It is so arresting because it restores literary formation to its proper end. Prynne reminds us that the fruit of learning does not consist merely in sharper analysis or the ability to speak cleverly about books. Its truest fulfillment is found when what has been received inwardly begins to be handed on outwardly: when a love of language, truth, delight, and beauty descends into the ordinary life of the home and becomes part of the inheritance of the young. The great books have done their deepest work not when they have made us more impressive, but when they have made us more human; not when they leave us better at criticism, but when they teach us to read aloud with warmth, to choose well for others, to cultivate wonder, and to make a household more hospitable to what is good.

J.H. Prynne, elusive British Literary Critic, in a rare photograph, 2004

Leadership, no less than literary education, must be animated first by a care for advancing what is most human. To organize, to operate, to levy strategic clarity is to participate in acts of love; it is to take seriously the communal implications of thoughtful order. When reduced to technique, performance, or the mastery of professional tools, leadership loses its magnanimous purpose. It is easily forgotten in our age of systems, strategies, dashboards, and management literature that leadership is not finally justified by productivity. It is not vindicated simply because a plan was executed, a target was met, or an institution was brought into cleaner alignment. These things matter, don’t get me wrong. They matter very much. Many of you know how much I wish school leaders took management technique more seriously. But none of that amounts to the full meaning of leadership. Leadership, in its richest and most human form, is not the mastery of a set of techniques. It is the patient, costly, and often quiet work of handing on reality rightly. And living in accordance with it. It is the transmission of truth, beauty, delight, and humane order into the lives of others.

That is why leadership cannot be understood merely as the ability to produce movement. Movement is so prized these days. So many leaders seem to be moving, shaking. Fewer are actually going anywhere good, but so many give the impression of constant forward momentum. But movement alone is no real prize. One can create motion through pressure, fear, charisma, manipulation, or sheer force of will. One can build a team that outwardly performs while slowly hollowing out the souls within it. One can achieve outcomes and still fail as a leader. For leadership is not simply about getting people to do things. It is about helping them become the sort of people who can see what is good, love what is worthy, and carry forward an order of life more whole than the one they inherited. Leadership is therefore not only directional. It is formative.

In that sense, leadership bears a deep resemblance to education. The leader is always teaching, even when no formal lesson is being given. He teaches by what he notices, what he praises, what he tolerates, what he laughs at, what he refuses to excuse, what he gives time to, and what he quietly neglects. The institution will always learn the real standards of the place not from its stated values, but from the patterned life of its leaders. A leader’s example descends into the culture the way weather settles into a valley: gradually, pervasively, shaping what can grow there.

This is why technique, though useful, is never enough. A leader must learn to run meetings well, to set goals clearly, to define roles carefully, to build sound processes, to make good hires, to give corrective feedback, and to manage conflict with maturity. All of this is good and necessary. But we must never forget that these are instruments, not ends. They are like grammar to language or scaffolding to a building. Necessary, but incomplete. Leadership reaches its proper fulfillment only when these instruments serve a deeper inheritance: when they help create a place where truth can be spoken plainly, where good work is honored, where joy is not feigned, where dignity is preserved, where standards are clear, where burdens are shared, and where others are strengthened rather than merely used.

Calvin in his commentary on 1 Timothy rightly noted, “Elders ought to lead the way to others by the example of a holy life.” Every leader creates a moral atmosphere. He may pretend that he is simply making operational decisions, but no decision is ever merely operational when it is repeated often enough. A leader who cuts corners teaches that appearances matter more than integrity. A leader who avoids hard conversations teaches that false harmony is preferable to truth. A leader who praises talent but ignores character teaches that giftedness excuses disorder. A leader who is perpetually hurried teaches that people are interruptions. A leader who cannot delight in the work teaches others to regard labor as drudgery alone. By contrast, a leader who is candid without cruelty, exacting without contempt, cheerful without frivolity, and steady without coldness begins to hand on a different kind of order. And he makes it easier for others to do the same.

That is why the best leadership is generative. As Ignatius put it, “to strive especially for the progress of souls.” In this sense, leadership does not merely extract output; it cultivates people. It does not treat subordinates as extensions of the leader’s ambition, but as souls and minds capable of growth, judgment, and meaningful contribution. The true leader does not hoard clarity. He gives it. He does not monopolize responsibility. He confers it. He does not make himself permanently necessary in every matter but builds others into greater strength and freedom. In this way, leadership is proven not by how much depends upon the leader, but by how much good continues to live and grow in the people and culture under his care.

