EDL 279

FBLA 1 - Highly Effective Leader

Anna Phillips

March 25, 2022

Highly Effective Leader

The habits created by Stephen Covey for his book, “7 Habits of Highly Effective

People”, apply to leadership as well. The habits are, proactivity, beginning with your goal in

mind, prioritization, compromising through trusting relationships, listening to others’

needs and perspectives, working well with others, and renewing yourself through a healthy

work/life balance. I see the benefit in all of these habits but there are some that stick out to

me in regards to leadership. Being proactive, having a shared goal, building trusting

relationships, listening to stakeholders and the workforce, and collaborating with others.

A highly effective leader is proactive by analyzing data to look for opportunities for

improvement instead of waiting for a problem to occur, then putting out the fires as they

occur. When this happens, the improvements are not planned out and become quick fixes

that fail. This is an extremely ineffective practice that wastes time and resources as well as

burns out the staff.

Without a goal, the leader is driving their team in the dark with no direction of

where they are going. Leaders who begin with the end in mind are effective because they

and their staff know what they are working towards rather than planning it as they go.

When a goal is in mind, a team can track and assess progress towards that goal and adjust

accordingly. A shared goal accounts for the workforce and stakeholders voice, which then

motivates them to work towards that goal.

 A trusting relationship is the foundation of any leader or team being effective.

Without trust, the workforce will not be willing to fail without fear of being reprimanded,

they will not be transparent with data, struggle, or deficiencies. When trust is present, the

workforce will be open about these things with their leader so they can work as a team to

fix them. Trust is built many ways especially by actively listening to others and

communicating with them.

Collaboration promotes effective leadership by bringing more than one perspective

and one person’s knowledge to the table. An effective leader is able to step back and bring

others to the table instead of running things, top down.

In our current system, effectiveness of a leader is measured by student success and

staff morale. The process to achieve these indicators is gaining a deep understanding of the

current system, collection of and collaboration in the analysis and utilization of data, being

transparent with results, and understanding that the improvement cycle never ends. This

process can have challenges when it comes to avoiding acting on variations or special

causes as well as getting staff to buy into using data for all decisions. It is also hard to get

staff to buy into an improvement that does not in due to turnovers.

A leader that I have seen display characteristics of an effective leader was

completely transparent about a district vision. He collaborated with the admin team to

come up with the vision then presented it to all staff and asked for feedback, once he got

staff feedback he asked for community feedback. With the majority of the feedback being in

favor and board approval, he moved forward with the vision and created a webpage to be

transparent about the process. A leader who was not effective did not collaborate and
enforced all decisions top down with no conferring with staff. The staff did not trust this

leader, did not go to them for help, and morale was low.

Being a highly effective leader takes work and commitment. It takes a servant heart

that will continue to do well. As Theodore Rosevelt said, “Nothing in the world is worth

having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…”.