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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Today Is Not Yesterday—Get Ready!
This book is devoted to helping you, the principal, challenge the absurd assumption that you can lead today as if it was yesterday. Simply put, you can’t. Even if you were a good leader yesterday, the game has changed significantly, and you have to change with it. I have been directly involved in designing award-winning principal and teacher leadership training since 2001, and I can safely say that much of what we designed just a few years ago either no longer applies or the application has changed dramatically. This book will help you recognize how leadership is changing in response to a very different set of challenges in schools; it will arm you with specific key concepts and requisite implementation strategies that will provide the tools you need to successfully lead—today and tomorrow.
In the pages that follow, I’ll be sharing a new leadership model that’s called Leading for Excellence and Fulfillment (LEAF). This model is designed for school leaders with the unique challenges of today in mind. Furthermore, the model takes advantage of the latest research on human performance, learning theory, and psychology. The ideas presented in this book aren’t just well-intended, homespun pieces of advice. They represent the synthesis of a generous amount of research on learning and human performance that will help you shape your leadership behaviors in the most productive way possible.
What’s rather surprising about this collection of key concepts and strategies is that, in many cases, it represents a distinct departure from much of the common wisdom about leadership from the past. You’ll learn in the following pages that much of what you were taught about leadership was designed for a world of work that doesn’t exist anymore. To illustrate this chasm between yesterday and today, I want to begin by taking a brief look back.
The Industrial Revolution
Our traditional notions of leadership and organizational development in schools emerged due to significant historic and economic forces. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the United States was going through the Industrial Revolution, cities were growing, and work environments were defined very differently than they are today (Eisner, 2002; Gray, 1993). Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer, developed the managerial style of the Industrial Revolution; it was known as scientific management or Taylorism (Taylor, 1911). As you read the following list of scientific management’s work expectations and conditions, think about how different the world of work is now from the systems envisioned when these models were developed.
Employers valued compliance and consistency over high performance and differentiation.
The work being done was mostly boring.
The workers were poorly educated and had very low skill levels.
Meeting expectations meant following very specific work parameters.
There was a great need for workers to respect authority and comply explicitly with everything they were told to do.
Workers had to endure high levels of boredom.
Everything was measured by time. Quality was assumed within the confines of the routine, and time was used to maximize efficiency (Eisner, 2002).
These rules and standards led the way for mass production, which required large numbers of people working in strict unison and close quarters to produce a consistent product with high quality, in great quantity, and at a lower cost than ever before (Jones, 2000). This method drove people from rural areas into the city for these new factory jobs. It also drove the need for larger schools, which likewise structured themselves in a way that both mirrored the common thinking of the time and served as a mechanism for delivering future workers for these emerging institutions (Gray, 1993). In order to prepare workers for the Industrial Revolution, schools constructed during that time were organized to do the following.
Schools were set up to reward compliance over high performance. Students were much better off going along with the crowd than standing out (Eisner, 2002).
Students were taught that putting up with boredom was part of their work expectations. Complaining about boredom was not an option, and learning to live and comply with it was the expectation (Eisner, 2002).
Fear, threats, and intimidation were utilized to keep control. This has proven to be historically effective in managing workers doing low-intellect, high-muscle jobs (Reason, 2010).
Even though schools were technically designed as learning institutions, the real measure or metric was time. Students were taught to move en masse by taking breaks, eating lunch, and going back to work with a large group. All activities were controlled by a bell system very similar to the factories that students would be joining in just a few years (Jones, 2000).
Sadly, many of the conventions in place during the Industrial Revolution still carry a significant level of importance in our schools today. Having trained thousands of teachers and administrators at this point, I can say with confidence that there are still greater rewards in most schools for conformity than there are for creativity. These schools also admit to being more focused on the metric of time than the progress of learning. Similarly, they value the illusion of control over the opportunity to be creative.
Still not convinced that your school is carrying around elements of this old managerial framework? Ask math teachers why algebra is taught before geometry. During the Industrial Revolution, to stay organized and streamlined, policy makers and school leaders decided to choose algebra over geometry because A comes before G alphabetically (Thompson, 2005). Learning theorists tell us that the levels of abstraction necessary to learn algebra may be difficult for students in the latter years of middle school and early years of high school (Thompson, 2005). Not surprisingly, algebra continues to be one of those courses with an extraordinarily high failure rate in every state (Pappano, 2012). Here we are over one hundred years later, and we continue to follow an unsuccessful tradition based on alphabetical order.
