What If You Are the Leader You’re Waiting For?

This past weekend, I had the amazing opportunity to spend two days with a remarkable group of leaders, graduates of the Executive Doctoral Program at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. I was invited because I teach a course called Executive Formation, and this gathering reflected one of our deepest commitments at BC: that leadership formation doesn’t end with a degree. It is lifelong work.

Chris Glass, Director of the program, and the planning team created the conditions for these scholar-leaders to pause the noise of daily leadership and life responsibilities to reflect, reconnect, and reimagine who they are becoming. The retreat invited them to explore both the calling and the cost of leadership in a time when higher education and the world need courage, imagination, and hope more than ever.

For me, it was a privilege to spend time with them, to facilitate part of the weekend, and to have meaningful one-on-one conversations grappling with the real challenges that busy, engaged leaders face every day across the country and around the world. The Exec Doc program and, by extension, the retreat, draw leaders from around the world. Graduates flew in from Russia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and all corners of the U.S. to participate, learn, and grow together in this weekend retreat.

On the second day, I had an opportunity to engage the group in an important exploration. My hope was to help create space for our leaders to tap their wisdom, expertise, lived experience, preparation, and courage to envision the impact they might make in the world. Today, maybe more than ever, we need leaders who are wise, disciplined, moral, and effective. We seek, and are waiting for, leaders “out there” who put people over profits, work toward the greater good, and can see a better future for our critically important higher education ecosystem. Perhaps those leaders are out there.

I engaged the group in a simple but radical proposition - What If You Are the Leader You’ve Been Waiting For? Perhaps we don’t need to wait for new saviors, but rather to recognize and claim (or reclaim) our own agency, authority, and wisdom.

The group reflected privately on the three questions:

• Where are you still waiting for permission?

• Where are you relinquishing or not claiming your authority?

• Where are you holding or projecting an old identity that you’ve outgrown or a belief that no longer holds true?

  
  

From there, we explored and reflected on the dimensions of Wellness, Voice, Leadership, and Mission, which scaffold our approach to Executive Formation: 

• What practices and boundaries allow you to lead from wholeness rather than exhaustion? (Wellness)

• What stories (or beliefs) about your leadership no longer serve you, and what new story needs to be told? (Voice) 

• What leadership assumptions do you need to unlearn, and what new supports will help you lead through uncertainty? (Leadership)

• How can this community of leaders sustain one another and build a more just, resilient, and imaginative future for higher education? (Mission)

These questions opened up powerful reflections. The conversations that emerged were raw, wise, and deeply human. Leaders spoke honestly about exhaustion and hope, about identity and growth, about what it means to lead with integrity in complex, often disheartening systems.

I left the retreat with a profound sense of hope, pride, and inspiration—hope in the kind of leaders we are cultivating at Boston College; pride in the courage and candor these alumni bring to their work; and inspiration in knowing that the future of higher education is being shaped by people leaders who understand that transformation begins with self-awareness, reflection, and community.

These are, indeed, the leaders we’ve been waiting for.