Battles in the Trenches

This book examines lessons educational administrators (higher education and K-12) can learn about leadership, motivation, and organization from elite college, professional, and Olympic athletes and coaches.

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Educational leaders work within a system that does not best leverage attributes of their professional employees. This book focuses on three areas: leadership, motivation, and organization, as they related to educational leadership. Each of these areas has a particular chapter devoted to it. Each chapter begins with a review of the extant literature covering the theme. 40 elite, professional, and Olympic athletes and coaches were interviewed for this book to learn their perspectives on what makes the best leaders in athletics in the areas of leadership, motivation, and organization. These interviews are subsequently interwoven into each of the three chapters outlined above. The book concludes with a chapter that pulls all these aspects together and utilizes a newly created Leadership Congruency Model.