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Leadership
Curriculum
Guidelines Summary
What
Court Leaders Need to Know and Be Able to Do
Leadership competency includes five areas which
encompass personal characteristics and
acquired knowledge, skill, and ability developed and refined through
study, reflection, observation of others, practice, and, very importantly,
experience. These five areas
are:
 Curriculum
Guidelines
Be
Credible in Action
Create
Focus Through Vision and Purpose Manage
Interdependencies: Work Beyond the Boundaries Produce
a High Performance Work Environment Do
Skillful and Continual Diagnosis
All can be improved through study, reflection,
observation, practice, and experience.
Be
Credible in Action
Character matters. Likewise trustworthiness,
honesty, integrity, accountability, and ethics are important.
By the widest margins, in every NACM survey of experienced court
managers, these attributes were found to be both essential and in great
need of attention and improvement. This squares with the research of others.
Knowledge of one’s limitations, personal style, values, and
one’s impact on others is essential.
Leaders communicate policies and procedures clearly, honestly, and
consistently. Self-understanding
and personal credibility determine whether or not peers, subordinates, and
outsiders will accept one’s leadership, especially over the long term.
Effective court leaders are action-oriented and transparent.
They say what they mean, they do what they say, and everybody knows
it.
Create
Focus Through Vision and Purpose
Survey after survey instructs that workers often,
and perhaps even usually, do not know what is expected of them.
Organizational goals, objectives, and responsibilities are seldom
communicated. If there is
communication, it is often done poorly.
Purpose is missing. Motivation
flows from perceptions that court work is important and contributes to
worthy court purposes. There
are no insignificant court jobs. Leaders
align individual performance and broad court purposes.
They create vision, establish action plans that flow from that
vision, and with the help of others, clearly communicate the roles of
departments and individuals in attaining that vision.
Power and participation are balanced.
Leaders think in the long term and focus their own efforts and the
efforts of others on core court purposes and the need to transition from
the present to an inspired future.
Manage
Interdependencies: Work
Beyond the Boundaries
Judicial
independence is an indispensable means to the ends of liberty, social
order, due process, equal protection, and justice under law. But, neither theory nor practice should ever confuse judicial
autonomy with judicial independence.
The framers of our federal Constitution affirmed, valued, and
reinforced the tension between independence and interdependency. When arguing for ratification of the Constitution in The
Federalist Papers, they recognized concurrent powers and
declared in Federalist 51 that “Every department should have a will of
its own,” and in Federalist
78 that “…the judiciary… has neither force nor will, but
merely judgment,”
System
interdependencies place power and resources needed by courts in the
executive and legislative branches. Operating and decision-making
interdependencies with other justice organizations, the private bar,
insurers, and, increasingly, public and private social service providers,
among others, must be managed if even simple cases are to be resolved and
disposed, efficiently and fairly. Court
managers must lead beyond the boundaries of the court.
Effective judicial leaders and their executive teams understand
constitutional separation of powers, the adversarial process, and
politics. They anticipate developments that will affect court
operations and create and support coalitions to maintain routines, to
produce just dispositions, and to make positive change. Produce
a High Performance Work Environment
Change
and complexity demand effective court leadership at all levels.
High-performance courts recruit, select, and develop their
personnel knowing that thought, decisions, and discretion are best not
concentrated at the very tip of the judicial hierarchy, whether at the
level of the state or its constituent trial and appellate courts.
Initiative is encouraged in the understanding that courts must
leverage scarce resources, both human and otherwise.
Innovation is not only allowed and encouraged, it is expected.
To
inspire trust and teamwork, court leaders must understand group process
and group facilitation methods and how, when, and where to use teams.
Judges and managers, whether elected or appointed, model effective
partnerships. What they do benefits and reflects the needs of others
outside and inside the court and its hierarchy.
They understand and practice “servant” leadership.
Do
Skillful and Continual Diagnosis
There
is no one best way to manage courts or any other organization.
Cookie-cutter solutions are impractical.
Effective court leaders, therefore, value and use processes and
skills that measure court performance and progress toward stated goals.
They want to know and continually ask and seek answers to the
“How well are we doing?” question.
Through
use of Visioning and Strategic Planning tools and other means, effective
court leaders use forecasts of future needs and conditions. They act on the needs and expectations of the public and
regular court users. They
analyze political conditions and anticipate developments.
They seek and use hard and soft performance data.
They have the ability to separate unimportant facts from important
findings, trivial and self-serving observations from critical data, and
insignificant readings from vital signs.
Click on each of the five Curriculum Guidelines to see the
associated Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:
Be
Credible in Action
Create
Focus Through Vision and Purpose Manage
Interdependencies: Work Beyond the Boundaries Produce
a High Performance Work Environment Do
Skillful and Continual Diagnosis
Leadership
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