There is a beauty in all of this. Not ornamental beauty, but fittingness. Proportion. Rhythm. Composure. Harmony between mission and practice. A place where words mean what they ought to mean, where duties are not confused, where ceremonies are not empty, where work has texture and dignity, where communication is not frantic, where discipline is neither lax nor theatrical, where excellence is pursued without vanity. Such places are beautiful in the deepest sense because they reflect moral and human coherence. A leader helps make such beauty possible.

Finally, there is a kind of delight in all of this, so often neglected, especially by “serious” leaders in “serious” institutions. Delight is not the enemy of rigor. It is one of its fruits. Where leadership is sound, there can be gratitude, laughter, relief, celebration, and shared enjoyment of noble work well done. There can be the warmth of common purpose and the pleasure of competence in service of something worthy. Delight tells us that the institution is alive and not merely functioning. It tells us that persons are not being ground down for the sake of production or piety alone. A leader who cannot rejoice, who cannot wonder, who cannot celebrate goodness in others, will eventually preside over a culture that is obedient perhaps, but joyless. Great leaders are to be, as Martin Bucer would put it, “principal physicians of souls.” Let us not forget that joyless cultures do not long remain healthy.

At its pinnacle, leadership is often quieter than modern imagination expects. It is not always dramatic. It most often appears in repeated acts of fidelity. Deep values are rarely transmitted through slogans. They are handed on through habits, tones, judgments, and examples that, over time, settle into the shared life of a people.

Leadership should be spoken of with more reverence than is common. It is not a set of tricks for influence. It is not a brand of executive confidence. It is not a technique for getting buy-in. It is a form of stewardship over souls, culture, mission, and shared life. Its calling is not merely to make institutions work, but to help make persons and communities more human. When truth is spoken with integrity, when beauty is honored in the shape of the work, when delight is permitted and even cultivated, and when humane order is quietly established and handed on, leadership approaches its true end.

Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. From 2008 to 2022, Erik helped build Great Hearts Academies into the largest network of classical schools in the country. He served as president of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022. Erik was a member of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools from 2016 to 2021, as well as a member of the Arizona Charter Schools Association. Erik holds degrees from Trinity University, where he studied political science, and Oxford University, where he studied theology and philosophy. Erik has been married for 20 years to Allison and they have six children.

Let me begin where Erik himself begins: with agreement.

He is right to insist that classical schools require operational excellence. He is right that weak hiring, disordered finances, unclear authority structures, and poor execution can undermine even the most beautifully articulated mission. He is right that “truth and technique cannot and should not be pitted one against the other.” On these points, there is no dispute between us. Indeed, I have seen firsthand, as I suspect he has, that institutional fragility often arises not from philosophical confusion alone, but from failures of management, planning, and disciplined execution.

If my essay suggested otherwise, then I welcome the opportunity to clarify: a classical school must be well-run. Prudence demands it. Justice to families, students, and faculty requires it. Sustainability depends upon it.

But agreement on the necessity of execution does not settle the question I raised. The question is not whether a school requires executive leadership. It plainly does. The question is whether the metaphor—and with it, the model—of the “CEO” is the most accurate or helpful way to understand the office of the Head of School in a classical institution.

Here is where I think Erik and I part ways, though perhaps not as sharply as he suggests.

On Definitions and “Definitional Slippage”

Erik argues that I define “business” and “CEO” too narrowly, making them easy to dismiss. There is something to this. Certainly, one can define “CEO” in a more abstract sense as simply the individual with final executive responsibility for carrying out strategy.

But words do not operate only at the level of technical definition. They carry histories, associations, and expectations. The term “CEO” does not arrive in a vacuum. It brings with it a set of assumptions about success, leadership, incentives, and institutional purpose—assumptions shaped by the corporate world from which the term is drawn.

My concern is not that the Head of School exercises executive authority. He does, and must. My concern is that the CEO metaphor subtly but powerfully reorients how that authority is understood and evaluated.

In other words, the issue is not whether the Head of School does executive work. The issue is what framework governs our understanding of that work.

On Ends and Functions

Erik is right to distinguish between final cause and executive function. They are not competitors. But neither are they unrelated.

In practice, the language we use to describe an office tends to shape how that office is inhabited. If we describe the Head of School primarily in executive terms borrowed from the corporate sphere, we should not be surprised if boards begin to evaluate him accordingly: prioritizing growth metrics, expansion, branding, and institutional scale as primary indicators of success.

