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CHAPTER 1

Developing Leadership for Whole-Child Schools

ASCD (n.d.) well-defines the whole-child approach to education: “A whole child approach, which ensures that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged, sets the standard for comprehensive, sustainable school improvement and provides for long-term student success.” Before we delve into the importance of this critical statement, let’s start where it all starts—at the top.

Here’s the repeating story of my work with school leaders. I’m called in to work on a specific initiative: creating collective efficacy through building trust and collaborative skills; launching effective, sustainable collaborative learning communities; differentiating instruction; improving instructional coaching; or resolving conflict are a few examples. Over the weeks or months that I’m involved, the leader gains a heightened awareness of his or her leadership style, its impact on a diverse staff, and strategies for avoiding overuse of strengths and related blind spots.

The leader moves to a new position, or a new building, or perhaps launches a major new initiative. “I’m set for the time being, what with all I’ve learned about leadership,” he or she tells me. “I’ll start with getting a good read on my new colleagues and team, listening to their ideas and working on strategies. Then I might call you in again. Thanks.”

And? Often within a month, I get a call, “I need you now. This staff is so different. We need to understand one another better.” Or, “I focused on A, lost track of B, and I can feel resistance on the rise. Help!”

These are effective, intentional leaders. They quickly grasp the situational nature of school leadership and have internalized the following.

♦ Each learning community is unique, with different histories, personnel, resources, assets, and challenges.

♦ Staff chemistry, habits, beliefs, values, and fears vary widely.

♦ To truly lead for academic success and success for the whole child involves more roles and responsibilities than any one person can shoulder.

♦ The most important leadership roles and responsibilities vary from situation to situation.

♦ Prioritize everything, and nothing will get done.

Further, they have learned that leadership roles are often in tension with one another. For example, it isn’t easy to communicate high expectations and create an atmosphere where teachers feel safe sharing dilemmas and mistakes. Nor is it easy for schools to ensure they are meeting each student’s academic needs and physical, social, and emotional needs.

That’s what this book is about: providing tools so that you can lead from who you are and focus on the right priorities for the students, teachers, staff, parents, local businesses, and other stakeholders that comprise your specific learning community.

To accomplish this, you’ll use a process aligned with the conditions necessary for true leadership development. Through stories of leaders who have successfully navigated competing priorities and stopped the pendulum swings so rampant in education reform efforts, you’ll learn about balancing twelve pairs of core leadership responsibilities that are essential for leading whole-child schools. These are the Twelve Lenses of Leadership I introduced at the start of this book.

You’ll come to know each of these lenses well, but to start off, the key concept to understand is that these lenses represent ongoing interdependencies between two equally important sets of values. A simple example of one of these ongoing interdependencies is also a major theme of this book: focusing on academics while also focusing on the whole child. They’re interdependent, aren’t they? After all, we know that physical, social, and mental well-being affect academic performance—and academic performance can affect the physical, social, and mental well-being of students (Jensen, 2005; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). You’ll read more about how these lenses work in chapter 2 (page 23). Here, you’ll first tackle your own leadership mindset by gauging how your natural priorities align with these twelve lenses and how your skills with eight core competencies of emotional intelligence support or thwart your efforts.

Leadership lenses? Interdependencies? Mindsets? Priorities? Emotional intelligence? There are so many components because developing as a leader—not just mastering management skills but engaging everyone in effectively working toward a meaningful shared purpose—is very difficult. In fact, most leadership development programs have little or no impact on actual leadership practices. However, if you use this book’s process, you will become a more thoughtful, balanced leader who is capable of adjusting to an ever-changing educational landscape. You’ll be using all of these components to maximize your strengths while avoiding your blind spots. As theologian Richard Rohr (2013) puts it, “We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are” (p. 82).

Your journey begins in this chapter with exploring five elements crucial for effective leadership development along with learning a holistic leadership development process for establishing your focus on whole-teacher instruction and whole-child learning.

Five Essential Components for Effective Leadership Development

McKinsey & Company is a consulting firm heavily involved in understanding and implementing what works best in leadership and change initiatives. Its deep analysis of what it takes to develop leaders identifies four key components (Gurdjian, Halbeisen, & Lane, 2014). The fifth essential component that you’ll find in the following list is something I believe is a crucial addition to the mix.

1. The skills and dispositions you need depend on your context: What works in one learning community may not fit with the needs, values, or chemistry of another. You’ll be using the tools in this book to choose the right focus for your context.

