Jenni Catron on Cultivating Healthy Leaders

When Jenni Catron founded the 4Sight Group, it was in response to a great need she saw in the world—and a great passion she felt within herself. “It was an overflow of my passion for helping leaders and teams be healthy,” she says. “I have a such a deep love for helping individuals find their sense of calling and giftedness and then pairing that giftedness with the work inside the organization they’re a part of.”

In her years of experience, Jenni has found one thing is always true: a healthy organization begins with healthy leadership. The mission of the 4Sight Group is to cultivate healthy leaders to lead thriving organizations.

Jenni explains, “Often, we focus so much as leaders on the thing we want to accomplish and how to accomplish it through our team. Maybe this is the optimist in me, but I don’t think any leader starts out trying to ignore how they are doing or their own health as a leader. I think we just get so caught up in all the things we’re responsible for and the people we’re responsible to, and we neglect leading ourselves well.”

She knows that sometimes, leaders may feel like taking care of themselves may feel like misplaced effort. After all, when you’re carrying the weight of an entire organization, who has the time or energy to look inward? However, Jenni wants to help leaders understand the spiritual significance of their positions—and why that means they must prioritize their own health.

“Leadership in and of itself is sacred work. It is a sacred privilege to have the power to change or affect the life of somebody else. So if I’m not in a healthy place, the ripple effect could impact the lives of those I lead in a negative way. If I take care of myself as a leader, it’s not selfish if I realize the purpose is for the ripple effect of my influence to be positive to those around me.”

For Jenni, all of these principles and practices boil down to a question she began asking herself early in her career: what does God-honoring leadership look like? She began investigating this question even more so during the writing of her book, The 4 Dimensions of Extraordinary Leadership. She turned to the Gospels to study how Jesus led people when He lived on earth. She read some verses she had encountered countless times in the past. Whenever a teacher of the law asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, He answered, “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:30-31). She wondered how this passage, in which Jesus Himself gives us the greatest commandment in all of the law, would apply to leadership. What would it look like for leaders to center themselves around loving God and loving people?

This is a question Jenni is helping leaders answer every day. Listen to our full conversation with Jenni Catron to learn more about her work in cultivating healthy leadership. And for more information about the 4Sight Group, visit www.get4sight.com