Leadership Takes the Cake

Do you have all the ingredients for great leadership? There are many ingredients, but there some that are vital to ensure that you lead your school to excellence. In this video, John shares his thought on what it takes to lead your campus to amazing growth.

Just like a cake has many ingredients, so does your leadership. All ingredients in your leadership are important, but there is one ingredient that is so important that if you fail to put in just the right amount or fail to put any in at all, your cake of leadership will not come together.

The 4 Key Ingredients

The 4 key ingredients of effective leadership are structure, culture, strategy, and conflict. Without them the cake of school improvement simply will not coke together.

Structure

School improvement can't happen without structure. The structure of a cake is flour and without structure which includes order, routines, systems, and the management of those items, there will be no cake.

Culture

The sugar in the cake of school improvement is culture which includes all the communication and interactions that foster strong relationships and stakeholder engagement.

Strategy

The eggs and oil represent all the strategies of leadership that seap into the flour and sugar so that schools employees are strategic in their knowledge and expertise to lead all students to excellence.

Conflict

The final and most galvanizing ingredient in a cake is baking power, and in every organization conflict is the baking powder. To get to the top, conflict is not only essential. It's required, but in order to make certain that conflict is productive, it requires just the right amount of it.

Too much conflict creates chaos, and too little conflict causes confusion, but when leaders add the perfect amount of professional and productive conflict, the whole organization grows by leaps and bounds. Just like baking powder solidifies and unifies all the ingredients in a cake, the right kind and right amount of conflict does the same thing for an organization.

Reflection

As you reflect on your performance and your leadership, ask yourself these questions.

1. Where in my leadership do I have too much conflict?

2. Where in my leadership do I have too little or non-existent conflict?

3. Where in my leadership do I have the right amount of conflict?

4. What is my plan to improve in adding the right conflict to my leadership?

The answer to these questions will drive you to higher levels of success, and now that we have talked so much about cake, I think I'll have a piece. I hope you do too.