We sat down with Dr. Natalie Houghtby-Haddon, a longtime colleague of both Bonnie and Ina through the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (GW CEPL). Our conversation began with her new role as Executive Director of the Center, stepping in at a time of transition and uncertainty. For more than two decades, the Center has focused largely on federal government leadership training, but as that landscape shifts, so does CEPL’s direction.
Originally launched to support local government employees, the Center quickly evolved to serve the federal workforce, adding executive coaching to its offerings along the way. Now, with the emergence of “CEPL 4.0,” the Center, led by Dr. Houghtby-Haddon, is looking beyond public service to develop leadership training for corporations and other sectors. It’s a moment of challenge, but also opportunity.
With Dr. Houghtby-Haddon at the helm, we explored how her lifelong commitment to building healthy, just, and sustainable communities informs this next chapter. That guiding principle first led her to the United Nations, then with a desire to make more of a direct impact in the community, she became a clergywoman and spent two decades pastoring churches in Southern California. Throughout her career, Dr. Houghtby-Haddon has helped people reimagine what’s possible in their lives and communities.
She shared her powerful framework of the “four worlds”—mythic, communal, social, and cultural—interconnected spheres that help us navigate change and envision new ways of being. Drawing on her experience across leadership, ministry, and public service, she spoke about her personal philosophy and how both failures and successes have shaped her journey.
Dr. Houghtby-Haddon also walked us through five key leadership perspectives that have influenced her thinking and continue to do so at the pivotal time for the Center: Scientific Management, Excellence, Values-Based Leadership, Trust and Cultural Leadership, and Whole-Person Leadership. Each contributes to a holistic view of how leaders and the organizations they serve can thrive in times of transformation.
Toward the end of the conversation, we returned to Dr. Houghtby-Haddon’s model and how it inspires people to move beyond it in pursuit of their fullest potential. She spoke about the importance of letting go of the old and welcoming the new—something she’s experiencing first hand at the Center, where the future is uncertain but full of exciting possibilities to rethink leadership and help leaders lean into their full potential. Don’t miss our lightning round at the end of the conversation to find out what Dr. Houghtby-Haddon might do if she had all the time in the world, where she might spend it, and what she’s currently reading. It’s a fascinating conversation that really opens the mind, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
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Dr. Natalie Houghtby-Haddon On Leading With Purpose In Uncertain Times
Charting A New Course: Vision For Public Leadership
In this episode, we have Dr. Natalie Houghtby-Haddon as our guest. Welcome, Natalie. Natalie is the Executive Director of the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership, and also an Assistant Professor at the GW College of Professional Studies. As the Executive Director, she serves as the strategic leader of the center, focusing on changing trends facing executive education and higher education for professionals in the public sector.
She also oversees the discovery, design, and execution phases of the center’s various leadership programs, supporting the members of the team in their work with the center’s various client organizations. Her primary goal in the work that she does is to help leaders imagine and generate alternative futures that will make a positive difference for themselves, their organizations, their communities, and the people they serve.
Prior to her appointment at the center, Dr. Houghtby-Haddon was President of the Immaculate Heart College Center in LA, where she also served as the interim executive director of the Institute for Community Leadership, a collaborative effort of the LA County Department of Health, the UCLA School of Public Health, the University of Laverne, and IHCC. Natalie’s an Ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church and served several local churches in the Los Angeles area prior to her appointment at the Immaculate Heart.
She received a PhD in the Human Sciences from the George Washington University and holds the Doctor of Ministry and Master’s of Divinity Degrees from the Claremont School of Theology, and a BA in Political Science from Boston University. She’s also the author of Changed Imagination, Changed Obedience: Social Change, Social Imagination and the Bent-Over Woman in the Gospel of Luke. Welcome, Natalie.
Natalie, I am so excited that you’ve joined our show. I know Bonnie and I have been into this journey for a while, and I think this is a great time actually to have you on, so welcome.
Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here.
When I say good timing, it’s because I’ve known you for many years now at the Center, so we’ve worked together on so many projects and it’s been a long partnership. This particular timing, it’s interesting because the Center has been going through significant transition and the world is in a new transition, and you’ve just stepped in as the new Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. I know it’s been quite a journey, and I would love if you can just step in and share a little bit about where you are, how you are thinking about leadership at this time, and your role and the Center’s vision.
