Leadership Strategies
June 7, 2025
Leadership can be a monumental task, a scary endeavor, or just plain fun. As an educator for 35+ years, I have led a plethora of people, and I can honestly say it’s analogous to a swinging pendulum: some days are easy, and some days are just plain hard. I read like a wolf eats (voraciously, hungrily, constantly), and I find myself reading leadership books like trick or treaters eat their Halloween candy (all at once!). Just Lead! by Sherry Surratt and Jenni Catron; The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni; Leaders Don’t Make Excuses by Green Leaf Leadership; and Culture Matters by Jenni Catron are just a few of what I’ve read this past month (actually, I have read every book Catron wrote. She’s my leadership hero).
Catron (2025) posits, “[An] adaptive leader goes out of his or her way to discover new strategies that can work” (p. 217). Are there new strategies in leadership? That depends on whom you ask. King Solomon said that there was nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9b). However, with the new rising generation in leadership, I agree with Catron wholeheartedly. There are new strategies to leadership, and—more importantly—a leader must discover and change with the times in order to lead his or her people well.
Take this recent scenario: A high school graduate took a summer job at a school that I ran in PA. Her job description was to engage with the elementary kids in games and different activities. She was wonderful with the kids. She stayed engaged and laughed a lot with them. However, she absolutely had to have her phone in her back pocket. As a much older woman who did not grow up with cell phones, I told her it was a requirement to leave her phone in her bag. She found that was something she could not do. Since she engaged well with the kids, and they loved her, the phone issue was not a hill that I was willing to die on, so I “adapted” and said she could keep it in her pocket and take breaks to check on her texts. It was a strategy that worked for both of us.
To grow with my employees, I, as their leader, need to be constantly learning. The Millennials (born between 1981 – 1996) and Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) have grown up with different work scenarios, rules, observations, and expectations. I am not advocating for throwing out all the “tried and true” leadership strategies (as a founder of several past and present organizations, I do have values and beliefs that are uncompromisable); however, I am saying that learning to pivot and to be flexible is paramount in learning new leadership strategies. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks.