The Carrot and the Stick
As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, the United States developed management techniques that revolved around carrots and sticks. It was generally assumed that people performed more admirably if leaders clarified their expectations by offering explicit rewards and punishments (Skinner, 1938). Those in charge would put a metaphorical carrot in front of an individual or group of workers and encourage them to move forward. Leaders would likewise wave a threatening stick as an ominous reminder of what would happen if the workers didn’t follow the prescribed direction.
So does the carrot-and-stick routine work? Does it work for students? Does it work for teachers and staff? The answer is yes and no. Rather than relying on stories or homespun wisdom, I’m going to share some science with you. In studying human performance, we’ve come to realize that if you are providing human beings with a simple task with relatively few decision points and the need to execute maximum effort, the system of carrots and sticks works quite well (Ayres, 2010). After all, the human brain is capable of many nuanced expressions and iterations. While the ability to examine options puts us at our most creative, it can also be somewhat of a distraction. We’ve all had the experience of spending more time considering our options than bearing down and getting to work. Therefore, in terms of carrots and sticks, if the job at hand is excruciatingly simple, the performance level will go up if the brain can associate some sort of punishment or reward associated with the simple choices in front of it.
Quite remarkably, however, there is an avalanche of research suggesting that the more complex the challenge, the more ineffective the carrot-and-stick routine becomes (Pink, 2009). In fact, even if you take away the notion of the stick and just focus on incentives, this research is clear that offering an incentive can become a distraction to an otherwise open and creative mind. What’s important to understand is that the evolution of our culture certainly saw a time when jobs were simple, tasks were boring and routine, and people weren’t asked to problem solve or collaborate with any great depth at work. Those days are over. However, just like the algebra problem, we unfortunately are living through a time in which the accelerated demands of the economy and new working environment in conjunction with our ideas about what it takes to get the best out of people have outpaced the leadership strategies available to us.
Before going further, I want to make it clear that we did make some progress in the latter half of the 20th century in terms of how we think about leadership, organizational behavior, and systems. Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but it wasn’t that long ago when this simple notion that workers should be comfortable and somewhat happy on the job wasn’t assumed and had to be taught as a matter of undoing old management principles.
The Humanist Movement
In what’s generally referred to as the Humanist Movement, leaders were advised to treat workers with a greater sense of humanity and concern. Rather than seeing them as replaceable parts of a big machine—as was the design in the industrial model—leaders were taught to show concern for people and offer reinforcement and encouragement (Rogers, 1959).
For the first half of the 20th century, it was common for workers to fear their bosses. In the second half of the 20th century, bosses attempted to portray a kinder, gentler, and more understanding image of management. Thanks to technology and the acceleration of the skill level needed in most jobs, the feelings that workers have about their bosses are perhaps less relevant than they once were. If you’re the boss, bluntly put, it isn’t all about you. In the most highly productive organizations, the workers don’t spend their days perseverating on every nuance of behavior from their boss or manager. Their focus is on their own work. They have the autonomy to lead in their own right and are busy finding solutions to problems rather than focusing on the maladies in management or leadership.
It should be clear that leading with a fear orientation simply doesn’t work (Reason, 2010). The learning and growth challenges that students and staff (including you) face each day are adequately complex, and the simple application of sticks and carrots won’t improve your performance. In fact, there is a significant amount of evidence that shows when fear is introduced, it actually shuts down learning (Lipton, 2008; Wood, Norris, Waters, Stoldt, & McEwen, 2008). Clearly, if you want the best in human performance in terms of creativity and learning, leading with fear isn’t leading at all.
The LEAF model is constructed with this evolution in leadership in mind. You will see that this new leadership model is, indeed, quite contradictory to many of the old presuppositions about managing from the late 1800s. Instead, it’s designed to take advantage of our natural learning rhythms as well as all the research we have at our fingertips about maximizing individual and collective human performance.
