The Story Behind the Framework
I Didn't Begin With a Leadership Framework.
I Began With Serving People.
For more than three decades, my work has taken me into families, schools, correctional institutions, nonprofit organizations, executive offices, and communities nationally and internationally. Today, I describe much of that work through a simple progression: Develop People. Strengthen Leadership. Build Healthy Cultures. Advance Human Flourishing.
But I didn't begin my career with that framework. I've only recently discovered it over these past few years as I've been spending more time reflecting on my journey of servant-leadership. As I think about it, I would say more accurately, the people I've served taught it to me—young people, parents, people in prisons, community leaders, employees and executives, and my own successes and failures.
Experiences that once seemed like separate chapters of my life began revealing themselves as parts of the same story.
Looking Beneath the Behavior
Early in my career, I worked in environments where human problems were impossible to ignore. I spent time within juvenile and adult correctional settings, where I encountered people whose lives were often described primarily by what they had done wrong—offender, troublemaker, at-risk, problem. Labels can tell us something about behavior. But they can also prevent us from seeing the human being behind it.
That lesson became clearer when I became an at-risk counselor. In 1990, I was given responsibility for about 50 of the hardest-to-reach students at a junior high school in Santa Barbara, CA—kids struggling academically, behaviorally, relationally, or emotionally, many already carrying reputations. I built relationships, listened, challenged and encouraged them, and tried to help them see something in themselves that others had stopped seeing.
You cannot understand behavior until you become curious about the story underneath it.
Young people don't arrive at school each morning as isolated individuals. They bring their relationships, fears, loyalties, disappointments, and their experience at home. The behavior was real. But it wasn't the whole story.
The Home Visits Changed the Question
Eventually, I began visiting the homes of my students, and it changed how I thought about helping young people. I could spend hours investing in a student, but after meeting their parents, I understood why progress was so hard to sustain. I couldn't think seriously about helping young people without thinking seriously about the environments shaping them.
That didn't mean blaming parents—quite the opposite. Many parents were struggling too. They loved their children, but love alone didn't provide the emotional maturity, communication skills, or leadership capacity increasingly complicated family realities required.
We were asking, “How do we fix these kids?” I began asking, “What if we strengthened the people with the greatest potential to influence them?”
Leadership Begins at Home
The more I worked with families, the more convinced I became that parenting is fundamentally a form of leadership. Parents influence culture, establish expectations, model relationships, and create experiences of authority, trust, and belonging—long before most children ever encounter a supervisor, coach, or executive. That realization eventually led to Parents on a Mission.
Rather than concentrating on techniques for controlling children's behavior, I wanted parents to examine themselves: How do I respond? Have I earned influence, or am I relying primarily on authority? What kind of culture are we creating in our home?
Before we can effectively lead others, we must learn to lead ourselves.
I saw this transformation happen in real families. As parents changed, relationships changed. As relationships changed, influence changed. And as influence changed, family culture began to change.
Lasting transformation happens from the inside out.
Then Came Another Question
Parents on a Mission grew. Organizations, schools, and correctional environments began using the principles. Eventually, more than 2,000 Parent Mentors would be trained. But growth raised another leadership question: I could not personally reach every parent who needed help—nor should I. If the work depended entirely on me, I had created reach, but not reproduction.
So the question became: how do we develop people who can develop other people?
I began thinking increasingly in terms of reproducing reproducers—developing parents who develop other parents, mentors who develop other mentors, leaders who develop other leaders. Leadership was moving beyond influence toward stewardship and multiplication.
Young People Were Never Just Problems to Prevent
Over the years, I became uncomfortable with how society talks about young people considered “high-risk”—so focused on the problems rebellious youth create. I kept saying we need to focus on the problems that create rebellious youth. Prevention alone is a terribly small vision for a human life. A young person needs more than something not to become. They need a vision of who they can become. That conviction shaped Youth on a Mission.
My experience taught me not to ask, “How do we keep this young person out of trouble?” but, “Who might this young person become?”
Some of the greatest potential within a community may be sitting inside young people whom institutions have learned primarily to manage.
From Individuals to Organizations
Eventually, my leadership journey expanded into nonprofit executive leadership and organizational development. The environment changed. The principles did not. Trust, communication, emotional maturity, consistency, and accountability mattered inside organizations the same way they mattered inside families. An organization could have an inspiring mission, talented employees, and sophisticated programs and still struggle because something within its culture was unhealthy.
The visible problem was not always the real problem. A performance issue might actually be a trust issue. A team problem might be a leadership problem.
The scale was different. But the pattern was familiar. Healthy leadership creates healthy culture. And culture eventually affects everything around it.
