An audit of the early-childhood education offerings in Minnesota finds complexity and fragmentation as well as a lack of data about program effectiveness.

Customer experience as a boardroom topic is more relevant than ever. Enterprises are investing significant digital transformation budgets and commissioning large projects to elevate CX. Yet more than 70 percent of digital transformation projects fail to move the needle at scale. One topic that has a substantial impact on CX is the transformation of customer service operations using digital tools.

"We don't have the big hospitals and specialized care. Should COVID-19 spread, we don't have the capacity or the resources to deal with it," said Cree Grand Chief Abel Bosum.

These times are testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House, from city halls to corporate suites.

Lincoln and Manna from Hong Kong are two of the four candidates to participate in OM EAP’s first Timothy Trek training programme this year.

As OM Hong Kong celebrates 25 years, leader Cheuk-chung Lau reflects on the past 19 years and wonders who the next “Joshua” will be.

Extreme Leadership Training camps create unity in Ukraine.

Mercy Teams International (MTI) strives to see local workers in each ministry field trained and equipped as leaders. MTI Cambodia is one example.

A group of Texas high school cheerleaders filed a petition with the state Supreme Court over an ongoing dispute about the display of banners with religious messages at high school football games.

The annual issue, now in its eighth year, highlights the work of district leaders who are deploying new ideas to make a difference for their staff and students.

Talk to school and district leaders and you’ll hear worries about the next recession, spending restrictions, and a public that knows little about worries that lawmakers and elected officials who know little about their funding needs.

As superintendents, we must make the system work for all students—however socially, politically, and professionally dangerous it may be, writes Demond A. Means.

Race, education disparities, school-leader standards, and criminal proceedings (in Atlanta and Chicago) were among the top stories on the District Dossier blog.

The coronavirus crisis has made staffing and hiring decisions more uncertain, but planning needs to start now, writes Terry B. Grier.

Effective management approaches are not skills principals typically learn through the traditional pathways of education. To fill the gap, they are turning to business programs and publications.

When it comes to school technology, Superintendent Doug Brubaker emphasizes robust infrastructure, regular refresh cycles, and training. Taxpayers and teachers are buying into the practical approach.

Less than 20 percent of respondents to a new CoSN survey marked any items on a list of cybersecurity threats as "high-risk" from their perspective.

WE should be wary of comparing the crisis of war with the crisis of coronavirus, but the 75th anniversary of VE Day is a reminder of what a national emergency can do to a leader. It can reveal their weaknesses and end their career, or it can highlight the qualities and skills that are needed in a time of trouble.

Research shows demands put on school principals are increasing when it comes to instructional leadership. Greater demands bring out increasing gaps, and a need for better leadership development.

Being a school leader is difficult. They are meant to focus on improvement while also negotiating their way through adult behavior. Can leadership coaching help them focus on what truly matters?

Rooting out teacher bias and focusing on family engagement are some of the steps schools can take to identify more English-language learners for gifted and talented education.

The Penn State Department of Mechanical Engineering is honoring several outstanding undergraduate students through its annual awards.

A recent study found that one organization's instructional-leadership professional development had no impact. Could it be because the topic of instructional leadership needs to be expanded?

OM Angola sets out to change the future of the country’s youth.

Political power is a slippery thing. Even in an absolute monarchy, it can get away from you with one wrong move.

Jake Griggs, who will graduate Saturday with a 3.95 GPA with dual majors in management and political science, has been named Smeal’s spring 2020 management and organization student marshal.

Online learners at Penn State have elected 10 leaders to the World Campus Student Government Association to serve in the 2020-21 school year.

Delaware is among three states using federal grants to develop school and district leaders who understand the complexities of special education.

A survey by the American Association of School Administrators finds fewer than half interested in such compensation plans.

Penn State President Eric J. Barron will host a virtual Town Hall at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19, to answer the University community’s questions regarding how the Penn State continues to manage the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, including the recent announcements on workforce changes, plans for summer and work being done by the task groups to return students to campus and employees to work.

Penn State Brandywine students who have impacted the campus through their leadership and service have been honored with student leadership awards. The annual awards program highlights the achievements of students involved with clubs, student government and campus programs

The first Leaders’ Virtual Question Time will take place tomorrow, Thursday 9 April, at 12:30, with arrangements set out in a message sent to all MSPs from the Scottish Parliament’s Presiding Officer, Rt Hon Ken Macintosh MSP, today.

By Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J.

