DaveShearon

Metro Nashville Public Schools Need Leadership, Not Implementation

Nashville is searching for a new schools superintendent.  By some measures, our last search was a success.  The candidate selected, Pedro Garcia, lasted almost seven years.  Of course, he also created a "climate of fear" and presided over six straight years when Nashville lost ground to the state average in helping students learn.  So, what have the leaders who will choose our next superintendent taken from this experience?

The meme from the Mayor's office and the business community seems to be,  "Let's get an implementor."  Here is one story that evidences this, but there are others.  A Nashville Today (not online) interview with former Mayor Bill Purcell quoted him to the effect that we needed someone who knows how to turn around an urban school system.

The meme out of the School Board seems to be, "a good communicator who listens, builds morale and maintains strong community relations."  All the thing's that Dr. Garcia wasn't.  That's fairly typical in these situations.  Our last search was to replace a superintendent who had been a career-long MNPS educator and who was not seen as strong on instructional issues -- his role had been facilities and helping settle the 4-decade desegregation suit.  So, of course, the meme was for an outsider with strong instructional credentials who would come in and whip the system into place.  I was on the Board when that search started and I pushed for us not to go looking for "an answer person."  No Board member or Chamber representative would publicly speak against that, but it was not the underlying tenor of leadership thinking.  We wanted a "change agent."

Memes make a difference.  They are the real drivers of decisions in situations like this, not formal statements of "what we are looking for."  Here we have interesting cross-currents between the "implementor" and the "people person" meme.  I hope that the "people person" meme wins out.  There's virtually no evidence nationally that any program, be it "small learning communities" or whatever the next fad will be, can reliably improve teaching and learning in urban systems if it is just "implemented" properly.  On the other hand, there's lots of evidence that good relationships between teachers and principals, teachers and teachers, teachers and students, and teachers and parents create engagement for students and gains in learning.  Chris Peterson of the University of Michigan and one of my professors in the MAPP program sums up the findings of positive psychology by saying, "Other people matter."

I was at an event this weekend where I got to visit with the parents of young adults who were in my older son's class in school.  Several of these, like Tyler, are now teaching.  One parent summed up the experience of his and a number of others he'd talked to over recent years as, "I love my kids, like my parents, can't stand the administration."  He talked about the number of young, idealistic, energetic students he had seen go into teaching in recent years, then leave in disillusionment due to the leadership, or lack thereof, in their schools.  Or, as another parent quoted his daughter's principal, "If you are looking for me to encourage you, you came to the wrong school."  Wow!

So, what should the School Board do?

• Hold to the "people person" idea, but don't hold your breath waiting to find her or him.  Much of the dynamic in the leadership track that produces candidates for urban systems tends to create "program people" with jaded views of teachers and even the possibility of change.  (One of the findings of a big survey done of our system by a group that conducts such studies around the country was that teachers and top administrators were equally pessimistic about the chances for improvement.)
• Change the system to support the people in it, specifically:
  • Support teacher-led instructional improvement.  The format does not have to be lesson study as I pushed it when I was on the Board, but it had better include letting teachers, working together in small groups, select areas for improvement efforts, research, design, implement, and evaluate those efforts, report the results, then turn around and do it again.  Call it "small learning communities" or "critical friends circles" or "action research", but make sure it has those characteristics.
  • Give back the teacher in-service days the last administration took away.  The idea that what we really needed was more time for teachers in front of students doing what they have always done was insane.  It was a reflection of the command and control, fear-based approach of the last administration.  The Board should not have agreed to it and you should take the lead now in creating time in the school year for teachers to work on deep, fundamental instructional improvement.  Don't wait for MNEA to demand it in negotiations.  Do it now, on your own, as a sign of your faith in teachers and a commitment to a new way of going forward together.
  • Create a system of regular surveys of culture and climate in MNPS generally and in individual schools.  This was a task the Board assigned the last administration.  They picked a vendor that delivered a useless product and then reneged on the balance of the agreement claiming lack of funds.  The Board let it happen.  Now, we find that instead of an $800,000 contract, we got a useful survey for $30,000.  Get a permanent, annual system in place to sample to feelings and beliefs of teachers, students, and parents.  I still recommend looking into this option, but don't take no for an answer this time.  Get a system that will produce data that will help you manage the leadership of this system.  There is no excuse for not fixing this glaring lack that allowed a culture of fear and low expectations to prevail under the last administration.

Selecting the next superintendent of schools is clearly the biggest challenge and most significant responsibility this Board will face.  Looking around the country, we see NO large, urban school systems that are doing well, so there's very little reason to think we are going to find a lot of quality candidates that can lead a people-first program.  But there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to think we will find a candidate who has a programmatic answer for teaching and learning.  Run from those who think they do.  Find your people person who believes in the strengths and character of our teachers, our students, our parents and our community.  Someone who will draw out and build on the best qualities and strongest aspects of who we are.  That is our only path forward.  Good luck!

PsyCap - An Integrative Approach and a New Tool

My book note on Psychological Capital by Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio is up over at Positive Psychology Daily News.

