Leading Up: Why the Best Leaders Let Others Lead Them
Leading up is the practice of influencing and supporting those in positions of authority above you. The concept of leading up is an articulation and reflection of leadership practices and organizational culture that effective leaders live out – principles well-documented in leadership research. Additionally, the current societal culture and multi-generational workplace value building leadership capacity, developing collaborative leadership, and planning for succession. Leading up is a leadership competency that can have significant impacts on an organization and produce wide-ranging benefits that are desperately needed and exist in leaders’ blind spots.
Leadership Flows
Effective leadership flows upward, downward, and across organizations. Leaders who understand and leverage these dynamic flows unlock exponential growth in both individuals and institutions. Leading up is an essential but often overlooked leadership competency that empowers leaders at all organizational levels and releases pressure on senior leaders to always drive initiatives and be experts in everything.
Tradition is that leaders develop, mentor, and support those underneath them. The Head of School exercises direct leadership over the senior leaders in the organization. The senior leader is responsible for the outcomes and ultimately problems that arise underneath them. Ultimate responsibility and accountability has to stop somewhere. Accountability is needed and frequently this generates a very downward flow of decisions. Further down the organization, administrators and program directors lead those within their program. Cue Tevye with a rousing “Tradition” belting out. The reality and weight of responsibility and accountability flow like gravity down the organization from the top to the bottom. While healthy organizations have shared decision-making, the flow of decisions, priorities, and needs going up the organizational mountain is slow and limited – it fights organizational gravity.
If we are going to attain excellence within our schools, we have to embrace a greater bi-directional flow through the organization. Leadership must bubble up from below as well as cascading down from above. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked.
Organizational Complexity
First, schools are unique organizations. The modern leadership landscape in schools is quite diverse as school leaders have come from an array of different life experiences and careers. While many school leaders started their career in the classroom, the job of leadership is entirely different than classroom instruction for those that have followed a more traditional school leadership path. Regardless of the preparation through experiences or educational training, senior leadership positions in Christian schools are extremely complex and challenging. Modern day senior leaders must be savvy business leaders, adept fundraisers, detailed construction managers, capable communications experts, up-to-date human resource and legal attachés, and organizational leadership scholars. Amidst these other tasks, they must also remember the core function of schools is the instruction and education of students. And by the way, that job is not just academic in nature but schools are expected to develop the whole student in realms that were previously the responsibility of the home and church. Parents have high expectations for schools to be all encompassing preparation for students’ development of their character and identity, including the spiritual aspect. While some of these expectations may not be desirable or philosophically how CESA schools may design the home, school, and potential church partnership, the reality is that a school failing to meet this broad range of expectations misses out on an opportunity to help students form a holistic identity and understand how God designed them. The world has a different message for the students under our care and we feel a tremendous responsibility to step into these opportunities to impact students. Complexity reigns. The multitude of demands from parents add to the leadership demands that already exist for senior leaders’ roles in schools.
Within this leadership environment, the pressure on school leaders has grown and the breadth of their jobs has increased. No place is this more true than in the head of school role. While heads have “experts” on their leadership team, they still bear great responsibility to “know” everything. This trickles down to division heads and other school leaders as well.
Leading up is a leadership competency that can help school leaders overcome some of this complexity and fill knowledge or skill gaps to achieve greater organizational outcomes. Every leader has areas of strength and areas for improvement, and the ability to be on top of every area at every moment is an increasingly rare gift. Empowering those below us in the organization to lead and guide leaders above them in areas where they have expertise and experience can help the entire organization thrive. For the subordinate, leading up can be risky and as a result, many individuals lower on the organizational chart are hesitant to speak up. Two specific behaviors can open the door for your subordinates.
- Create a safe, welcoming culture for people to share ideas, even bad ones. Within this culture, providing and receiving feedback is a key component.
- Ask great questions that make those you lead think more deeply and expand their thinking.
Power dynamics require that the leader higher up in the hierarchy take steps to facilitate these behaviors, which is why this is considered a leadership competency. In order to explore this concept more fully, we can examine real world examples and you can consider where you have seen this in your own organization or leadership.
Leading Up in Action
For example, among my many responsibilities as a division head, I am currently over technology in my school. In my past experience, I worked extensively with technology so it was logical for me to assume this responsibility with my background and experiences. However, two key problems exist – I have a thousand other priorities pressing in on my time and I am more than a decade out from really being up-to-date on the current technologies and best practices. Needless to say, technology use and capability has changed significantly in that time. In my role, I seek to empower my team and create an environment where they can propose ideas, provide me with their priorities to move us forward, and give me feedback, including telling me when I have a bad idea, as we all do (at least occasionally). Many leaders lack self-awareness of how they are viewed by those below them and even if they empower those below them to propose ideas and give input on priorities, they do not receive being told they have a bad idea well. Humility is a key leadership trait that undergirds leading up. While I may not be a current expert in technology, my experience equips me to ask great questions. My questions should help my team think through an issue and push for deeper thinking about the implications of a particular decision. These questions also provide me with the information I need to know to evaluate the decision at a higher level. My team, who are updated with the latest technology capabilities and immersed fully in their role, are allowed to drive our school forward in this area. Leading up maximizes our growth and movement forward so it is not restricted by my leadership. Far too often, leadership is bottlenecked by a leader’s expertise or bandwidth.