Thanks, Ina, and yes, it has been a very interesting transition. We knew Jim was going to retire in December 2024, but we didn’t realize how different the world would be, come the end of January 2025, just a month later, with the new presidential transition and new priorities and things like that. In trying to think about where are we with this new reality in which we are living, because our work with the federal government has been so much work of what we’ve been doing for many years, along with the work that we do with the district, that things are shifting dramatically.
As I have been, again, dealing with that new environment, but also with the new transition and what is the center at this particular moment in time, and what does the center need to be at this moment in time, it occurred to me that we’re really moving into CEPL 4.0, so [that’s the] Center for Excellence and Public Leadership, CEPL, we train people as our watch word, and also to help people know how to pronounce our acronym correctly.
As I’ve been thinking about the time that I’ve been with the Center, which I came in the fall semester of 2000, so it’s been a long time, that really the full 1.0, which is what I walked into, and which I’d known about from the very beginning because a college friend of mine was in the very first cohort of the Program for Excellence in Municipal Management that we do with DC, I thought, “That was really municipal.” We did the CPM program. That was the only program that we did. We did it three times a year.
In 2001, we started the CPM program with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. We were just doing local government stuff and just doing certified public manager things. We did receive another program from elsewhere in the university, the Contemporary Executive Development Program, which was with the federal government. We now call that the Senior Leader Program, but it was our first little dabble in something other than local government work.
In 2003, we began working with the Defense Information Systems Agency, doing a customized leadership development program for them. That really became CEPL 2.0 where we added federal work onto our local government work. Both of those two things have been really the mainstays of the Center’s work since then. Although in 2010, you brought us coaching work. I think about the addition of the coaching piece of CEPL 3.0, because the coaching work has been so much a part of, and a very significant part of how our leadership, thinking about leadership and how we help people to develop has really transformed.
The individual coaching makes a huge difference. Also, the model of peer coaching that we now use in almost all of our leadership development programs and is hands down what people say is the most important thing they learn in our leadership programs. Of course, adding the coaching certification program as well too. That’s CEPL 1.0, local government, CEPL 2.0, local and federal, CEPL 3.0, local, federal and coaching.
Now here we’re at CEPL 4.0, which is, the sky’s the limit. The pillars that we’ve relied on with both federal programs as well as local government programs is much more uncertain. We’re really at an opportune time to think about what else should we be doing? Is there something beyond just public leadership that we should be doing as well too?
This is really our time to think about all of that, to bring our brain trust together. That’s what I call our senior fellows who come from different industries and both public and private sector organizations, and as well as working with our alumni and from all of our different programs to see what are the issues that they’re trying to deal with where leadership is a really important ingredient, but really is the secret sauce, the magic that will help their organizations accomplish their missions more effectively.
We really have a blank slate at this point to think through what is the opportunity and how can CEPL take all of its knowledge and understanding about leadership development that we’ve seen transition over the years. Where are we being called to be developing people who can become leaders, who make a positive difference and a positive impact on their organizations, on their communities, on the lives of the people that they serve?
Unlocking Social Imagination For Leaders
It strikes me with your big blue sky and jumping off into what could come next, it’s so interesting that all of these world changes happened when you stepped into that role because changing imagination has been something you’ve long worked with. In fact, you’ve developed a model, written a book about social imagination. Can you talk about that a little bit?
What does it take to imagine our lives differently?
Sure, I can. The research question that has guided my life since I was in high school actually, is how do we create healthy, just and sustainable communities? My initial thought was to work with the UN, which I was really privileged to do in my first job out of college. I thought that’s maybe too big. How do we bring that a little bit closer to home? I went to seminary. I am a Methodist clergy woman, and spent about twenty years pastoring churches in Southern California, although I’m a fourth generation Methodist on my dad’s side. Being a Methodist and being involved in the church, it’s all I’ve ever known, let’s put it that way.
Part of my academic career is a little bit weird. I’ve always done interdisciplinary work, but it’s always been around that question. I’m a New Testament scholar, and then my PhD is half New Testament, it’s half public policy. My Doctor of Ministry is half New Testament and half Liturgics, which is worship. (How does worship take place?) I figure I have a whole doctorate in New Testament, but I’ve got these other pieces as well too, both ritual as well as policy.
I was really privileged to work with Burton Mack when I was at Claremont, who was my New Testament advisor. He began talking about, really, what was for him, a homiletical model, which is preaching. Which for me, I was like, “It’s bigger than just that.” It’s really a way to think about social imagination and how can we give people a framework that can help them to imagine their lives differently within this context when they’re facing something that’s new or different or a situation that the world is changing around them and they’re either needing to change or they’re have the opportunity to change.
