The Ballard Way
The Ballard Way: Leadership Success Guide
The Ballard Way will help you realize your leadership potential by focusing on the following three principles. Additional leadership resources can be found here.
You are vital to the success of the Ballard Center. We rely on your contributions and expect you to demonstrate initiative without waiting to be directed. The following principles will guide your leadership efforts as you seek to empower others, navigate challenges, and guide your team toward a shared vision.
Authentic Leadership
Authentic leadership is rooted in the practice of humble self-reflection, where leaders strive to leverage their strengths, values, and guiding principles as they lead by example.
High Love, High Expectations
High Christlike love creates a positive, supportive work environment marked by genuine care, empathy, support, and praise. High expectations involve setting clear expectations and ambitious standards while trusting your team through effective delegation.
Management Skills
Management skills include planning, organizing, and executing strategies for team success, encompassing administrative tasks. Expert managers excel in optimization, delegation, organization, and communication.
Practices
For all Employees:
- Meet with your director or team lead for a professional development review at least once a semester.
For Team Leads:
- Solicit formal feedback from your team members at least once a semester.
- Provide formal, personalized feedback to each team member at least once a semester.
- Review your team’s semesterly budget with your director.
- Ensure team documentation is clearly organized and up to date.
- Update your onboarding strategy and review it with a member of HR once a semester.
- Complete an onboarding interview with every new hire to review your team’s executive overview and answer questions.
- During your last semester, update your team’s leadership transition strategy to ensure your replacement has a smooth transition. This strategy should include the following:
- How will you train and otherwise prepare your replacement to take over? Ideally, your replacement should have time to shadow you and learn by experience before you retire.
- How will your replacement gain access to important team information, such as team passwords and accounts?
- You may spend up to 1 hour, bi-weekly, on independent leadership development. See the Leadership Development Page for available resources.
The Ballard Center is known for its high-quality programs. Programs and teams each serve a unique purpose, contributing to the collective success of the center. They define success for themselves, while ensuring alignment to the center’s mission, vision, and values.
Audience-Centered
Each program and team have a group of people that they aim to serve. Understanding and prioritizing the needs and experiences of these groups helps inform decision-making and is essential for success.
Goal-Oriented
Successful programs and teams set and pursue specific and measurable objectives that align with their mission, pivoting as needed.
Sustainable Growth
It is essential to facilitate the seamless transfer of knowledge, resources, values, and institutional memory accumulated over time, allowing future teams to focus on raising the bar and making progress toward the team's long-term vision without being hindered by the need to redo previous work.
Practices
For all Employees:
- Complete an onboarding interview with one of your team leads. This should be done every time you transition into a new team.
For Team Leads:
- Hold a one-hour team bonding activity each semester.
- Update your team executive overview as a team and review it with your director each semester.
- Click here for a template and hyperlinks to all team overviews.
- Review this document with every new hire as part of their onboarding.
- Schedule and attend a measurement and evaluation review with the data team once a semester.
- After completing the Team Lead roadmap, attend an onboarding interview with a member of HR.
The employee culture at the Ballard Center is characterized by collaboration, positive connection, and a shared purpose to solve social problems.
Supportive
Employees are encouraged to contribute to the Ballard Center as a whole, allocating a portion of their time to assist other teams by sharing expertise, collaborating on projects, offering assistance, etc.
Unified
At the Ballard Center, we share a collective commitment to the center's mission, vision, and values.
Celebrate Together!
At the Ballard Center, we emphasize various team successes as collective victories and encourage reflection on progress to promote continuous improvement.
Practices
For all Employees:
- Participate in All-Hands meetings.
- Allocate 10% of your time to learn about and support other teams. Seek to understand what other teams are struggling with and what is going well.
For Team Leads:
- Participate in All-Hands meetings and Leadership Council.
- Ensure your program is represented at all major Ballard Center events.
- When asked, prepare a short presentation to spotlight your team at one of the All-Hands meetings.
- Review progress as a team. Celebrate successes!