That drift rarely announces itself as a rejection of mission. It presents itself as a refinement of strategy.

My argument, then, is not that executive responsibility should be denied, but that it should be explicitly subordinated, and visibly so, to the school’s formative end. The language we choose either clarifies or obscures that subordination.

On False Binaries

Erik suggests that my essay relies on false binaries: mission versus management, formation versus measurement, culture versus structure.

I agree that such binaries, if pressed, would be false. But my intent was not to propose a choice between them. It was to warn against a pattern I have observed repeatedly: the quiet elevation of secondary goods into primary ones.

When I write that efficiency can eclipse depth, or that marketing can replace mission, I am not suggesting that efficiency and communication are unimportant. I am suggesting that they are prone to displace what they are meant to serve.

Erik himself acknowledges this danger when he warns against “mismeasurement and reductionism.” That is precisely the concern.

On Measurement and Institutional Health

On the question of metrics, we are again closer than it may appear. I do not deny the usefulness of prudent indicators. Enrollment trends, retention, financial health, and faculty stability all matter and must be attended to carefully. But here, too, the question is not whether we measure, but what we treat as dispositive.

A school can meet its enrollment targets, balance its budget, and expand its programs while slowly eroding the intellectual and moral seriousness that once defined it. Those losses are harder to quantify, and they often lag behind the indicators we track.

The temptation, then, is not to measure too much, but to mistake what is easily measured for what is most important.

On the “Practical Danger”

Erik worries that essays like mine might give cover to leaders who wish to avoid the “tedious, unglamorous, but indispensable work” of running a school. That would indeed be a serious danger.

But I would suggest that the opposite danger is at least as pressing: that in our understandable desire for institutional competence, we adopt frameworks that gradually reshape the institution in ways we did not intend.

The classical school movement does not primarily suffer from an excess of philosophical seriousness. It suffers from the difficulty of sustaining that seriousness amid the real pressures of growth, funding, staffing, and cultural expectation.

The solution is not to abandon executive discipline. It is to ensure that such discipline remains clearly ordered to, and constrained by, the school’s higher end.

A Clarification of My Claim

So let me restate my position as plainly as I can: A Head of School must, in fact, perform many of the functions typically associated with a chief executive. He must lead, plan, allocate resources, hire, evaluate, and ensure institutional viability.

But he is not merely a CEO, nor is the CEO framework sufficient to describe his role. He is something more specific and, in some ways, more demanding: a leader whose executive authority is bounded and directed by a prior commitment to the intellectual and moral formation of students within a particular civilizational tradition.

If the term “CEO” could bear that weight without distortion, I would have little objection to it. My argument is that, in our current context, it rarely does.

Conclusion

Erik is right to call the classical school movement to greater institutional maturity. That maturity will require both philosophical clarity and operational excellence. On that point, we stand together.

Where I would press the conversation further is this: maturity also requires precision in how we name things. Not because terminology is everything, but because it is rarely nothing.

Metaphors shape expectations. Expectations shape decisions. And decisions, over time, shape institutions.

If we are to preserve what is best in classical education, we must not only run our schools well. We must also speak about them in ways that keep their true end firmly in view.

Michael Rose is headmaster of Cincinnati Classical Academy, a Hillsdale College K-12 member school, serving 950 students in southwestern Ohio. He is also author of The Subversive Art of a Classical Education, The Art of Being Human, and other books. His latest essays and letters can be found at Classical Compass Rose

Classical Compass Rose

Navigating the wreckage of discarded traditions, mapping forgotten virtues, reviving enduring principles, and unearthing timeless pedagogical treasures

By Michael S. Rose

Headmaster Rose argues that a classical school exists for the formation of the human person, not profit; that faculty are not merely functionaries; that culture cannot be manufactured like a brand; and that the head of school must safeguard mission, inheritance, and institutional integrity. All of this has force. It needs to be said and said often, and I give it—and Michael—a resounding, Amen! What is frustrating, however, is how he turns a legitimate caution into an unnecessary absolute: because a school is not a business, he concludes that the head of school is not a chief executive in any meaningful sense. That move is where the essay weakens and perpetuates an already pernicious attitude among many classical school leaders.   

Let’s begin with the obvious definitional slippage inherent in the argument. Michael defines “business” in the narrowest possible way, as an enterprise ordered to profit, and defines “CEO” as though the term necessarily implies a corporate officer accountable mainly for financial return and investor protection. On those terms, of course a classical school is not a business. But that is too easy. The title describes a governing and executive function, not the ultimate telos of the role nor, by extension, of the institution. The essay wins part of its argument by shrinking the meaning of the opposing terms until they are easy to dismiss. 