A new leader comes in, the world becomes drastically different. How are they going to not only survive but thrive in that new environment? Some of that came out of working with several organizations, one a church, one a small academic institution where the world had shifted so dramatically around them and they really struggled to be able to imagine that there was any other way that they could be other than what they had always been doing.
I thought, “There’s got to be some way that we can think about that we can find a more concrete way to help people imagine things differently.” The social imagination model that I developed based on Burton Mack’s work involves four worlds, which actually are developed from United Methodism and John Wesley’s Quadrilateral, which is how we do theology.
It’s a matter of having four worlds and then four authorities. The worlds are the mythic world, the communal world, the social world, and the cultural world. What links the mythic world and the communal world is tradition, the idea of, “how has a given community articulated to itself over time?” What are the practices, what are the principles that they have taken [from] this mythic world that shapes them and that guides their values and the way that they approach the world? That’s the linkage between those two.
In a Judeo-Christian tradition, or even if you think about our society in the United States these days, so in the US, we’ve got the Declaration of Independence, which we’re coming on the 250th anniversary of that in 2026. We’ve got constitutional principles, we’ve got these different value sets that come out of our understanding of who we are as the United States of America, and how that has been modified and developed and explored over the time to where we come to now.
The communal world is linked to the social world through experience, what’s my personal experience of being out there in the world. The social world is all about the things that we, like in the US, we drive on the right-hand side of the road as opposed to the left-hand side of the road. Those are some of the practices that help society function and some of the institutions that help that.
What links the social world to the cultural world is reason. The idea that while we may have some different cultural practices, using our reason as in, are these cultural practices still appropriate in our current situation? It links the culture world to the mythic world again, so it’s a big circle, the foundational texts.
Again, I mentioned the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. In faith traditions in the US, there’s sacred texts, which both shape and inform what the mythic world is all about, but then also shape our culture as well too. That’s the big circle of the social imagination. The idea is to have those resources that we almost always take for granted.
When something is disruptive or we find that the world has changed around us, then how can we look at those worlds and traditions or those worlds as resources, [the] authorities as resources. Just like with a kaleidoscope, if we did a quarter turn, would that help us see the world in a different way that would give us new ideas and would help us imagine a new way of being?
That’s the model. Again, this idea that we can take what’s around us, and this is part of what I learned in trying to work with these two organizations that really didn’t come through well, the need to imagine their lives differently. If I had thought about this center, or known about this center had put this together, then could I have helped them be more successful and help them not only survive, but also thrive? In both cases of the two organizations I’m thinking about, they did not survive, nor did they thrive. That really pushed me to say, “What does it take to imagine our lives differently?”
That’s actually a great question, and I just want to take that kaleidoscope and maybe turn it inwards in you. I’m wondering, because you’ve had all these different experiences, Natalie, as your ministry work, leadership work, in academia, and then again in the focus in public leadership. Where do you stand in your own personal philosophy of leadership?
When I first came to the Center, one of the frameworks we were using was the Five Perspectives, and this is Matt Fairholm’s work along with his dad. What struck me was that this model of Five Perspectives really captured my own personal leadership journey, which also highlighted some of the reasons why I was not an effective leader in some of these organizations.
The Five Perspectives relies on primarily on public administration models that have been around for a good century, if not more. It started with this, the Scientific Manager, this idea that management is a science and you are all about making decisions that are predictable and so on and so forth. It’s more about getting things done than it is about worrying about people or anything like that.
The next perspective that we took a look at was Excellence leadership. This was beginning to look at if you involve people who are on the front lines, could they help you improve processes and so and so that they were more effective and you could accomplish the mission of the organization more quickly and more effectively. The third level was Values leadership.
This [is the] idea that the leader began to articulate her or his own leadership values, but also began to work with the values of the other people in the organization. Therefore, people were functioning more from a values perspective. The people became important, not just that we’re getting things done and that we’re getting them done in the right way as effectively as we can.
The fourth perspective is called Trust Cultural leadership. This is the idea that not only do people share values, but also they bring different cultural realities, experiences, perspectives to the table. The leader’s responsibility is to try to take advantage of all those different perspectives and views of culture, but then to create a shared culture that, again, helps the organization be more effective in a much more diverse world.
The final perspective is called Whole Soul or Whole Person Leadership. This idea that it is totally about the people and that you invite them to bring their whole selves, their whole souls into the life of the organization and to be their best selves in order to have the organization be as good as it possibly could be, and to accomplish its mission as effectively as it possibly can.