2. Skill development happens not in isolation, but while working and reflecting on real responsibilities and issues: Case studies and retreats may have their place, but combining leadership development with important workplace projects and initiatives fosters real growth. As you will soon see, it’s ultimately about setting a specific goal to focus on, and that will derive from your real work. (See Choosing Your Development Focus, page 14.)

3. Leaders need to unearth and address mindsets: We all have unconscious beliefs, biases, assumptions, and other mindsets that keep us from changing, keep us from hearing other viewpoints, and keep us from being free to see new solutions. Perhaps you’ve heard of some of the sources of biases, those blind spots that influence our thinking and actions. Jonathan Haidt (2012) summarizes some of the most important ones that keep us from seeing other points of view and courses of action.

• Our moral judgments come before our rational decisions, without cautious processing. We then reason to justify what we’ve already concluded. Paradoxically, the more education we have, the better we are at building one-sided arguments.

• Our genetic makeups, cultural backgrounds, and life experiences influence our instant reactions to people, things, ideas, and more.

• We’re all guilty of outcome bias, a tendency to judge a decision by the outcome rather than by how the decision was made.

• We all have confirmation bias, a tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what we already think. Haidt (2012) summarizes research showing that it takes only one piece of evidence for us to say, “See? I’m right!” But it takes ten or more for us to consider changing our minds.

• Only through dialogue with people who think differently do we examine our beliefs and evidence that contradicts them—and through tools that point out when we can’t see the other side.

The tools in this book are designed to help us see what we don’t see. You’ll know you’re unearthing them if some of the exercises cause you to squirm as you realize, I was wrong…. I misinterpreted their motivations …. There is another way…. I need the wisdom of that person who kind of drives me crazy!

4. Leaders need to measure whether they’re developing: You’re investing time and effort in becoming a better leader—and the McKinsey research (Gurdjian et al., 2014) indicates that people don’t really take it seriously unless they’re gathering evidence as to whether that investment is paying off.

Perhaps you’re relying on the SMART acronym for setting effective goals—goals that are strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). Supposedly, such goals are motivating and lead to higher performance. Many schools use the SMART goal framework to set goals and action steps based on student assessment data. However, these criteria will not help you measure whether you are improving your skills with empathy, nor whether you are mobilizing your staff around a common purpose, or if you are successfully reframing the questions and contributions of teachers whose backgrounds and strengths are very different from yours. Each chapter in this book has examples of more immediate ways you can constantly check whether you are continuing to focus on the right priorities to reach your goals. If this sounds time-consuming, keep in mind that you’ll be following this process while focusing on your real work—both leadership development and your core responsibilities. However, from my experience in coaching leaders, this concern unearths one more component (number 5 in this list) that isn’t on the McKinsey list (Gurdjian et al., 2014).

5. Set aside time for reflection: We don’t actually learn by doing. We learn by taking action and then reflecting on whether the action had the impact we desired, by examining how others were affected, whether we might have done something differently, what we’ve learned for the next time, and so on. In the busy life of a school leader, it’s easy to overlook the necessity of reflection. Write it into your calendar like any other responsibility, or as if you were taking a class. If you can work with a leadership coach, do so; leaders in the business world have long recognized the worth of an objective, skilled outsider who can facilitate reflection. Or, find an accountability partner and schedule regular check-ins—someone with whom you could talk about your progress, frustrations, and next steps.

Before you dive into the journey of effectively leading for the whole child, let’s understand the leadership development process this book uses.

The Whole-Child Leadership Development Process

The leadership development process in this book is one you can use again and again, for different development goals (short-term and long-term) that let you gain the skills, wisdom, dispositions, and understandings you need to lead a school that truly meets the needs of the whole child. Be intentional about using it. Before you run into difficulties with new people or new responsibilities, use the process to identify the potential focuses you will need (the right goals), and then coach yourself to a plan for action. The six-step process works like this. (You will find more detailed supporting material for these steps in the sections that follow.)

1. Choose an appropriate development focus or goal as I describe in the next section (page 14).

2. Sort your leadership priorities using the list in Choosing Your Priorities (page 16).

3. Locate those priorities in Aligning Priorities and Lenses (page 18), and work with the reflection questions on page 20 that follow the figure. These are all designed to help you consider your mindset. Think of this as a way to discern where you may or may not be overusing your strengths or to perhaps discover where you are falling into the trap of one of your blind spots.