Subscribe now

Michael is right to insist that the final cause of a school is formation. But the question “What is a school for?” is not the same question as “What sort of leadership office is needed to direct and sustain it?” Final cause and executive function are not competitors. They operate on different levels. We should never forget that. But a classical school can be wholly ordered to truth and virtue and still require a chief executive with final responsibility for carrying out board-authorized strategy, thoughtfully ordering means to ends, and ensuring that the institution is financially and operationally sound. Rose collapses these levels and then treats the collapse as insight.

Unsurprisingly, his essay repeatedly concedes the executive function point that he is trying to deny. Michael knows full well that one cannot discard the duties of the office so easily. He rightly acknowledges the head of school must ensure that “hiring, curriculum, scheduling, discipline, and budgeting all serve the stated mission,” and says the role requires “philosophical clarity joined to operational competence.” Later he adds that schools “must balance budgets,” “manage personnel responsibly,” and “plan for sustainability.” All well and good. This is precisely the sort of work boards entrust to the institution’s chief executive. Is it sacrilege to say as much? Michael admits the substance of executive responsibility while rejecting the language that most cleanly names it. This is a typical move in our circles. Is it because we think biz speak is beneath us? Do we believe that admitting the head of school’s chief responsibility is to execute a clearly defined strategy with a sound tactical plan inevitably leads away from a defense of human flourishing? Maybe we tend to avoid corporate language because we’ve all been condescended to by the know-it-all entrepreneur types who think school leadership is akin to a kid playing with his cute little non-profit toys. Or, do we fear the kind of accountability that comes when you take seriously that you run an institution that is governed by actual economic and operational laws? Maybe it’s all of this and more. I’m not quite sure. But I think we look silly when we try to say these terms don’t work. Sure, they’re incomplete. But their incompleteness is not a good reason to toss them aside.

Related to this is the essay’s reliance on false binaries. Michael repeatedly frames the matter as though one must choose between mission and management, formation and measurement, culture and structure, wisdom and execution. But his own best lines undermine that frame. He rightly says that “vision without execution becomes sentiment” and “execution without vision becomes bureaucracy.” Exactly. That is the whole case for integrated executive leadership in a school. The wise response is not to reject execution as somehow unworthy of education, but to subordinate execution to the true end of education. Michael gestures toward integration, then argues as though the alternatives were cleanly separable. 

Further on, he says formation cannot be reduced to key performance indicators. Fine. But it does not follow that prudent indicators are alien to education, and the essay leaves that impression. Schools must know whether students are enrolling, families are staying, teachers are thriving, budgets are viable, philanthropy is healthy, classrooms are orderly, alumni remain engaged, and mission drift is being resisted through clear communication and disciplined infrastructure. The real problems are mismeasurement and reductionism, not measurement per se. A school that refuses all institutional metrics in the name of higher things will usually lose the higher things through neglect of the lower. Why we still playact as though this were not the case eludes me.

The real danger in essays like this is not merely semantic. It is practical. The framing can give boards and school leaders permission to neglect operational excellence, managerial discipline, and institutional sustainability, as though these belonged to a lesser and vaguely suspect realm. And, if we are honest, this is our greatest weakness as a movement. We don’t lack intellectual capacity among our leadership class. But we sure do lack operational know how. In too many of our schools, mission is damaged not by an excess of tactical and technical clarity, but by its absence: weak hiring, poor supervision, unstable finances, confused lines of authority, neglected development work, inconsistent discipline, sloppy communication, and strategic drift. A school does not protect its soul by neglecting its bodily integrity. It loses it that way.

Headmaster Rose is right that a classical school must never confuse commercial success with educational excellence. He has always been a strong defender of this truth, and I hope he will continue to be. But he is wrong to suggest that the head of school is something that transcends a chief executive. Too many school leaders are looking for high-minded excuses to avoid the tedious, unglamorous, but indispensable work of running their institutions. Rose’s essay suggests they might be justified in scoffing at such corporate assumptions. They want the tweed and the pipe and the podium. They want to fancy themselves guardians of an academic ideal. But they need reminding that Platonic pieties are destructive stand-ins for leadership. Their people need them to defend first principles as well as stand up an operating frame that advances them. Truth and technique cannot and should not be pitted one against the other. And we would do well to give no more occasions for suggesting they can.

Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. From 2008 to 2022, Erik helped build Great Hearts Academies into the largest network of classical schools in the country. He served as president of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022. Erik was a member of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools from 2016 to 2021, as well as a member of the Arizona Charter Schools Association. Erik holds degrees from Trinity University, where he studied political science, and Oxford University, where he studied theology and philosophy. Erik has been married for 20 years to Allison and they have six children.

Goodwill is the determination to assume the best in another. To lay a strong foundation for a successful school, a leader simply must assume the best in another. In a school community, there are hundreds of thousands of interactions between and among humans every single day. If even a fraction of a percent of these go poorly, conflict emerges and that conflict can easily hamper the learning, the collegiality, and the trust critical to a school’s work towards the formation of young people. All too often, conflict emerges based on one’s view of why another behaved as he did. We frequently assume the worst, rather than the best. We rarely read an upset parent email with a spirit of charity and think, “Wow, that parent is really trying to figure out what is going on with her child. Let’s see how we can help!” Instead, we react to the email with increasing blood pressure and a sigh in response to the parent “who just doesn’t get it.” Candidly, the root of that same perspective (“teacher X just doesn’t get it”) was probably in the mind of the parent who sent the angry email in the first place. Nevertheless, the point is that we tend to encounter challenge and conflict with defensiveness and blame, neither of which posture is likely to lead to resolution because it bestows far less charity on another than he deserves. Cynicism might feel like private vindication but very little can be built upon it.

Subscribe now

Simone Weil famously stated, “Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” In a posture of goodwill, the good leaders gives that sentiment a real shot. Rather than regarding the student or the colleague with suspicion we could readily form of her, we opt for the opposite. We should ask, “What would happen if I assumed positive intent about the other?” At a minimum, an assumption of goodwill should ensure that whatever the disagreement, it will be approached with far greater calm, reasonableness, and understanding. Ultimately, we are training our hearts, our instincts, and our immediate reactions to be less vicious about those with whom we work and live.

In Book VIII of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides the insight: “Friendship is reciprocated goodwill.” When any two people genuinely care about what is best for each other, they have laid the foundation for mutual support of one another. As many a mother has instructed her children, “you don’t have to like everyone, but you do have to love everyone.” This is nothing more than seeking the good for others, even if their humor or Myers-Briggs profile differs considerably from yours. This affection multiplied throughout a community by constructive leadership – especially a community of adults modeling and instructing young people in the fundaments of the good life – will work wonders.

What we model and what we directly teach about our regard for others makes a difference. To start, I have a few simple tips for school leaders to get the goodwill bubbling. First, as a professor of mine was fond of saying, “come inquiring:” if something seems off or amiss with someone, go to the person with authentic questions about the issue at hand. The point is not to engage in an inquisition that begins with preconceived notions. Instead, it’s an upgrade to the adage: “seek first to understand rather than to be understood.” The negative example that frequently comes to mind on this topic is my interactions with my own adolescent children when they are “emotionally escalated.” In their indignation, their mouths are literally open trying to form the next word on their lips, even as I am still speaking to them. They’re not listening; they’re waiting to make a point they already conceived and believe will land. Inquiry, on the other hand, tries its best not to begin with conclusions but with questions.

Listening to the other side of a conflict. The second trick to turning up the goodwill is deployed when conflict is already apparent. Simply try to channel Atticus Finch and ask, “How is the other side thinking about this matter?” And, more deeply, “WHY are they thinking about this matter in this way?” That is incredibly hard work, but it’s the kind of thing for which our students and our teachers should be well trained. They are continually working to make sense of the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of numerous historical and literary actors. Rather than considering, “Should Napoleon (or Achilles, or Hester) have done X?” the more basic question is “why did Napoleon/Achilles/Hester do X?” When we first ask the latter question, we have to think carefully and suspend initial outrage or irritation that clouds our analytical abilities. Part of what makes the effort toward graciousness so difficult is the natural tensions that exist in our hearts when it comes to engaging other people with whom we are upset. To make matters worse, our present society manifests a limited capacity for restraint. In the current moment, all positions (especially moral and political ones) tend to be advanced without moderation. Willing the good of the other is to some extent both counter-instinctual and counter-cultural.