In addition to maximizing the impact on the organization, this example demonstrates individual leadership growth alongside increased leadership capacity in the school. This leadership culture will spread to other members of the team and has an exponential effect for everyone on the team, creating ownership and motivation for each individual to contribute in their area of expertise.
The ultimate responsibility continues to rest on my shoulders and accountability does not shift. Yet, shared ownership of outcomes increases the school’s progress. Leading up allows those below in the organization to help someone above them to get better.
Call to Action
So, what is next and how do leaders create more opportunities for leading up in an organization?
First, leaders need to examine their organizational culture including their own behaviors. For most leaders, if you ask your leadership team or subordinates if they are comfortable giving you difficult feedback and disagreeing with you, most of them will nod and say yes regardless of their true feelings. That is what you want to hear and it may be a symptom of the very problem you fail to see. Some strategies to really get to the root of your organizational culture is to ask that critical friend/colleague who will really tell you the truth privately. Ask that person about their willingness to give you honest feedback and your receptivity to your subordinates, AND ask them their perception of how others feel about telling you something you do not want to hear. Additionally, reflect on recent meetings such as leadership team meetings or 1-on-1s. Who did the talking and decision-making? How did you respond to ideas or thoughts? Did you ask great questions? In some cases, an anonymous survey with simple rating scale questions can get you truly honest information so you increase your awareness of how your subordinates view you.
Second, identify gaps in your own expertise that are significant to your own role and the strategic goals of your school. While leading up is all encompassing and we can facilitate leading up in all areas of leadership, it is particularly helpful when you have an awareness of gaps in your experiences or training. Leaders frequently hide or cover up weak areas. While public disclosure is not necessary, self-awareness of these areas supported by humility and confidence in your leadership identity allow you to fully embrace leading up and discourage an overcompensation or defensiveness.
Third, articulate and express expectations and appropriate boundaries, if needed, for subordinates to contribute ideas and propose solutions. By clearly stating your goals to allow leadership to flow up in your organization, it can facilitate culture change or the attainment of the culture you want or thought you had. If this is not the norm for individuals or the entire organization, leaders must build trust. This takes time and behavior, not just words. Your reactions, your effort to ask questions, and your inclusion of appropriate people in discussions and decision-making is critical. While this is best to model with senior leadership, it should be an intentional effort at multiple levels in the organization.
Fourth, develop your ability to ask great questions. Numerous books and articles give tips on how to ask great questions. For clarity, good questions are insufficient. Leaders need to be genuinely curious and ask great questions that expose new ideas and foster critical thinking. Consider how the following questions might apply to some of your leadership discussions with your team:
- What are the assumptions that we are making around this issue?
- Have we done something like this before, and what did we learn?
- Whose voice could help us see this issue more fully?
Curiosity mixed with humility can lead leaders to ask the kind of questions that surface blind spots and produce the wisest decisions.
Final Thoughts
Nothing in this discussion absolves leaders of the responsibility and accountability for decision-making. However, implementing the competency of leading up can significantly expand leaders’ individual capacity to achieve excellence, build leadership capacity, and strengthen organizational culture, including creating ownership across the entire school. As one examines these outcomes, dominoes of its wide-ranging impact start to fall in other areas. For example, retention requires a high degree of engagement and meaning for individuals in the organization. With the challenge of hiring excellent employees, faculty, and administrators, retention is critical to organizational success. The same conditions that drive retention — engagement, meaning, and ownership — are naturally cultivated within a culture of leading up.
The ripple effect of leading up in the culture has influences beyond what is discussed here. Whether leading up is already part of your culture or a missing piece of leadership behaviors at your school, articulating it and intentionally cultivating it in your school produces meaningful results that will help your school achieve excellence. The question is not whether leading up can help your school and your leadership – it is whether you are willing to create the culture that makes it possible.
If this theme resonates with you, please join Dr. Price and other Christian school leaders for the Engaging Christian Leadership Conference at Houston Christian High School on February 8-9, 2027 where the theme will be Leading Through and Leading Up.
Dr. Darren Price has been the principal at Houston Christian High School in Houston, TX, since 2015. He is the former Head of School for Contra Costa Christian Schools in Walnut Creek, CA, and held various administrative roles during his 10-year tenure in Christian international schools in South Korea. He has written articles and delivered presentations regarding leadership, technology, professional development, and furthering Christian education around the world. He believes strongly in the future of Christian education and its importance to impact the next generation.
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