Thoughts about Staying On-Mission

About 6 years ago, I found myself speaking to a group of board members and seated Heads of School at a Conference in Baton Rouge, LA. I was tasked with addressing the relationship between a school's stated mission and its resulting culture. After 30 minutes or so of defining terms like mission and culture and community values, as well as referencing data from 3rd party sources and offering up a few defining examples of a mission shaping a culture (sort of thing), I shifted our time towards collegial dialogue around the topic.

What ensued during that time has stayed with me to this day. Over and over it became apparent that most board members in the room had little to no confidence in re-stating their particular school's mission, often showing some discomfort even putting it into their own words. That, while their respective Head of School often casually paraphrased the language of their mission, made ready application points, effortlessly carrying the conversation forward. On the surface, this may strike us as simply par for the course.

Still, when reflecting upon the potential impact this mission-meaning awareness might have on Board/Head relations and their collective efforts at leading the greater school community with mission fidelity, it is worth pondering further. In our time, the result often exposed a breakdown between the board member's thinking on applying a particular aspect of the school's mission and the Head of School's thinking.

Of course, this disconnect is not reserved for board/Head relations but can also happen between respective board members. To be sure, just a year ago, as a colleague and I were leading a board through the mission-parsing aspect of our program, in efforts at coming to an agreed-upon definition of one of the mission components (Christ-Centered Education), a full-hour discussion ensued on what each board member thought that component meant. While nothing about these examples qualifies as breaking news regarding tendencies within organizations to unwittingly live at arms-length with their stated mission and its meaning, what has stimulated me over the years is the likely reason this is so often the case.

I have begun to hypothesize that we, as leaders in independent schools, to remain objective in our roles (mainly as board members), trend towards an arms-length relationship with our stated mission to remain objective. While some might argue that it's simply a matter of having enough time to talk about it more to understand it more fully, I suspect we would all agree that we seem to find a way to make the time for the things we deem critical to understand. Understanding the budget, personnel issues, or other significant matters when leading an independent school successfully.

Ironically, we might even feel it's almost more responsible to keep some of the emotion, maybe even passion the mission might call for, tempered in ourselves, lest we make rash or short-cited decisions that ultimately hurt the school. At least, these are the sorts of things I subconsciously told myself through the years. Of course, holding leadership offices (board or Head of School) with wisdom and fidelity is admirable and necessary.

Yet, what if leaning into our mission with more than just intellectual acknowledgment of its existence and basic meaning resulted in something more profound and critical to these very leadership efforts of Ours? What if a greater awareness of our mission's meaning and clarity on each component that makes it up resulted in greater ownership of the mission for us, personally? Consider that to be an independent school is to be, in a phrase, a school "on" a mission. Said another way, it is to be a school that exists for the acute purpose of affecting its clientele (primarily its students) with a set of pre-determined, pre-agreed-upon values to a certain ideal end.

Often, that end mirrors what the founders of the stated mission envisioned as the ideal citizen who would pursue the envisioned ideal society in response to being affected by the mission values. Granted, while language such as "ideal citizen" and "ideal society" might not be used in everyday conversation between board members and Heads of School, these words do, in fact, accurately reflect the most natural desired end of a given school. That is to say, to have a stated mission is to have an idea that the mission is designed to achieve.

We see this in more common language, such as developing students of high character…spiritually minded…who are trained in academic rigor…with humanitarian hearts …and sound leadership skills, or some of the aforementioned. Few would sincerely disagree that a school affecting any of these qualities in a student would, in the end, be putting forward a positive force for a healthy society, if not an ideal one! In short, a school's mission is its ultimate reason for existing. It's why the buildings have been built. It's why the faculty has been hired.

The occasionally long board meeting is worth it, though inconvenient at the time. All of this makes it something not to keep at arms-length but worth leaning into, personally. This, especially if you're a board member, takes us back to the question: do you understand your school's mission? To be clear, the question isn't merely, do you know your stated mission? (Although that knowledge alone might be a good starting place for many of us!).

Instead, the question that is begged here is more personal than that. Do you understand your school's mission? Do the differing components that make up your mission have a clear meaning to you? Are they readily applicable to the differing areas of daily operations in your mind? How about the rest of your board? Since a board is only at its fullest functionality when operating as a unit, the next question arises: does your board have a collective understanding of your school's stated mission? Understanding often leads to ownership (the personal piece), which leads to stronger boards.

​This is the case precisely because a board unified around a collective understanding of their school's mission and its application in daily operations results in a board functioning at the highest level of mission fidelity. One can only imagine the benefits to a school community having a board that shares an awareness of, clarity on, and ultimately ownership of the school's stated mission! In short, a board that has fully leaned in to and, thus, understands its mission.

By Chip Welch
CEO of On-Mission Diagnostics
Founding President of The Habersham School