The Leading for Excellence and Fulfillment Model
The emphasis on excellence within this leadership model represents the continuous pursuit of the very best. Too many modern leaders aim to simply get by or for outcomes that are “good enough.” The best leaders in schools are striving for excellence in everything they do. They recognize that it will take excellence to do more with less, as is the cold, harsh reality of many schools today. Leading in a way that achieves unprecedented excellence in a humanistic way to maximize learning and innovation certainly isn’t easy.
The emphasis on fulfillment is not simply an extension of the Humanist Movement. It goes deeper than that. You will see that human performance is significantly impacted by the degree to which individuals or groups feel that the work they’re doing is meaningful and important; the feeling that one’s work is part of a bigger and more important mission has a tendency to maximize effort and engage individual and collective learning systems (Reason, 2010). This isn’t a motivational moment. It’s a scientific fact (Cheung & Chiu, 2005). Therefore, leading with an emphasis on fulfillment is good for the human spirit, is motivational, and is enormously productive. Following are six priorities these leaders exhibit.
1 Maximize learning potential—When using the LEAF model, you should always be looking for opportunities to maximize the individual and collective learning power and potential that exist in every school. Having visited thousands of schools over the years, I’ve never been to a building without pockets of excellence waiting to emerge. The passionate pursuit of maximizing this learning potential is paramount to this type of leader.
2 Create engagement—Engagement is a learning term that references the amount of mental energy a learner is bringing to any learning situation. As you know, levels of engagement vary depending on learner interest, learner commitment, and the relative stimulation of the learning situation. We’ve all had the experience of tuning out what’s in front of us and only providing enough mental engagement to capture the major talking points. The best leaders understand this dynamic and make it their mission to maximize high-engagement learning opportunities for the staff.
3 Create autonomy—Psychologists and brain researchers agree that in order to get individuals and groups to perform at their creative best, leaders must provide autonomy whenever possible (Volmer, Spurk, & Niessen, 2012). The advantage of autonomy is that it opens up the art of possibility and gives the individual and collective learning systems a chance to flourish. Without autonomy, those wonderful “what if” questions never get asked. Leaders who lead with excellence and fulfillment understand that autonomy can’t come without responsibility, accountability, and necessary checks and balances. Many of the challenges accompanying change have high levels of prescription that make this autonomy harder to achieve. That said, these successful leaders never stop pursuing that autonomy whenever possible.
4 Relentlessly pursue excellence—These leaders don’t give lip service to the pursuit of excellence. It is a cause they chase relentlessly. It’s so easy in a moment of fatigue or distraction to lower our standards and come to accept what should be unacceptable. These leaders hold a standard of self-excellence and create a culture within the school in which heightened sensitivity to excellence and high performance is everywhere.
5 Identify and advocate purpose and fulfillment—When individuals understand that their work has meaning and purpose, they are far more likely to bring their creative best to the situation. This is true of individuals and groups, and the best leaders today understand this dynamic and consistently infuse purpose in the conversation.
6 Make work fun—Research has shown that one of the advantages of having fun is that it breaks the tension and allows the brain to go back to whatever it’s been focusing on with renewed energy, focus, and heightened levels of neurological engagement (Reason, 2010). Research also clarifies that institutions or groups that play all the time without meaning or purpose generally don’t gain this benefit, because the pursuit of fun isn’t connected to a bigger purpose (Meyer, 2000). Those schools that have a clearly defined meaning and purpose can pursue their goals and objectives with stalwart seriousness and can laugh uproariously at themselves in the process. The best leaders understand this and make this working condition possible.
Unfortunately, far too many leadership books give you stories but are woefully weak in providing strategies. On paper, the idea of the LEAF model certainly sounds great, but it is my intention to provide you with Monday-morning strategies ready for implementation. Thus, I present ten key concepts to be explored in the chapters that follow.
Chapter Overview
These concepts are designed with the busy practitioner in mind. While they will cause you to rethink your approaches to professional practice and will reshape your filter and how you contemplate leadership and innovation, they are not designed to completely overtake your agenda. You’ll see that in executing these concepts, you’ll actually address much of what you’re already doing on a consistent basis. They will likely serve as a framework that will allow you to create and ultimately support a leadership culture destined for both excellence and fulfillment.
Each chapter focuses on one of the following concepts.
