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; one that reaches beyond strategy and skill to shape how you lead, 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 pursue your calling with conviction, draw wisdom from experience, turn drive into responsible action, cultivate a culture people can trust and carry forward, and evolve through change without coming apart or losing what matters most.

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

You do not need a perfect plan, another title, or permission to begin. You need the courage to take the next faithful step.

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

Let a settled because become the compass bearing for faithful pursuit, with promise providing its unseen pull. Protect what cannot be traded, order your priorities, and pursue with perspective, persistence, preparation, prayer, peace, and poise.

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

Read leadership across the clock: look honestly to the past, live attentively in the present, and long wisely toward the future. Turn experience into usable wisdom through reflection and application, especially when lessons repeat or old rhythms need revision.

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

Join ambition's engine to agility's transmission so drive becomes traction under changing conditions. Aspire with aim, assess with authenticity, analyze with acuity, and act with responsible regard for risks, people, sequence, and safeguards.

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

Build the track people experience every day on the twin rails of competence and character. Use clarity, courage, certainty, curiosity, commitment, conduct, and connection to make expectations credible and trust repeatable.

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

Weave sustainable change from empowerment, experimentation, and edification. Develop and entrust capacity, test methods against reality, and reinforce body, mind, and spirit so transformation does not become depletion.

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

Portrait of Dr. Drew Howard.

Dr. Drew Howard

Dr. Drew Howard has spent more than two decades leading, learning, and serving across public education. His journey has taken him from driving a school bus and teaching science to serving as an assistant principal, principal, superintendent of schools, Associate Commissioner with the Texas Education Agency, and Deputy Director at Region 7 Education Service Center. His perspective spans classrooms, community centers, boardrooms, and the state Capitol.

He has worked with more than 300 school boards and governing teams while coaching and mentoring leaders across Texas. He holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership from Tarleton State University, where his research examined learning agility.

Step Into Your PLACE was shaped not only by professional experience, but also by hard decisions, successes, setbacks, changing seasons, faith, and family. He has been called Mister, Coach, and Doctor, but none compares to husband and dad. He and his wife, Carrie, are the proud parents of Carter and Ryder. A licensed and ordained minister, he hopes his leadership tells a story greater than any title, position, or accomplishment, reflecting the love, grace, and faithfulness of God.