Everyone has a theory about leadership, but all of us want strong, effective, and moral leaders. They’re in great demand but hard to find. Families and schools, sports teams, businesses, and faith traditions rise or fall on leadership. Governments, armies, and nations rise or fall on leadership. According to James MacGregor Burns, historian and political scientist, leadership is “the process by which groups, organizations, and societies attempt to achieve common goals.”

Political leadership is a matter of personality, and it concerns the relation of authority and power with the people. Yet, within this definition lies a mysterious and mercurial quality known as temperament—the most difficult characteristic to gauge in a leader, the most challenging to pin down.  Different leadership styles and different temperaments produce varying degrees of success or failure, a topic requiring lengthy discussions.

In this essay, we will consider three aspects of leadership: personal and professional qualities of leaders, vision, and decision-making.

Personal and Professional Qualities of Leaders

To paraphrase the Hallmark motto: The nation should care enough to elect the very best men and women with proven effective leadership, strength of character, and moral probity.

Character

Leaders should reflect on a key question: Who must I be, and what must I do to bring about and advance the vision I have for the common good?  Having learned the art of self-discipline, strong leaders are master listeners, master communicators, and masters of their emotions.  Honesty lives at the core of their moral compass; it undergirds and supports the public trust. Strong, effective, and moral leaders speak the truth to themselves and to others without shaving it.  

On the eve of Britain’s entrance into World War II, Winston Churchill delivered the stark and sobering truth to a nation in distress:  “I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”  

George Washington was acclaimed for his integrity, wisdom, and astounding courage on the battlefield, and Nelson Mandela, as a “colossus of unimpeachable character.”

Rose Kennedy was not a public figure but the matriarch of a family of political leaders.  She inspired thousands of men and women through her courage in the face of so many family tragedies.

The Burmese-Myanmar politician, statesperson, and author Aung San Suu Kyi has inspired women throughout the world for her courage to withstand fifteen years of house arrest by the authorities who considered her an enemy of the state.  She writes in Freedom from Fear: “It is not power that corrupts but fear.  Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”  

Communication Skills

Effective leaders have the ability to communicate clearly and persuasively. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a charismatic patrician. With his clear sense of noblesse oblige, he led the country through the Great Depression.  From his struggle with polio, he learned to empathize with others.  Roosevelt’s fireside chats gave him a direct, personal, and immediate contact with the country.  He simplified his grand-scale programs capped by the motto, “The New Deal” which gave jobs to the millions of unemployed roaming the streets in despair.

As a sickly child and young adult, President John F. Kennedy spent many solitary hours with books.  The breadth of his reading history and politics, literature, science, travel, and biography served as one source of his eloquence, whether in prepared speeches or presented spontaneously.  His press conferences became the stuff of conversation pieces in Washington. The press corps was riveted as much on Kennedy’s oratory as on his responses to questions. Here was a master communicator thoroughly enjoying his own press conferences.

Winston Churchill’s strongest quality as a leader was his ability to inspire others, despite the ominous circumstances Britain was facing during his tenure as Prime Minister.  The source of this ability lay in his own character—and of course his ability to find the right words to fit the country’s mood.  On the eve of World War II in 1940, Churchill declared before the House of Commons: “We shall go on to the end.  We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”  Labor MP Josiah Wedgwood promptly responded:  “That was worth 1,000 guns, and the speeches of 1,000 years.”  

In April 1963, when President Kennedy made Churchill an Honorary Citizen of the United States—Churchill’s mother was an American—the President offered this word of praise: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”  

Sense of Humor

Strong leaders have a developed sense of humor that may enhance their Office.  “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it,” declared the President in the spring of 1961 on their visit to France.  

Acerbic wit was never far from President Lincoln’s lips or from Winston Churchill’s.  In a letter to his good friend, Joshua F. Speed, Lincoln wrote, “When the Know-Nothings get control, it [the Declaration of Independence] will read: 'All men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”  Regarding his pro-slavery opponents Lincoln declared, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

One evening as a tired and wobbly Churchill was leaving the House of Commons, the Labor MP Bessie Braddock accused him of being disgustingly drunk.” He replied: “Bessie, my dear, . . . you are disgustingly ugly.  But tomorrow I shall be sober, and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

Vision

Leaders have vision, a quality that conceives of an idea or sees a picture into the future before others can visualize it.  St. Ignatius of Loyola chose and trained leaders who would be affable, attractive, and persuasive messengers of his vision and not those who were rich or powerful.  