Accountability and clemency. What I am emphatically NOT suggesting is lessening accountability. This is not a suggestion toward naivete nor toward permissiveness. In Matthew, Jesus counsels his disciples to be as “shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” We need more of both wisdom and clemency. We want to discern and understand what is going on so that we might engage and resolve matters well. We don’t help our cause (or the uplift of the school), if we err in our zeal for righteousness. Let’s be righteous and call others toward virtue in the most humane and intelligent way possible. I think of the wonderful juxtaposition of two flawed approaches to the affairs of a community in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett mocks Jane for operating with such innocence and lack of scrutiny about others that no one could ever be found at fault for anything, ever. Alternatively, Elizabeth herself must admit much later that she who prided herself on her judgment had been deluded by her own vanity. This is precisely the point – we tend to err in our judgment when our own interests are involved. We all too often invent and/or locate blame in some place other than ourselves. None of this leads to a better nor wiser community; and it certainly does not beget more intellectually and morally virtuous young people.

Good will matters in our schools because in human society we must build relational capital. Here, I don’t mean we should treat others in a manipulative, stereotypical transactional way. I mean we must build trust by showing grace, thoughtfully responding, honoring our commitments, and demonstrating that we care deeply for members of our community even when they’ve done something they ought not to have done. Gossip, challenges, and tensions know no limits in communities – which is especially true in schools. Our task is not to falter under such perennial sin, but to overcome it as individuals and as a school community.

Trust is essential to a good school. If you’ve spent any time in an awful school – or really any kind of destructive community – when things break, they break along lines of trust. This insight is neither novel, nor my own. Patrick Lencioni, and others, identify trust as the foundation for all positive functioning of communities. Part of what makes this observation so insightful is how readily apparent it is within teams, between individuals, and among peers. If one does not start every working relationship from a place of goodwill, and if people do not believe in the goodwill of the other, very little that is positive will emerge. Distrust is bad for companies and absolutely devastating for academies born to enrich the lives of young people. The alternative is an amazingly compelling prospect – what if our leaders, neighbors, churches, and our families started from a point of assuming the best? How much more flourishing would we observe and experience? The school built on goodwill will see its share of challenges, but such obstacles will be capable of being engaged because the orientation of the leaders and subsequently the children and parents will be one of a human push toward the excellent.

The last question about goodwill is how to wield it. The solution is not to consider a posture of goodwill as an instrument of conflict. It is neither a cudgel, nor a shield – it loses its merciful power if it is used to attack our critics or defend ourselves from accountability. It works in a single direction: when we find something amiss, we should begin assuming the best and not rushing to judgment. When we err, we cannot reverse the order of things by ducking and covering ourselves with the demand that “you must show me goodwill.” At that point, it’s simply a tool of manipulation or self-gratification, not an act of grace. In truth, the move to require goodwill of others is a toxic moral protectionism. It’s akin to turning Christ’s “judge not lest ye be judged” into a defensive posture to prevent accountability.

If any school will be more successful when its posture is one of goodwill, a Classical school is especially well-suited to spare its members from “contempt prior to investigation” (as my mother describes it) and, in turn, provide greater occasion to grow, improve, and learn. Furthermore, those whose hearts have grown accustomed to proffering goodwill have laid the foundations for magnanimity.

Brandon Crowe is the Superintendent and Managing Director of Great Hearts Arizona. Mr. Crowe joined Great Hearts in 2007 as a Humane Letters teacher at Great Hearts Veritas Prep where he taught for five years and held several leadership positions. He later moved to Great Hearts Glendale Prep where he served as Headmaster for six years before moving into an executive leadership role with Great Hearts Arizona. Brandon is a member of the Arizona Charter School Association Board of Directors. He holds both his MA and BA in Religious Studies from Arizona State University. Brandon and his wife are native Phoenicians and live in the West Valley with their four boys.

How can we think differently? Allow me to offer wisdom from philosopher (and scientist) Archimedes, who said, “Give me a firm place to stand and a lever and I can move the earth.” When you want to move something that seems to outsize you, a lever and fulcrum can be quite powerful – literally and metaphorically.

We all seek more leverage to achieve our goals. While authority can be useful, over-reliance on it diminishes its effectiveness. It is tempting to think that possessing greater authority would simplify accountability and execution. However, we must look for something else – a combo of a fulcrum and lever that will allow us to work with the laws of nature to do something that seems superhuman. This is the power of influence.

Influence without Authority: The ability to drive change and achieve through people you cannot command. (Hint: This is almost always the case.)