4. Use the steps in Aligning Priorities and Lenses (page 18) to narrow down your priorities to just three. Why? Because it’s hard to focus on more than three priorities at once. In fact, until the 19th century, the word priority had no plural (McKeown, 2014). Think about it. You could only have one.

5. Check out the chapters that relate to your top three priorities (chapters 4–15 each cover a specific lens). Which leadership lenses are involved? What other roles or tasks require you to successfully navigate those lenses? How might the suggestions at the end of this chapter help you better balance the demands of that lens?

6. Create a plan for action—a priority focus. Chapter 16 (page 209) provides the process for turning your priorities into a guide that includes answers to the questions Why is this important? and How will I know I’m making progress? This process gives you a real-time tool for development.

That’s it, a process you can use again and again to ensure you’re focused on the right priorities and actions for your current situation. In the next three sections, we’ll detail how you choose your development focus, how you choose your priorities, and how you can align those priorities with the Twelve Lenses of Leadership in this book.

ASK YOURSELF

What is a goal you already have for which you might use this process? Before reading further, take a moment to identify this goal, and then apply the criteria in the next section.

Choosing Your Development Focus

Each time, the development process begins with choosing a specific goal. Becoming a better leader is too general, but a wide variety of other goals works. You’ll find that different goals may call for completely different priorities, making this process very different from other systems for determining values that you may have used in the past.

Although it is by no means an exhaustive list, here are some ideas of how you might identify your initial focus.

♦ Lead a specific initiative or work toward a specific learning community goal: Your focus might flow straight from the strategic plan and could be as large as successfully launching a district- or schoolwide PLC or smaller in scope such as increasing expert use of student-centered discussions in your building.

♦ Improve a specific skill: For the time being, set aside technical skills such as using data to inform instruction. Think about the soft skills that are actually the hardest to develop (Cherniss, Extein, Goleman, & Weissberg, 2006). For example, you might read through the eight components of emotional intelligence described in chapter 3 (page 33) and choose one that will improve your ability to positively influence and motivate others.

♦ Focus on a new position: If you are about to step into a new role, your focus could be on what you perceive as your most important goal for the first four to six weeks on the job. Maybe you need to listen to understand the culture or maybe you need a deeper understanding of what will be expected of you. Maybe you need to establish a clear purpose and vision or need to review, revise, or implement a specific plan.

♦ Change your one key thing: Do you have a mentor, supervisor, or colleague whom you trust and who really understands school leadership? Ask this person, “What one thing should I work on getting better at so that I can be a more effective leader?” It’s amazing how often the answer people receive is surprising, a bit unnerving, and spot on. This may be the toughest starting place for a first foray into true leadership development, but the payoff can be huge.

Now, let’s check whether your natural priorities truly support achieving your purpose.

Use these margins to make notes of related goals you might set; and if you don’t like to write in books, attach a sticky note with your thoughts beside each one.

Choosing Your Priorities

Figure 1.1 lists forty priorities—priorities that leaders with very different strengths, mindsets, and styles view as naturally key to good leadership. None are bad or wrong; you are choosing between good and better priorities. In fact, some that seem unattractive to you for this goal may be key for a different goal. With your chosen focus in mind, select the top ten priorities that you think will be most important for reaching your goal. Another way to phrase it is, Is this priority crucial to my making progress on this goal?

Figure 1.1: The forty leadership priorities.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Here’s a tip for doing the sort: use small sticky note flags. Or, print a copy of figure 1.1 and cut apart the forty priorities so you can sort the strips of paper. Do not simply circle your top ten. Why? Because your brain reacts differently to setting aside a priority than to simply not circling one. Using the flags or paper strips expands your working memory to include the work surface in front of you—your brain holds on to the important focus of considering your goal while the surface allows you to move ideas around, group them in different ways, and reconsider discarded priorities.

Once you have your top ten priorities, let’s see how they align with the Twelve Lenses of Leadership as a first step toward examining any mindsets that could get in the way of your goal.

Aligning Priorities and Lenses

In figure 1.2, you’ll find the forty priorities distributed among the Twelve Lenses of Leadership. They’re in the same order as the list in figure 1.1. For example, the first priority, influencing, is under lens 1 and the last (fortieth) priority, fulfillment, is under lens 12 (the last lens). Notice how each lens lists two, core polarities (poles), a topic we explore in detail in chapter 2 (page 23).

