. The rationale was that if we had this level of interest from people of this quality, we wouldn’t want to defer anybody. If we’re serious about elevating leadership, we want to make sure we give everybody this opportunity as quickly as we can.”
Van Dop and Hayes said it was important to use a large palette of candidates, not just teachers or long-time members of the staff, for the first Leadership Academy.
Six members of the Academy have been a part of the Worthington Christian Schools community for a decade or more, including second-grade teacher and mathematics department chair Kelly Burby (35 years), Lower School intervention specialist Karin Browning (30 years), and media director David Stoll (22 years). Other members of the first class, administrative assistant to the head of school Kristi Veit and director of spiritual formation Jake Ferrier, began working at the school this fall.
Other members of the Leadership Academy and their years of service at the school included eighth-grade English teacher Delilah Armstrong (two years), third-grade teacher Krissy Couser (two years), Lower School STEM teacher Stephanie Custer (10 years), Elifritz (five years), fourth-grade teacher Lucas Gantz (19 years), upper school art teacher Christy Kline (three years), counselor Kristin MacCaughey (first year), communications coordinator Libby Montgomery (first year), eighth-grade social studies teacher Raechel Morrow (three years), kindergarten teacher Denyse Smith (16 years) and eighth-grade science teacher Annie Stimmel (two years).
“One of the biggest successes of the academy has been getting multiple viewpoints from across the school from different faculty members and administrators into one space,” Van Dop said. “We realize we are all (on) the same mission: to develop the mind of Christ in students while learning from one another and appreciating each other’s different perspectives.”
“Another thing I love about the academy is we are made up of staff members with so many different roles within the WC community,” Elifritz said. “We have faculty and staff from the Upper and Lower School and admin offices. It has been so neat to hear diverse perspectives.”
Each monthly meeting had a different theme. The group started off in September with servant leadership and then advanced to leadership stories (October), organizational frames (November), vision (December), organizational culture (January), change (February), and courageous conversations/conflict management (March) and then closed out the year with flourishing from a leadership perspective (April).
Van Dop was surprised by how quickly relationships were formed among people who don’t normally interact.
“Obviously, we all come from the same faith background, and we have many similarities, but people are at different points in their careers and have different interests,” Van Dop said. “It’s really great to see a cohort of individuals rally together and have meaningful discussions about the positive ways our school is growing and changing.”
The school plans to offer the Leadership Academy again next year.
“We’re looking at different formats and potentially having even more participation,” Van Dop said. “I hope we can continue to have more people apply and be a part of the process.”