The Nature of Influence
Influence and positional authority do not always go hand in hand. Consider individuals in your organization who hold immense influence without formal authority—those people everyone turns to when they need to get something done. Conversely, some individuals with high positional authority may struggle to command respect or action.

Influence stems from several sources beyond formal authority:

• Relational Influence: Who you know and your ability to connect with key individuals.

• Operational Influence: Control over critical processes that drive execution.

• Experiential Influence: Institutional knowledge and experience that guide decision-making.

Expanding and Leveraging Influence
To expand and leverage influence effectively, we turn again to the classical Greek framework of rhetoric—the art of persuasion. The three primary appeals in persuasion are ethos, pathos, and logos.

• Ethos (Credibility and Trustworthiness)
  To persuade others, you must establish yourself as trustworthy and credible. Building this trust takes time but offers long-term dividends. Gaining trust means being able to leverage it for future initiatives, not just the current project. A key to credibility is self-awareness. Seek feedback actively and demonstrate improvement based on that feedback. Additionally, cultivate trust by consistently exhibiting honesty, integrity, transparency, loyalty, competence, accountability, and commitment. For deeper insights, consider Stephen Covey’s Speed of Trust.

• Logos (Logic and Competence)
  Your message and plan must be logical and well-founded. To establish logos, diagnose problems accurately and propose sound, feasible solutions. If you lack certain expertise, demonstrate a clear strategy for acquiring the necessary resources and skills to succeed. Ensure that your solution is not only logical but also executable.

• Pathos (Emotional Appeal and Empathy)
  To command pathos (an appeal to your stakeholder’s emotional confidence), you must understand the minds and hearts of others. You must be able to look with their perspective and figure out what they care about and be willing to address their needs in the situation. You must appeal to what they love and reassure others that you hear their needs as part of the project.

Bonus: Kairos (Timeliness) and Topos (Context)
Finally, consider two more ideas (not always included in the traditional triangle of rhetorical appeals): kairos and topos.

• Kairos (Timeliness): Choosing the right action at the right moment.

• Topos (Contextual Awareness): Understanding the organizational landscape and identifying key influencers who can accelerate or hinder progress.

Questions and Challenges for Influential Leadership
So, the next time you have a big project and little authority, think through the following questions:

• Ethos – Am I credible to others in leading this project? Do people see me as trustworthy? What feedback do I get? Are there other trustworthy people I can engage to build trust?

• Pathos – Do I listen well to others? Do I understand the needs of others affected? Do people feel heard? What’s the tone? What are some hidden desires people may have that I need to address?

• Logos – Do I have the expertise and competence needed to complete this project? If not, where is the expertise? Did I diagnose the problem correctly? What is the outcome that I want to see? Have I made that clear? Does it make sense to others?

• Kairos and Topos – Do I understand the organization/context where I am operating? Do I know what accelerators vs. detractors exist? Do I know where to find others who will influence the project? Is the organization or team ready for this change at this time?

Most importantly, I challenge you to check your intentions. To lead others well is to love others well. Leadership is not about what you can get done. Leadership is about inspiring others to do well. Are you considering what is the highest good for the organization, the situation, and those affected? Do you love the people more than you love the change you propose?

There is no secret formula for persuading everyone to support your vision. Rather, Archimedes offers an idea more powerful (and more difficult). If you want to move the earth, start with your own heart and mind. Find your firm place to stand, and from there, love and serve others well.

Jerilyn Olson is the Chief People Officer of Great Hearts. Jerilyn’s education began as a home schooled student through the eighth grade, at which point she attended one of the first public charter schools in the nation with a classical curriculum. She then continued her education by attending Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts college in Southern California, where she double-majored in Literature and Government. After helping found the second school in the Great Hearts network and teaching for 6 years, she began working to support the growing community of faculty. During her tenure, she has also completed a Master’s degree in Humanities with a Classical Education Concentration through The University of Dallas. She and her husband live in the Phoenix area and delight in watching their three children thrive in a classical education environment.

What if you want to build something enduring? Turns out, moral vacuums are very bad incubators of sturdy institutions. Classical educators know this better than most. Long before management manuals crowded the shelves, our great tradition insisted that true leadership (and, therefore, true institution building) is rooted not in control but in the inner architecture of virtue. Aristotle teaches that praxis is the fruit of ethos; Augustine reminds us that communities are bound by the love of common objects; Aquinas insists that virtus perfects human powers so those powers may attain their proper ends.  Strip leadership of virtue, and you strip from the institution its long-term purpose and health.