The whole soul leadership was over the course of my ministry in local churches, I started as a scientific manager. Again, this idea that if my congregation would just do what I told them to do, it would be perfect and wonderful and be about doing the work that God was calling them to do. That was totally where I failed in the first congregation where I was not very successful. They really didn’t survive too much longer than my time there, which is one of my great losses, I think. If I could go back and do it all over again, knowing what I know now, it would be a very different experience.
To finally realize in my last church that then taking that on forward, that you just have to meet people where they are and invite them to be themselves and to help them see for themselves alternatives and possibilities and potential that they might not have seen for themselves. That’s what I think translates into the work that we do at the Center and how we’ve really begun to shape and articulate and have always tried to do to be this whole soul or whole person leadership.
We receive people into our programs as they come to us. Over the course of our time with them, [we] try to help them see alternatives and possibilities for themselves and to encourage them to take advantage of that and to keep building and becoming even more of what they have the possibility of being as leaders and as human beings out there in the world.
I want to go back to the kaleidoscope and these ideas about leadership for a second. As you laid out this model, there’s this kaleidoscope, there are these structures, there are these things that we’ve put in place, culture, rules, things like this, and we can click the kaleidoscope and see things from a new angle. I have a question. As we think about leadership now, perhaps we also need to just look outside of the kaleidoscope. That itself is working with a very small defined set of circumstances, ideas, history, thought, and that we can look beyond the kaleidoscope.
Really, coming back to your whole thing of where you are right now in total blue sky and really get super imaginative. I find in my work with leaders, there’s a real fear of getting into blue sky because most organizations start with so much energy and great ideas. There’s this concern of leaving behind that legacy of what generated the organization in the first place. I wonder how you work with that when you’re working with all these leaders and working with imagination.
This is where Ina is a good partner in this because she’s better at the less structured ways of thinking and imagining things. In my dad’s side of the family, everybody’s an engineer. We have structure built into our DNA on that side. Now, I will say that on my mom’s side, everybody’s an artist.
That’s a nice mix.
Yeah, it’s a great mix. The guy who did our psych exams for becoming clergy, it is like, “You’ve lied somewhere because you can’t be in the 98th percentile of technical, creative, and administrative stuff.” I said, “A, you don’t know my family and B, you don’t know my history.” I’ve spent all my life doing administration on top of all that other stuff. For me, the nice thing about my little model is that it is quite structured, but it gives you the opportunity and the freedom to be very creative within that. The stepping outside and to think about things out there is not my strong suit. That’s why it’s really good to have Ina as a partner because she’s much better at helping people do that.
One thing I will say about that, and I think, Natalie, we have similar things in the family because we have that kind of structure. I remember when we did the whole Herrmann Brain Dominance, we were almost close to that whole brain. It’s bringing different perspectives. The thing that I’m thinking about is that yes, there is a model that you’ve crafted, but I still feel it’s your question that keeps it open.
The question you started with is how do we create healthy, just societies and organizations or communities. I think that’s what keeps the model open. What I also heard from what you were sharing about the center, you still provided the laying out of the structure or how we built it, but now there’s this open sky
I also hear in the model that looking at it this way is the spark to get people to move beyond it.
The congregation that I really did not do a great job with, they had been invited, and this is where leading change or change itself comes into it. The congregation had been invited to participate in a change initiative that our annual conference, which is in the Methodist tradition, like an archdiocese in the Catholic tradition, that they had been invited to be a part of it. They had said yes because they loved the previous pastor, and they hoped that nobody would tell the new pastor who was coming in that they’d said yes to be a part of this. Of course, the whole point that I was sent there was to help them be a part of this change process.
It started the week I arrived. In fact, the first meeting of this program with the participating churches was on the Saturday before I was in worship for the first time with people. I’d not met anybody other than the six people who were the steering committee. They were all lovely people. It was three couples who had official positions in the church leadership and they’re the people that the church had selected. It seemed like a really good idea.
What I didn’t realize was that if only Evelyn had been on the steering committee as well too, and if she said it was okay, then everybody else in the congregation would’ve said, “Okay, let’s jump in with both feet.” John Kotter’s model step two is the guiding coalition. He hadn’t written his article yet when I started all of this and so who knew that you needed a guiding coalition that was actually included both formal and informal leaders.
