Lead People and Manage Processes

Plenty of leaders run a tight process and a loose relationship with their own people, when it really ought to be the other way around. The bulletin gets reviewed twice before it goes to print. The person who writes it hasn't had an actual conversation with her supervisor in months that wasn't about a typo or a deadline. The grading rubric gets revised every August without fail. Nobody's asked the teacher using it how her year is actually going since the spring before last.

People aren't a process. They don't improve because you add another review step to how you interact with them. They improve because someone trusted them, challenged them, and paid attention over time, which takes longer than a checklist and can't really be delegated to one. Processes, on the other hand, don't need your charisma. They need to be written down clearly, followed consistently, and revisited now and then to see if they still make sense. Mixing the two up, leading the bulletin and managing the person, usually ends with a frustrated employee and a bulletin that still has a typo in it anyway.

This isn't an argument against structure. It's an argument about where structure belongs. A process can absolutely tell you when the tuition statements go out, who approves a purchase order, and what the steps are for onboarding a new hire. A process should never be the main thing standing between a leader and the people he's supposed to be leading. When it is, everyone just gets managed, and nobody actually gets led.

At one school we worked with, the principal held weekly one-on-ones with staff that were, in practice, entirely status updates on open tasks. The meeting was on the calendar. The actual relationship part of it never showed up. Turnover stayed stubbornly high even though communication looked fine on paper, full calendars, regular check-ins, everything a good leadership habit is supposed to look like from the outside. We split the two apart: a short written weekly status check, separate from the person, and a monthly one-on-one that was actually about her, her workload, what she needed, what was actually going on. The conversations got harder before they got easier. People started feeling seen instead of just tracked, and that shift mattered more than any new form ever could have.

At a parish we worked with, the pastor personally reviewed and approved every bulletin announcement and every social media post himself, a task that could have been handled by a simple style guide and a short approval checklist. Meanwhile he rarely sat down one-on-one with the parish secretary who actually wrote most of what he was reviewing. The bottleneck wasn't a leadership failure exactly. It was a leader trying to manage a process by hand instead of building one, and in the process starving the one relationship that needed his actual attention.

A few ways to tell which one you're actually doing.

• If a one-on-one is mostly status updates, the actual relationship part of the job didn't happen that week, no matter what the calendar says.
• A process that depends on one leader's personal review for every decision isn't rigorous. It's a bottleneck with good intentions.
• Documentation is an act of leadership, not a substitute for it. Writing down how something works frees a leader up to actually lead the people doing it.
• The clearest sign a leader is managing people instead of leading them is treating every mistake like a process failure instead of asking what the person actually needs.

This matters more in a Catholic institution than almost anywhere else, because the work is supposed to be about people first. A pastor or principal who spends most of his energy reviewing processes by hand has less left over for the kind of leading that happens in a hallway conversation or a hard conversation nobody else can have. Build the process well enough once, and it stops needing him every day. Then he gets his job back.

Jill Wollmer

Founder, Pax Ordo Advisors · June 2026