In Back to Methuselah, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “You dream dreams and say “Why?”  But I dream dreams that never were and say “Why not?”  His words were paraphrased by Robert F. Kennedy in his 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination.    Transformative leaders can rouse a nation to action when their goals are persuasive. They articulate a shared raison d’être in words such as the Rev. Martin L. King, Jr. orated in his “I have a dream” speech.”  He asked men and women to dream today and tomorrow of a better America.

In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy put his vision this way: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” He simplified this vision in the motto: “The New Frontier.”  This phrase encompassed pursuits in science and the arts, foreign affairs, race and inequality.  He invited the country to become pioneers on this noble quest.  Soon the Peace Corps appealed to the generosity and self-sacrifice of American youth to serve all over the world.    

It is no small thing for leaders to touch our hearts and minds by appealing to “the better angels of our nature,” a phrase of Charles Dickens which Lincoln quoted in his First Inaugural Address.

Decision-Making

Leaders make decisions throughout the course of a day or over a longer period of time.  Some decisions are so consequential they can change the public image of an organization.  Such was the case with a decision taken at Vatican II regarding the fate of Gregorian chant.  At the close of the Council, it was hastily whisked away from parish Masses in North America, though it was kept alive in a few monasteries. Popular songs, accompanied by thumping guitars and percussive bongo drums, hastily replaced it.  Latin gave way to the vernacular.

The pros and cons cannot be debated here, but music scholars were shocked at the sudden change. Gustav Reese, a noted expert on Gregorian chant, could barely contain himself at the hierarchy’s decision.  In a passionate cry, he exclaimed:  ‘What have you done to the chant!’

To avoid open criticism of the Church, other scholars described the drastic changes in neutral and measured language as the most dramatic and consequential of all the changes made at Vatican II. Internal struggle was marked by “defiance versus intractability.”  This struggle “has sapped the church of its vitality not to mention the effect it continues to have on matters that are “aesthetic, political, sociological, or even purely technical.”    

In times of crisis how do leaders make decisions?  Some leaders make decisions without consultation, while others call for collegiality. Collegial leaders point the way forward to advance the purpose of the organization.  Still, the personality of the leader plays an important role in this model. Whereas strong leaders get the best and brightest to execute their vision by delegating responsibility, weak leaders fear initiative and creativity from their workers.  They lack trust in the abilities of others.

To sum up this complex topic, St. Paul exhorts leaders of the community “to lead their lives worthy their calling” (Eph. 4:1).

Leader of OM Germany serves in the kitchen during TeenStreet, OM’s annual week-long international youth congress that started on Saturday.

Brazil’s mission training programme provides practical experience and cross-cultural knowledge for participants heading overseas.

In a recent video message, transgender teachers urge school leaders to make schools more welcoming by examining their own biases and implementing inclusive policies.

As superintendents, we must make the system work for all students—however socially, politically, and professionally dangerous it may be, writes Demond A. Means.

Other defendants convicted on murder, manslaughter, weapons, and drug charges Three men at the helm of a massive drug dealing enterprise were sentenced to prison in Superior Court. Dwayne White, 36, of Wilmington, Eric Lloyd, 40, of New Castle, and Damon Anderson, 40, were convicted of numerous charges in June for their roles in the […]

Over 300 State leaders, including Cabinet secretaries, state agency heads, division directors and human resources professionals participated in the Equal Employment Opportunity Summit which was hosted by the Governor’s Council on Equal Employment Opportunity.

Governor Jack Markell has ordered the U.S. and Delaware flags at all state buildings and facilities lowered on Friday, November 1, to mark the passing of two former Delaware leaders.

Gov. Jack Markell has presented the Order of the First State to two noted Delaware agricultural leaders and public servants, Bob Garey of Felton and Bill Vanderwende of Bridgeville.

Social service agencies will partner with law enforcement to prevent gun violence WILMINGTON, Del. – State of Delaware social service agencies will partner with law enforcement to prevent gun violence in the City of Wilmington under a Group Violence Intervention (GVI) project announced by state and city leaders on Tuesday. Governor John Carney joined Wilmington […]

Attorney General Kathy Jennings announced Friday that Secretary Rob Coupe will join the Department of Justice next month as its new Chief of Staff. “I am thrilled that Rob will be joining our team,” said Attorney General Jennings. “His reputation precedes him, not only as a leader in State government, but as a public safety […]