I’m a little bit off track with that, but the other piece that I had not really accounted for, and again, this is 30, 40 years later, it became clear to me that what had been missing also was how hard it is to let go of the past, particularly, as you said, when you’ve been at the start of creating this organization. About half of the congregation at that time were charter members of this congregation. They had literally built the church buildings with their own hands. The idea that some young whipper snapper pastor lady was going to come in and make them do something different or open themselves up to the neighborhood around them, which had changed dramatically, was, I’m sure infuriating and it just froze them in place.
Over the years, and this is thanks to working at CEPL over the years, if there is one book that I could take back and redo that whole thing with is William Bridges Managing Transitions because what he talks about, when you’re ending something, is that people are losing stuff. They’re losing themselves, their identity, what has made them proud of the work that they’ve accomplished, all of that stuff.
If you’re moving from one way of being to a new way of being, you really have to account for people to go through that grieving process. They didn’t teach me that in seminary. Nobody mentioned any of that. Didn’t change. We’re just going to go to some forward and forward into wonderfulness and whatever. However, the piece that I totally missed was that sense of loss.
I will say, as we’ve moved into this transition from CEPL 3.0 to CEPL 4.0 is, for me, a sense of loss and how I have been the associate director of the center for many years. It’s one thing to add a new component when all of those components are at risk, and you think, “We have to do something. We have to be open to doing something completely new and different.” I’m like, “What? Who am I? Who is CEPL if we’re not doing the things we’ve always done? The need to let go of that, let go of that is something that this is what that congregation was experiencing when I just buzzed in and said, “We’re going to do all this stuff and it’s going to be wonderful.”
How do we account for that sense of loss and needing to grieve the old ways, but also then to be open to what’s next and what’s new? That’s why this notion of CEPL, this little framework, so this is my structure, but also my imagination coming into play, this idea of being able to articulate that CEPLs 1, 2, and 3 are the prelude and really are a part of what CEPL 4.0 [is]. It’s one of the ways in which we visualized the Five Perspectives was in concentric circles.
The idea that each circle encompasses, but transcends, and this is Matt’s language, everything that’s come before. It’s not that as a whole soul leader, you lose being a scientific manager. It’s just that you’ve got that there and you can rely on that if you need to, but also, you’ve added these other kinds of skill sets or ways of imagining leadership, in this case into what’s going on now.
For me, the opportunity right now with, with the transitions that we’re making with CEPL is all 1, 2, and 3 are still there and all the things that we’ve already done are the things that we can rely on to be there. It’s an opportunity, as you say, to get outside of our boxes or outside of the structure and to say, “What else is out there? How can we think about leadership in this new environment?” I was talking with somebody who’s one of our partners, and it’s like, “What is the core competency of CEPL?” I said, “I think whole person leadership is our core competency.”
What we have done consistently over the years is to help develop leaders to live into their full potential in a positive way and to really help them focus on making positive changes [that] have a positive impact on their organizations, their communities, the lives of the people that they serve. I think no matter what we do going forward, that, to me, is the center of who CEPL is, what CEPL is and what we strive to do.
Even if it looks very different, if even if we’re doing more private sector stuff, if we’re focusing on multi-sector leadership where people are needing to know how to work across different industries or types of organizations or whatever, which again, has been a long-time competency, I would say, of the Center, was the focus of our Master’s degree was to do multi-sector leadership and so on. The idea that really nobody does it alone anymore, you need other people with other skillsets, other organizations with other skillsets to be able to be effective in the world these days.
Unfiltered Insights: Rapid Fire Insights With Dr. Houghtby-Haddon
As you were, you were talking, I had to go and pull these. A few years ago, I took this class, it was called Lessons in Magic. This guy called Philip Carr-Gomm. When you talk about artistry and your family, Natalie, and you and I have talked. I know you’re a Harry Potter fan. Bonnie is a Harry Potter fan. I don’t know, but this idea of magic kept popping up. I went and I pulled out these sentence stems. I thought we can try it and see. I will just read the prompts and you finish the sentence without thinking too much. If I was totally free, I would?
Weave.
What, do you weave?
I am a weaver. I picked up tapestry weaving during the pandemic. I started weaving back in the late ‘90s with floor looms and table looms and things like that. During the pandemic I thought, “Let me do tapestry weaving because it’s much more contained,” and so on. If I just had time and that was all I could do, I would spend a bunch of my time weaving.
I had it here and I couldn’t find it because my sister changed all my desk when she moved here, but I have one of those that you gave me for Christmas. It’s really fun. If I had all the time in the world, I would?
Travel and hang out with friends and family and read lots and lots of books.
