Leadership Trends 2024-2025: Trend #2

By Tim Bentum  |  January 13th

We are back this month with the second of five Leadership Trends for 2024-2025. These trends are being released once per month in the Edvance Notice between December and April.

If you missed the first trend, we would encourage you to go back to December’s edition of the Edvance Notice to catch up. As a quick reminder, these five broad Christian school leadership trends were generated based out of two days of discussion, debate, learning, reflection and engagement between the Edvance Directors and Cohort Leaders in August of 2024. Here are a few caveats  that will help you read these trends with an eye towards leading more effectively in the current school year towards the flourishing of your Christian school community:

The goal of these trends is to equip school leaders and boards with information and relevant discussion topics that may be useful around a board or leadership table. They are not ‘prescriptive’, in the sense that Edvance endorses the trend or its resultant factors. Rather, the trends are more ‘descriptive’, creating space for dialogue and debate. In addition, these trends are inherently broad and general and do not apply equally, or perhaps at all, to each Christian school communities. However, at the very least, these trends may create an opportunity for learning, growth and empathy in and between school communities who may be wrestling with similar issues.

Although the trends may at times be challenging to read, each entry ends with some concrete steps that school leaders and boards can take to move forward in a hopeful, God-honouring manner in the face of challenge.

Happy Reading!

Trend #2: Mental Health

Context: In recent years, there has been a healthy emphasis placed on the state of human mental health conditions. There are now ample resources (ie. counseling, books, podcasts) available for Christian leaders to utilize when thinking about how to grow and maintain a healthy state of mental health, both for themselves and for the people that they serve. From a Christian perspective, we recognize that we are ‘whole’ beings (1 Thessalonians 5: 23-24), each part of our body, mind and soul impacting the health of each other part.

There are also many metrics pointing towards growing societal mental health challenges. For example, Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, documents well the impact of smart phones on the decline of mental health, particularly among young people, but extending to all parts of society. To add to the challenge, many of these mental health trends were exacerbated during and after the Covid-19 pandemic due to the isolation that resulted. In the context of schooling, mental health impacts have certainly had a dramatic effect on school leadership.

In a broader sense, the local Christian school continues to become a dense locus for family joys and celebrations, but also the challenges and tensions that exist in our world. With the general continued decline in overall church attendance and ongoing time commitments that can overwhelm the average Canadian family, the local Christian school can become the lone institution that many families still ‘need’ to prioritize due to the educational requirements of their children. Given that many families simply do not have time for other types of institutional life, at least not in deep and meaningful ways, they can have increasingly outsized expectations of the local Christian school.

Issue In Brief: Christian school leaders are now dealing with ‘complex’ challenges far more than they are dealing with ‘complicated’ challenges. As defined by pastor, author and speaker Mark Sayers, a complicated challenge usually involves a fairly straight-line solution to get from a problem to a solution. One such example of a ‘complicated’ challenge may be the purchase of new curriculum. In this example, there may be many curricular options, but the path to a solution is fairly straightforward – you have a problem (ie. need new curriculum) and you can see a path to a solution (i.e. research options, engage stakeholders, discern, buy new curriculum).

Conversely, complex challenges have several layers, each intersecting with and compounding the difficulty level for a school leader. For example, sudden increased enrolment may create the need for a new building project. However, a leader may find that the school does not have enough of a donor base from which to solicit donations for a building project. This may be due to an influx of recent new family enrolments who do not have a long history with the school and do not feel an emotional attachment leading to capital campaign donations. In this scenario, the leader has a problem (ie. increased growth means you need more room), but the solution involves many layers (ie. Does the principal have capacity to engage with donors or does the school need to hire a development director? How do you connect with families who do not have a long history with your community? Even if you raise the funds, is this enrolment trajectory sustainable? Etc.)

Complicated challenges require solutions. Complex challenges require trust and relationships. Unfortunately, with heightened anxiety among teachers, boards, and wider community members to engage in these complex challenges in general, leaders may be left dealing with complex challenges in a less linear environment.

Steps To Consider: Here are three ideas for school leaders and boards to consider in the context of mental health challenges. Again, these are not meant to be prescriptive, and not all suggested steps will apply equally in all situations. Many schools have many things to celebrate as they have taken active steps to bolster their awareness and support for mental health in their school community. As always, wise discernment and prayer is required in a team-based leadership setting:

1. Recognition – Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, school leaders and boards could wrestle with the tensions outlined above together. Perhaps they may conclude that leadership in 2025 is in fact fundamentally different from 2005 and is even different from 2015. Comments about ‘the way things used to be’ are certainly worth considering but need to be wisely balanced with an awareness that our culture has shifted following the smart phone, social media, a global pandemic, and many other factors over the past years, for both better and worse.
2. Accommodations – Leaders may need to become more comfortable providing increased accommodation for their staff for both general and specific mental health related issues. Whether or not a staff member has a formal, medical diagnosis, the reality may be that more staff are going to miss more work, for example, for a greater variety of reasons than they would have a decade or more ago. Potentially adding to this complexity are the varying expectations that different generations of staff members have of their workplace (ie. Gen X vs. Gen Y). Along the same vein, leaders may need to give themselves more grace to deal appropriately with their own mental health. Equally, boards must remain aware of their leaders’ current leadership capacity at any given time.
3. Resilience – While it may be true that more accommodation could be required, it could also be equally true that leaders must build and model resilience in the face of challenge. As always, leaders must model wisdom in both pushing through challenges, while also not creating unreasonable or unhealthy expectations for staff in sustaining good mental health. Coaches, spiritual guides, trained therapists, and good mentors could all be important for leaders as they navigate these tensions. We all must embrace our own humanity and our dependence on our Creator. Equally, leaders may need to embrace this same tension for the staff that they lead. What is appropriate accommodation? When does a staff member need to develop a deeper sense of resilience in the face of challenge? Leaders may need to seek out counsel for these kinds of complex and highly relational issues. Again, a leadership coach or mentor may be a good place to start as no one can optimally lead alone over the long haul. Humans are created for relationships – build resilience by traveling together!