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT

The priorities and lenses are designed based on the leadership strengths and priorities of leaders with different Jungian personality-type preferences, a framework popularized through the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, but you can use them without knowing your personality type. The appendix (page 217) contains a version of figure 1.2 (page 19) with the related type preferences. If you would like to use the framework with this book but do not know your type, contact me through www.janekise.com/contact-me for a decision-maker code to access TypeCoach (the system I use with educators), to verify your preferences and receive a six-page report on how your type operates in the world of education.

Figure 1.2: The Twelve Lenses of Leadership and related priorities.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Make a copy of figure 1.2 (page 19) and circle the top ten priorities you chose from figure 1.1 (pages 16–18). At this point, you have settled on your priorities, so it’s OK to circle them. Then, use the following five steps to take a slow, reflective look at whether your priorities reveal any mindsets or blind spots that might hinder achieving your overall purpose.

1. Read the definitions of the lenses that are connected with the priorities you chose. Do they seem to match the intent of your overall goal?

2. Read the definitions of the lenses under which you circled no priorities. Do the themes for these lenses seem connected to your goal? Remember, the lenses define ongoing interdependencies in leadership roles and responsibilities. Reflect on which of the twelve are most likely to be problematic, given your development focus and your situation.

• Do your priorities point to the most relevant lenses, or are you overlooking some key priorities? Identify the two or three most relevant lenses.

• If the priorities you selected for one of the lenses appear on both sides, that often means that you’re already aware of the ongoing interdependency the lens presents. Or, as one leader said, whose priority sort for an ongoing initiative revealed this pattern, “No wonder we haven’t made much progress!”

3. For your chosen lenses, are you naturally drawn more to one pole or the other as being of higher priority? The chapter for each lens begins with a chart that provides a little more information that might help you identify such biases. Remember, each lens is made up of two equally valuable sets of priorities, but it’s easy to over-focus on one side and create an unbalanced situation that will not bring long-term success.

4. The priorities on the left-hand side of each lens and those on the right-hand side of each lens correlate with the natural priorities of leaders with different sets of strengths. In other words, for each lens, some leaders more naturally choose priorities on the left and others choose those on the right. With this in mind, consider the following.

• Read the definitions of the priorities opposite the ones you chose. Do you find any distasteful or not very valuable? For example, one leader whose goal involved deepening community connections did not choose networking. When I asked about this, she said, “Networking is just selling snake oil.” Of course, it was a key priority to her goal, but her past experiences had created a blind spot around its importance. Ponder what you didn’t choose to flag any such hidden mindsets.

• Of the priorities you chose, are any so much a part of your leadership style that you will focus on them no matter what? If this is the case, consider substituting for something that is less automatic to your leadership style.

5. Think about which of the ten priorities are probably your top three. Eventually, these will form the structure for your development work.

Remember, this is a repeatable process. Your priorities will change with each goal—that’s what makes this different from a values clarification. This process is not about deciding what your values are. Here, you are thinking contextually about forty different focuses you might use as a leader, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Once you’ve narrowed from forty to ten to three, you’re ready to delve into the meat of this book. However, if you like to begin with the end in mind, turn to chapter 16 (page 209) for a preview of how you’ll turn those three priorities into a useful tool for personalized leadership development.

Reflection and Next Steps

Chapter 2 (page 23) provides a deeper explanation of polarity thinking, a method for working with the ongoing interdependencies in the Twelve Lenses of Leadership. Chapter 3 (page 33) will help you understand the importance of these varied, hard-to-measure, core leadership competencies (the lenses) and how the ongoing interdependencies between them often result in either their underuse or overuse, both of which impede effective leadership. You’ll learn how they fit with the Twelve Lenses of Leadership and identify which ones may require more focus from you. Then, you’ll have what you need to use chapters 4–15 as a reference guide for your personal development around your current focus. Although you can read these chapters in order, you can also begin with the three to four lenses that are most relevant to your goal. In each chapter, you’ll find the following.

♦ Information on the interdependencies inherent in the lens and examples of how they affect school leadership

♦ Stories showing leaders working with the lens—their experiences, struggles, successes, and wisdom

♦ Which emotional intelligence competencies support effective use of the lens

♦ Tips for developing your ability to employ both–and thinking with the lens that you can adopt or modify for your own development

Finally, chapter 16 guides you through forming a development plan and provides the reflection tools to ensure that you can continue to reflect to find what is working, adjust your focus, and truly continue the leadership development journey.