Witch School and Pagan Leadership Revisited

Witch School when it began was a concept that was shocking to most people, and was one that was highly derided and openly criticized. It was berated and even attacked as a idea that was not workable. I even lost a good friend and ally who promised everyone that Witch School would fail within a year as it was a unsustainable model and did not respect the leadership of the Pagan community. After all, Wicca could not be taught over the web. Now more than seven years later Witch School stands, not just as a school but also as the leader among a plethora of online Pagan and Wiccan schools that followed.

Among the reason Witch School was seen as something undesirable was that it offered an open access to an education. This many felt cut at the central authority of what was the primary source of leadership in the community. This allowed people who wanted to learn to be Wiccan, Witches, and even Clergy without having to be judged by a High Priestess or Priest to see who was worthy or who was not. It made the concept of learning Wicca at home, anytime, anyplace, and anywhere. The second concept was that you could earn clergy status without the rigors of dealing with the personalities of local leadership. In this Witch School has worked and worked well.

What was not obvious and even discussable at the time was the principles by which we would structure the Witch School community, and by association the Correllian Tradition. This is the first time that I have ever written down those concepts for the world to see, and share. It is important as these principles must be taken to a higher level as Witch School is going global at a quickening pace.

The first principle is virtualization, or simply that we would be virtual. Virtualization means that we would no longer require everyone to be in the same place at the same time in order to teach or to learn. A virtual organization is one that that you do not see, certainly not all together in one place but nevertheless delivers required services.

In such a organization you would have distributed leadership. In this I believe nature is not hierarchal. Wisdom is distributed through out the system. All the cells of the body is needed to repel the invading disease, all the fish in a school swerve as one, all the geese in formation takes turns at the point and then drop back to recuperate in the airstream of the wings of their fellows. This is how one can reach people and share in their knowledge.

At the top of a distributed leadership organization is a personalized leadership style, because the task at this level is to provide the glue that holds this virtual community together. The glue is made up of a sense of common identity, linked to a common purpose and fed by an infectious energy and sense of urgency. As a leader, my job is to inform and educate our mentors and provide the tools they need to do their jobs without the continuous need for instruction and permissions from above.

In this case, you can not simply assign positions and have people respect the people in that position simply because of their place in the hierarchy. In this type of organization you have earned authority. Being involved with Witch School is not simply a ladder of roles you climb, but instead where you lead by growing a reputation for getting things done and making things happen. Influence, not authority, is what drives true leadership in the Witch School community.

In this type of virtualized community, leadership means managing people you cannot see and cannot control in any detail. In fact, many of the people you are involved with you may not have ever met or may never meet physically ever. Only through distributed leadership and earned authority can you build the flow of trust in both directions to make this work.

This brings us to the next and final concept of this exploration of leadership and that is the principle of subsidiarity. This is a very old principle that holds a higher body should not assume the authority that could or should be exercised by a lower body. In this aspect a company should not tell a employee how to run their family. In Witch School terms, we believe that mentors are allowed to run their groups with guidance, not by authoritarian structures. Further that the Correllian tradition can not be run by a central authority but by the local temples. We cannot allow the hierarchy to steal responsibilities that belong to the lower levels of authority, as this will cause our mentors and students as well as future clergy members to be unskilled. Every time we have gotten away from this principle, we have tremendous fights, and every time we stick to this principle we have amazing results.

By this principle of subsidiarity, we are able to form really good teams. In this concept a true team both defines it's objectives and finds ways to meet them. In our case, it is teaching students, and the mentors and members decide what they really want to learn and how they will learn. Further they are able to integrate the tools we have into there styles. They are also free to use any information that comes their way to refine their methods and skills as needed.

This has allowed us to understanding the universe works and encompasses a vision of life as one great-interconnected web. As we have come to recognize the dynamic connectedness of the various parts within a whole educational ecosystem and the world beyond our school.

Witch School with these principles, has avoided having the form of top-down leadership that control groups by withholding power from their ranks, deprive them of the ability to use their expertise and information vested in them to respond directly and with speed the needs of their students. With these principles we unlocked the power of Wicca unto the world with good people, who are dedicated and focused on other people as well as their own spiritual growth. With these principles we have been able to unlock people from their limitations and gave them hope for a better world today and in the coming future. We have awakened the leader within, and that is the greatest feeling in the world.