Leadership as the Growth Catalyst: How Drury Graduates Navigate Economic Uncertainty (Sponsored Content)

Regina Waters, Director of Drury's Leadership Collaborative

The difference between regional stagnation and growth often comes down to one critical factor: leadership quality. While businesses across Southwest Missouri grapple with market volatility and planning challenges, Drury University continues to develop the kind of leaders who don’t just weather storms. They create opportunity in the midst of them.

Winter Kinne, President and CEO of Community Foundation of the Ozarks and a Drury alumna, knows this reality firsthand. “I mean, our board just yesterday passed next fiscal year’s grant making budget, and we are making no bones about the fact that we’ve got two versions this year. We’ve got version A and then version B, because we need to be able to move really quickly if things start to unravel,” she explains.

This adaptive approach reflects a broader challenge facing regional leaders today. “It’s just the unknown of exactly what’s coming. Not only does the financial market and the business market not like the unknown, but it just makes it really difficult to plan,” Kinne notes. Yet it’s precisely this uncertainty that demands the kind of leadership development Drury has been refining for decades.

The foundation for effective crisis leadership often begins in college experiences that teach collaboration and problem-solving. For Kinne, Drury’s smaller environment provided crucial leadership training. “I was president of my sorority and I have joked that getting 60 women to be quiet in a meeting was maybe the best leadership training I ever had,” she says.

These early experiences translate directly into community impact. Kinne describes her organization’s role as foundational to economic development. “Community foundation work is not economic development, but it does come right alongside of that because it’s the placemaking portion of it. We’re not going to bring employers, we’re not workforce development or those kinds of things, but we are philanthropically providing grants to make the community the kind of place that people want to live.”

Dr. Regina Waters, Director of Drury’s Leadership Collaborative, has watched this leadership development evolve over 15 years. Originally focused on nonprofit leadership, the program expanded to address the interconnected nature of modern challenges. “We know that our communities are best when the private, the public sector, the nonprofit sector are interconnected working together,” Waters explains.

The Leadership Collaborative’s approach emphasizes practical application over theoretical study. “Our degrees focus on problem solving,” Waters notes. “We want people to take what they’re learning and get back to their community, back to their employer, back to their volunteer work, and put that knowledge to work solving applied problems.”

This practical focus includes addressing current workforce needs. Waters cites their new Data-Driven Leadership certificate as an example. “We have found over and over again, people in marketing, people in healthcare, people in insurance, people in education are being sent spreadsheets with a ton of data and they need the ability to think through and ask the questions, what is this data telling us and how do we reason through it to make leadership level decisions that are not based out of fear, but out of thoughtfulness and critical thinking?”

Perhaps most importantly for regional economic development, is creating networks of collaborative leaders. “Good old Drury we’re everywhere,” Kinne observes. “It was in college that that I truly began learning collaboration and Springfield’s collaborative spirit at an early level.”

This collaborative approach becomes essential during challenging times. As Kinne learned from city manager Clay Goddard: “We don’t make friends in a crisis. We make friends ahead of time and have relationships ahead of time and partnerships ahead of time and trust in each other. And that’s the only thing that’ll carry us through.”

For the future, both leaders see regionalism as key to sustained growth. “I think this whole conversation and all the things that are happening around regionalism right now” represents the path forward, according to Kinne. “We’ve always believed that everybody is stronger together and what’s good for Springfield is good for the region and vice versa.”

Waters echoes this sentiment, noting that successful leadership development requires business community engagement “looking to educational institutions like Drury University for learning opportunities to help that talent pool develop. We can help in really creative ways.”

In an era where economic uncertainty seems to be the only constant, Drury’s approach to leadership development offers regional businesses something invaluable: leaders who don’t just manage through crisis, but who create the collaborative partnerships and innovative solutions that drive sustainable growth. The question isn’t whether challenges will continue. It’s whether we’re developing the leaders capable of transforming those challenges into opportunities.

This content is paid advertising by Drury University.