Chapter 1, “Establishing Vision Clarity,” focuses on the actual steps we know leaders must take to create a clear, durable, and implementable vision. Vision is a neurological construct that requires us to both see and respond. The ability to create these mental representations and make sure that they are sustainable with groups requires very different types of leadership activities than most leaders have ever been shown. Creating a better vision means more progress for everyone!
In chapter 2, “Generating Enhanced Reflective Learning,” we will explore the pursuit of learning capacity in your school. If you believe that nothing can change until the adults in your school begin to work and interact differently, you have to also believe that learning is at the center of that transformation. As a leader, your most powerful gift is developing the capacity to support quality learning experiences in your school—first for the adults but ultimately for the students you serve every day. Leading to enhance learning is an altogether essential component of leadership training that has been all but ignored.
Learning is all about asking and answering questions, isn’t it? In chapter 3, “Asking Meaningful Questions,” you’ll learn about the power of questions asked strategically and consistently in schools and the impact they have on the climate and culture of the organization. The pursuit of one question over another fundamentally changes both your end goal and the steps you take to get there, so this chapter shows you how to strategically use questions to create a better culture.
Sadly, schools spend very little time innovating their way toward a new outcome. In the past, schools were largely measured by their degree of compliance to preestablished standards. While the accountability movement has created some lofty goals, we understand that the pathway toward achieving those goals is uncharted at best. The most successful schools in the future are going to require dynamic levels of innovation, and chapter 4, “Inspiring Dynamic Innovation,” shows you how to create a culture with rich, dynamic innovation.
Does your school spend more time talking about what’s going on in the principal’s office than what’s going on in the classroom? In chapter 5, “Developing and Enhancing Authentic Teacher Leadership,” we will discuss the fact that teacher leadership is not quasi- administrative. It is a unique leadership opportunity that can help teachers establish a unique position in the lives of their students, their school, and in the communities they serve. Encouraging authentic teacher leadership doesn’t happen by accident. In this chapter you will learn how to lead in a way that makes enhanced levels of teacher leadership the center of your school improvement endeavors.
Chapter 6, “Igniting Next-Level Collaboration,” discusses the role of collaboration within professional learning communities (PLCs). The promotion of PLCs has been a blessing. However, the ubiquitous PLC phraseology has been dampened by lazy interpretations. Collaboration at a deep and meaningful level is more than just putting people together in a room and asking them to meet regularly. This chapter helps leaders understand the impact of teamwork and consistent, quality group interactions on the learning process. A highly collaborative school culture can have a significant effect on the staff members who work there and the students they serve.
The most successful leaders are getting away from the notion that conflict is a bad thing. Actually, disagreement is perfectly acceptable, and a divergence of opinions is expected and can make a school far better prepared for the challenging world around it. In chapter 7, “Using Conflict and Repurposed Energy to Improve and Inspire,” we will explore how the best leaders reframe conflict and disagreement and repurpose that energy as a mechanism to improve the culture and inspire deeper levels of innovation.
In terms of psychological well-being, decades of research have been devoted to the importance of resilience and the merits of demonstrating high levels of will and determination. Healthy organizations work in very much the same way. In the past, we didn’t spend much time talking about leadership that encouraged accelerated levels of will and determination in response to difficult challenges. It was just assumed that the system would respond accordingly. As discussed in chapter 8, “Encouraging Will, Determination, and Resilience,” the reality is that schools have to be led toward these capacities in a thoughtful way.
In many cases, the greatest barrier to next-level performance is the belief that it is even possible. Striving for that next level can be difficult due to the fact that we are altogether transfixed on achieving this thing called “average.” The best leaders in schools and beyond understand that you must have a deeply held belief that a next-level performance is not only possible but is the expectation, as explored in chapter 9, “Developing Individual and Systemic Belief in Next-Level Performance.”
In many earlier texts there have been discussions about the importance of shared leadership. That principals or other system leaders would give away the power in certain circumstances is certainly a warm, benevolent idea. However, the complexity of organizations today makes this notion antiquated; due to the speed of technology and other change elements, leadership cannot grow only when these capacities are made available by the leader. Instead, organic leadership should emerge as needed, when needed, and with confidence. In chapter 10, “Cultivating Organic Leadership,” we will address this powerful leadership potential.