Thankfully, that ancient insight is not merely a museum piece; it finds modern champions in leaders like Alexandre Havard and Patrick Lencioni. Together, the work of Havard and Lencioni provides an indispensable road map for anyone aspiring to lead well, where technique is animated by virtue. Those wishing to lead the classical ed movement at any scale would do well to take them seriously. Here, I want to take a quick look at their individual insights and how they fit together to shape what I believe is the strongest organizational leadership blueprint available today.

In Havard’s framework, magnanimity and humility serve as the twin pillars of true leadership, without which organizational strategy degenerates into gamesmanship. Upon that foundation emanate the classical virtues of prudence, justice, courage (fortitude), and temperance. For heads of classical schools, this premise should feel familiar.  A classical curriculum aims to form persons by habituating intellect and will toward transcendent goods.  If the telos of education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, then the telos of educational leadership must be the same, lived out in the public square of faculty meeting, board retreat, and hallway conversation.  Anything less reduces leadership to either the sterile management of resources, or their gross manipulation.

Havard’s great contribution is to translate the moral vocabulary of antiquity into actionable leadership dispositions. Magnanimity infuses leadership with a greatness of soul that sets bold horizons for the whole community; it awakens an expansive vision that beckons faculty and students alike toward higher purposes. Humility, its indispensable counterpart, grounds that vision in true knowledge of self and open-hearted receptivity, enabling the leader to delegate wisely, listen attentively, and welcome correction without defensiveness. Prudence then guides the enterprise with practical wisdom—seeing reality as it is, judging means and timing with clarity, and steering decisions toward enduring goods. Justice follows as the steady resolve to give each person his or her due, establishing fair policies, honoring promises, and cultivating trust through consistent practices. Courage provides the grit to act decisively in the face of risk or resistance, protecting mission and people when pressures mount. Finally, temperance anchors the whole array in self-mastery, modeling balance and resisting the freneticism that so often erodes organizations. Together, these six virtues form a single integrated capacity: they transform authority from a mere apparatus of control into a personal gift offered for the flourishing of others.

If Havard places a cardiogram of the leader’s heart on the table, charting the vital rhythms of individual virtue, Lencioni follows with an X-ray of the body corporate, exposing fractures in team health. Overlay the two images and a full roadmap emerges: cultivate the virtues that oxygenate personal character, then apply them to mend the skeletal structures of the team, until individual integrity and collective health beat in steady, unified cadence.

It is easier said than done. Team dynamics must be attended to daily as cracks form quickly on teams. One of Lencioni’s great insights is in showing how predictably the cracks form. They always do so along the same fault lines: Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to collective results. Unsurprisingly, each team dysfunction Lencioni identifies is, at bottom, a deficit of virtue:

Absence of Trust ↔ Humility: only the humble disclose weakness.

Fear of Conflict ↔ Courage and Justice: truth-telling requires both.

Lack of Commitment ↔ Prudence: prudent leaders clarify choices and timelines.

Avoidance of Accountability ↔ Magnanimity: great-souled leaders protect standards higher than personal comfort.

Inattention to Results ↔ Temperance and Justice: self-mastery keeps ego at bay; justice prizes the common good.

Healthy teams (and, therefore, healthy institutions) are made up of men and women who first cultivate virtue in themselves, and who pursue a culture of moral seriousness and steady purpose for the sake of the whole.  Teams who do not inevitably substitute politics for persuasion and coercion for communion.

Subscribe now

“City is the soul writ large,” says Plato; so too a school.  Student culture flows from faculty culture, and faculty culture flows from leadership culture.  If faculty observe their headmaster or admin team deflecting blame, inflating achievements, or shortcutting due process, they infer (rightly) that such habits are tolerated—and perhaps rewarded.  Conversely, when leadership repents publicly, honors opponents, praises in secret, and perseveres in difficulty, these patterns seep into the communal bloodstream.

Leadership, viewed through the classical lens, is service ordered to the flourishing of others.  Havard reminds us that service without virtue is sentimentalism, and power without virtue is tyranny; Lencioni shows how vice sabotages organizational health and undermines even the best-drafted strategic plans.  For classical educators charged with forming the next generation, nothing is more urgent than embodying the virtues we teach.  Strategies may differentiate schools for a season, but it is virtue, painstakingly acquired and relentlessly modeled, that will secure communities where truth is loved, goodness pursued, and beauty made manifest. It is these things that endure and the institutions that are led by men and women dedicated to the same will stand for generations to come.