Can I add on?
Sure.
Top of the list that you would read right now.
I’m all about trashy novels right now. My life is too stressed to do regular stuff.
Give us a title. What’s a trashy novel right now?
I also love mysteries as well, too, which came out of a preaching class I took once. There’s a whole series about sisters that own a bookstore. That’s intriguing me right at the moment.
If I could follow my dream, I would?
I would be in Mississippi at the reservoir writing about the New Testament and my book title, Three Foreigners and a Cripple, which looks at four of the stories in the gospels that are about unnamed women that Jesus encounters where it really transforms his life and theirs.
The song of my heart tells me to.
The song of my heart is a little bit stilled at the moment, having lost some important people to me. It’s not singing as loudly or as fully as it has in the past.
Natalie, I’m Jewish and the Torah has a lot of different thoughts about leadership. Rabbi Jonathan Sachs wrote a book about it and talked about how there’s two things that are honored where you have the priests who are about eternity, tradition. They never vary. You have the prophets who are of the moment in time. The tension between those two evolves. Religion, thought groups, etc. It’s interesting to think about that tension between, I don’t want anything to change, but the world is changing, so we have to change.
Yes, exactly. That’s really a lot of where the whole piece around the scriptures as a source of imagination. If [I’d] been smart enough with this congregation, the idea of how could I have helped them see what they had been and who they had been as a resource for being slightly different, but with the ability to engage with the community around them more effectively. Not to be afraid of it, but to see that as a testament to their strength and their history.
That was really one of the key things, where moving into change is not leaving who you were behind. It’s, again, encompassing, but transcending into a new way of being, given the way in which the situation has changed around you. That, to me, is really where CEPL is at the moment. We have this huge history, which was really celebrated at the Cafritz Gala [the night before the interview].
We had so many of our alums who’ve gone through our various programs there who are now in leadership positions in the District of Columbia government, and who are, again, bringing these incredible people and supporting them in the work that they’re doing on behalf of the folks who live, work, and visit in the district. You think, “That’s our legacy. We were created to help build the leadership and management capacity of DC government employees in the middle tier of leadership.” It was on full display, which was really an incredibly nice thing.
Congratulations. Natalie, thank you so much for sharing your vision with us. It’s really been a pleasure to talk to you. It’s sparked my imagination in thinking about where, not just CEPL that I’m also blessed to be working with and a part of in some ways, but every organization because there are dramatic shifts in the world right now. I think imagination is our key. I appreciate this conversation very much. Thank you.
Thank you, Bonnie. It’s a delight to talk with you and thank you for letting me share some of these things that are in my mind and in my heart right at this moment. I really appreciate the opportunity.
I’m excited about where CEPL’s going. It’s been fun.
Thank you.
Thanks, Natalie.
Important Links
- Dr. Natalie Houghtby-Haddon
- Change Imagination, Changed Obedience: Social Change, Social Imagination and the Bent-Over Woman in the Gospel of Luke
- Managing Transitions
About Dr. Natalie Houghtby-Haddon
Dr. Natalie K. Houghtby-Haddon is the Executive Director of the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (GW CEPL), and an Assistant Professor in the GW College of Professional Studies. As Executive Director, she serves as the strategic leader of the Center, focusing on the changing trends facing executive education and higher education for professionals in the public sector. She also oversees the discovery, design, and execution phases of the Center’s various leadership development programs, supporting the members of the CEPL team in their work with the Center’s various client organizations. Her primary goal in the work that she does is to help leaders imagine and generate alternative futures that will make a positive difference for themselves, their organizations, their communities, and the people they serve.
Prior to her appointment at GW CEPL, Dr. Houghtby-Haddon was President of Immaculate Heart College Center (IHCC) in Los Angeles, where she also served as the Interim Executive Director of the Institute for Community Leadership, a collaborative effort of the LA County Department of Health, the UCLA School of Public Health, the University of La Verne, and IHCC.
Natalie is an ordained elder in The United Methodist Church and served several local churches in the Los Angeles area prior to her appointment at Immaculate Heart. She received the Ph.D. in the Human Sciences from George Washington University and holds the Doctor of Ministry and Master of Divinity Degrees from the Claremont School of Theology, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Boston University. She is the author of Changed Imagination, Changed Obedience: Social Imagination and the Bent-Over Woman in the Gospel of Luke, published by Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Tagged Four Worlds Model, Leadership Journey, Navigating Change, Public Leadership, Social Imagination, whole person leadership