Step into Your PLACE

Make the decision to begin leading from the specific context, calling, and responsibility directly in front of you. Stepping into your PLACE is more than reading a book. It is recognizing the faithful step within reach and choosing to take it.

About the Book

Your leadership moment is already here. Will you step into it?

Leadership is more than a title, position, or measure of influence. It is revealed in who you become, the trust you build, and the faithful steps you take when the path ahead is uncertain.

In Step into Your PLACE, Dr. Drew Howard invites you into a practical, faith-rooted journey of leadership formation. It reaches beyond strategy and skill to shape not only how you lead, but how you live and who you are becoming.

The journey unfolds through five integrated dimensions: Purposeful Pursuit, Limitless Learning, Ambitious Agility, Confident Culture, and Expedient Evolution. Together, they help you clarify your calling, learn from experience, move responsibly, build trust, and evolve through change without losing what matters most.

Through personal stories, biblical insights, real-world leadership lessons, guided reflection, and practical PLACE Tests, the book helps you recognize your strengths, uncover the patterns shaping your leadership, and discern what deserves your attention next.

Whether you are beginning your journey, carrying the scars of experience, navigating change, or searching for renewed direction, you do not need a perfect plan, another title, or permission to begin.

The next step is yours. Step into your PLACE.

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PLACE Dimensions

PLACE offers five integrated dimensions for navigating leadership, each rooted in distinct leadership disciplines, values, and spiritual truths. Each dimension offers a distinct place to begin while remaining connected to the whole. They are not boxes to check, but connected parts of the whole leader you are becoming. The PLACE tests serve as mirrors, helping you recognize strengths, recurring tendencies, and areas that need attention. The goal is not a perfect score, and the tests are meant to be revisited as your experience and leadership realities change.

Compass illustration for the Purposeful Pursuit chapter.
P

Purposeful Pursuit

Purposeful Pursuit is your internal compass. It guides leadership from a general why to a settled because.

Purpose gives you a bearing. Pursuit follows that bearing with intention. This dimension helps you protect what must not be traded, order your priorities, pray from surrender, receive peace, and maintain poise. It strengthens pursuit through perspective, perception, passion, persistence, and preparation—all pulled by promise. Promise remains foundational rather than scored because it is received, not manufactured.

Protection, priorities, prayer, peace, poise, perspective, perception, passion, persistence, and preparation.
Test categories

Purpose: Protection, Priorities, Prayer, Peace, Poise.

Pursuit: Perspective, Perception, Passion, Persistence, Preparation.

Gold watch illustration for the Limitless Learning chapter.
L

Limitless Learning

Limitless Learning is the discipline of turning intervals of time into lasting growth.

It keeps you teachable across the timeline of leadership by inviting you to look to the past with honesty, live in the present with attention, and long for a better future with wisdom and insight. It lets experience become wisdom through reflection, application, ownership, and a legacy of learning.

Honest reflection, present attention, wisdom, insight, application, ownership, and a legacy of learning.
Test categories

Looking to the Past: Lighting, Locating, Lifting, Listening.

Living in the Present: Layering, Leveraging, Loving, Leaning.

Longing for a Better Future: Legacy, Lasting, Leveling, Launching.

Gear shifter illustration for the Ambitious Agility chapter.
A

Ambitious Agility

Ambitious Agility brings the engine of ambition together with the transmission of agility.

Ambition supplies drive, urgency, and forward force. Agility regulates that force so it produces usable traction when conditions change. This dimension helps you aspire with aim, assess with authenticity, analyze with acuity, and act with apprehension—responsible caution that keeps risk, people, and sequence in view. Ambitious Agility keeps you bold but measured, driven but discerning.

Aim, authentic assessment, acute analysis, risk-respecting action, awareness, acumen, adaptability, and anticipation.
Test categories

Ambition: Aspire with Aim, Assess with Authenticity, Analyze with Acuity, Act with Apprehension.

Agility: Awareness Agility, Acumen Agility, Adaptive Agility, Anticipation Agility.

Railroad track illustration for the Confident Culture chapter.
C

Confident Culture

Confident Culture is the lived environment people learn to trust through repeated experience.

This dimension runs on the twin rails of competence and character. Clarity makes the culture understandable. Courage and certainty steady it. Curiosity tests it. Commitment, conduct, and connection bind it together. Crew members and culture carriers keep it moving.

Competence, character, clarity, courage, certainty, curiosity, commitment, conduct, connection, and culture carriers.
Test categories

Culture: Competence, Character, Clarity, Courage, Certainty, Curiosity, Commitment, Conduct, Connection, Culture Carriers.

Interwoven rope strands illustration for the Expedient Evolution chapter.
E

Expedient Evolution

Expedient Evolution is the sustainable strand that helps leaders and organizations transform without coming apart.

Empowerment extends developed capacity beyond one person and prepares others to hold entrusted responsibility. Experimentation brings assumptions, practices, methods, and systems into contact with reality. Edification reinforces the whole person—body, mind, and spirit—so outward evolution does not produce inward depletion.

Empowerment, Experimentation, and Edification help leaders and organizations keep becoming without coming apart.
Test categories

Empowerment: Equipping, Empathy, Encouragement, Enablement, Emergence, Engagement, Ensemble.

Experimentation: Excavation, Encounter, Elimination, Enhancement, Exchange, Embedding, Extending.

Edification: Effort, Exertion, Endurance, Elasticity, Equilibrium, Enlightenment, Essence.

About the Author

Dr. Drew Howard.

Dr. Drew Howard

Dr. Drew Howard is an education leader, governance coach, and author whose work helps leaders align purpose, systems, and stewardship.

He has served as a superintendent, Associate Commissioner of School Governance at the Texas Education Agency, and Deputy Executive Director at Region 7 Education Service Center. Through his work with school boards, superintendents, and district leaders, he focuses on clarity of expectations, disciplined accountability, and leadership that strengthens people and organizations over time. That experience shapes a practical approach to helping leaders clarify purpose, strengthen governance, and lead with steadiness in complex seasons.