In addition to a short discussion about each individual concept as it relates to outdated Taylorism ideals, I provide related strategies to help you lead your staff forward, including critical conversations you must have with your staff regularly. Each chapter also includes chats I’ve had with educators in the field. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk with many exemplars in leadership over the years, and I hope they inspire you as well. In addition, the chapters end with the impact, or takeaway, for each key concept.
You have an incredibly important job, and you deserve a leadership coach who can encourage and support you—this book is written with that kind of coaching in mind. You’ll notice that my style will be encouraging, but I’ll also tease and cajole you. And I’m willing to challenge you as well. I want to confront your assumptions, and I’ll be using a coaching platform to do it. Leadership coaching is available in most other professions, and I think the principals and building-level leaders in K–12 education deserve a good coach as well.
Spoiler Alert
Let this be fair warning: optimism abounds in this book. If you’re somebody who loves to regale your friends with stories about gloom and doom in the field of education, you might be frustrated by my coaching efforts. I recognize the grim reality of the challenges we face in schools today, but I remain an incurable optimist. I was a principal in an extraordinarily tough learning environment, and in a relatively short period of time, our team came together and made a significant impact on the students we served. This progress wouldn’t have been possible without optimism and a belief that better outcomes were just around the corner. I carry this perspective with me today, not just in terms of the fortunes of one school at a time but also in terms of the profession in general. Here’s why. Even though our problems and challenges are as tough now as they have ever been, our opportunities to find answers have likewise never been this robust. A teacher in your school might have a challenge reaching a particularly difficult student with a very discrete and challenging learning deficiency. Rather than toiling away in frustration, with just a few clicks, that teacher can reach out to a limitless number of colleagues who may very well be dealing with the same issue. Therefore, even if we have more questions than before and the questions are more difficult, our access to answers has grown astronomically.
I have spent over a decade doing leadership and organizational culture work in private industry, as well as in private and public schools. These experiences have provided me with a unique perspective on what Fortune 100 companies do to compete in outlandishly challenging environments. After coaching CEOs in some of the fastest growing, highest performing businesses in the United States and working with executives in some of the most well-established businesses internationally, I have learned that the challenges of leadership remain remarkably consistent across disciplines. While public educators often wring their hands and bemoan the fact that they don’t have the same tools or resources as private industry colleagues, it is clear to me that it doesn’t come down to the tools or the financial accoutrements; rather, it has always, and will always, come down to the capacity to create a culture that encourages leadership. After watching outrageously successful leadership in private industry, I’m more convinced than ever that, when it comes to leading meaningful innovation in schools, we can do this.
One great example of what it takes to be successful in leadership is American Express, which has a long tradition of investing in leadership training. After becoming familiar with my work, American Express invited me to train a handful of leadership cohorts on the vice president promotion track with the company. The human resources director was particularly interested in helping leaders stimulate systemic learning. At a key moment in the training, I remember one of the attendees reflecting out loud on the training components (highlighted in this book) that speak to the importance of leaders’ capacity to influence, which improves the learning acumen individually and collectively throughout the organization. During this salient moment, this future vice president said, “I think I get it now, Casey. All these tools you are sharing can really help me. I will be able to lead others by helping them become better learners. It really does seem to me that to be a great leader, I have to first and foremost be a great teacher.”
Obviously this was a teachable moment for both the young executive and for me. While I’ve always believed that what we learn in education is valuable, this exchange convinced me more than ever that the expertise educators carry with them is more important to our culture than many of us, even the biggest fans of the profession and of learning itself, could ever have realized.
To compound this, we are living in a time in which technology makes everything easier. Technology, if used correctly, allows machines or devices to do the laborious heavy lifting, freeing us up to focus on the most interesting and engaging aspects of our jobs. We are living in a time when handheld devices have given teachers access to just-in-time information about each student, allowing them to adjust their work as they go. Teachers can use technology to open up the entire world to their students—a world that wasn’t available to them just a few years ago. We are also living in a time when we can share resources and help each other dramatically increase our own performance levels like never before. With all of these blessings, however, comes a renewed need for good choices to be made and for schools to never stop striving to be well led. If we can step up and accelerate our leadership capacities and truly lead with strategies that are appropriate for today—not yesterday—I believe we can open up an unprecedented world of opportunity for the students we serve and do a better job than we’ve ever done before. So are you ready? Let’s get started.
