A Utah management consultant and author, Margaret Wheatley, told 250 Catholic educators this week that most leaders do not consider leadership to be a vocation.
Yet that is precisely what it is, Wheatley told members of the Chief Administrators of Catholic Education (CACE), which met in Salt Lake City.
Wheatley, of Provo, was the keynote speaker for the conference of those who manage diocesan school systems. She spoke to the group via video link from London, where she was attending a funeral.
In a world organized around economic systems, it is easy for leaders to consider people as economic units to be distrusted and manipulated, said Wheatley, who has a doctorate from Harvard University and formerly taught at Brigham Young University. But the best leaders, she said, recognize that their greatest assets are people.
"Our major task is to remember ... we have this great gift of the human spirit," Wheatley said. "The human being is a blessing, not a problem."
Just as students live up to the expectations of teachers, she said, employees excel when their leaders trust human nature and treat people as valued partners.
Women bosses, in particular, need to be wary of becoming "heroic" leaders. Such leaders, often motivated by a desire to shield workers from overwork, take on more and more of the load themselves.
That style leads to martyrdom and exhaustion and actually demeans employees, she said. "It seems compassionate,
Wheatley proposed, instead, that leaders adopt a "host" or "hostess" style, inviting colleagues to creatively contribute and showing awareness of and gratitude for their contributions.
Sister Catherine Kamphaus, superintendent of schools for the Salt Lake City Catholic Diocese, said it was the first time the Catholic school administrators had met in Salt Lake City.
The conference theme was "The Vocation of Leadership: Empowering Leaders for a Changing World." Besides Wheatley, those attending heard from Bishop John Wester of the Salt Lake City diocese and Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of the diocese of Tucson, Ariz.
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