Looking good by being negative (and hurting your team)

Although positive psychology has gotten a lot of favorable press, there have also been a number of stories that, at the end, turn critical.  Richard Handler's "20 Weeks to Happiness" (http://tinyurl.com/yxf98v) is one example.  I've seen others, but can't put my cursor on them right now; perhaps you can.  I've often felt that that turn to negativity near the end of some pieces on positive psychology represented two things:  (1) a feeling that it's too hard to be positive and (2) an attempt to look smart by being negatively critical.  Monday's Wall Street Journal gave me some evidence for the latter point.  Jared Sandberg's "Cubicle Culture" column was entitled, "Some Managers Make It Easy on Themselves with a Ready 'No'".  After quoting several sources who talked about their experience with negative, nitpicking, no-saying managers (anyone remember Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativity?), there's this paragraph:

Naysayers tend to deflate motivation and bring productivity to a grinding halt -- just to salve their needy egos. "Negative evaluation is a tactic people use when they're intellectually insecure," says Teresa Amabile, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. More than 20 years ago, Prof. Amabile conducted a study in which she discovered that criticism sounds smarter than praise -- that people believe lashing critics are smarter than the approvers.  

When people evaluated edited excerpts from negative and positive book reviews, she found that negative reviewers also were seen as more expert and competent "even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness."

There's lots of evidence about how positivity boosts productivity.  Jane Dutton, David Cooperrider, Bob Quinn, and Amy Wirzesniewski come to mind.  But it's easier to be negative, and may make others view you as smarter to boot!

FISH!

Just finished FISH! by  Stephen C. Lunding, Harry Paul, and John Christensen (see sidebar).  One of my staff had read it and wanted our office to work with it.  Good book.  Written as a story and presented in a simple manner, but the principles fit with the findings of the Positive Organizational Studies folks at Michigan.  Those principles are:

*Choose your attitude.

*Play.

*Make their day.

*Be present.

Not bad.  Although it may sound simplistic, a conscious focus on positives, improvement, enjoyment, and high-quality connections with co-workers and customers can not only make work more enjoyable AND more productive, it can actually make folks healthier.  For a more scholarly and more in depth look at some of the same issues, see Energize Your Workplace: How to Create and Sustain High Quality Connections at Work by Jane Dutton

Building the Bridge as You Walk on It

I'm almost finished with Building the Bridge as You Walk on It by Robert Quinn.  The subtitle is "A Guide to Leading Change."  However, if you think you're not interested, think again.  Quinn's approach and thinking are so different that executives come up after his programs and say, "I only wish I'd learned this when my children were young!"  And, Dr. Quinn finds his insights to be applicable to parenting, also.  He shares, with their permission, an experience with both his son and his daughter in the book, and what they wrote about those experiences.  The experience with his daughter came as they dealt with a breakup with a boyfriend, and from it she found purpose in her life, increased peace, poise, and success at work and in relationships! 

Also, if you'd like to know why the superintendent of almost any major school system in this country is NOT a "change agent", read the story of the executive that attended one of Dr. Quinn's week-long workshops that is in Chapter Nine on "Authentic Engagement."  (The story of the Mom with a daughter who didn't like homework that opens that chapter is powerful, also!)

Caring for the Leader

Does that title strike you as strange?  I suspect it does.  But leadership is tough, and yet most of us give little thought to the care and feeding of leaders.  They have to do it themselves, and, what's more, they virtually never get even a suggestion that they need to do that, much less guidance in how.  A VC has a great post on this.  And I suspect it is appropriate to school principals.  I know it would be to superintendents.

But my advice to founders and CEOs who find that they have the weight of the company on their shoulders is to get some help.

And there are two sources of help I recommend.

The first is inside the company.  A CEO/founder must surround themselves with people who they like, trust, and can lower their guard with.  The best leaders have a "kitchen cabinet" of people they can be completely honest with and who they rely on for advice, counsel, and support. It is tricky to provide that back to the same people who are providing it to you, but you must try to make it happen.

The second is outside the company.  I encourage every CEO/founder I work with to find someone that they can meet with at least once a week to talk to about their hopes, dreams, challenges, anxieties, and fears.  I don't normally suggest a shrink, but a coach or a mentor who has no other agenda than to be your counsel and friend is critical.  Most of the successful leaders I know has someone like this, at least for part of their stint on the job.

The bottom line is being a founder/CEO is a really hard job.  It's even harder if you've never done it before. If you find yourself being slowed down by the weight of the company on your shoulders, find some people you can trust and be totally honest with to help you carry the load.

Think about it.  School principals really report to a "board".  No one person at the central office is their direct superior, responsible for building them up and helping them succeed.  Rather, you've got a ton of folks empowered to meddle in their day-to-day activities, but with virtually no accountability for results.

And what about supers?  They usually didn't set out to be CEO's and founders.  They just moved up.  And, along the way, the only time they were the "leader", they were principals -- and not supported.  Then they get to the top, and they think being the "big leader" is going to make it better.  And, instead, they find everybody dumping problems in their laps and an organization that, as noted, fails to support the critical leaders on which supers depend:  principals.  But, that's the way they were treated.  That's the way all school systems are structured.  How in the world are supers going to see the need to radically realign the roles of central office administrators vis-a-vis principals?  As one administrator here in Nashville was heard to say, "I came to the central office because I like to tell people what to do!"

Finally, I should point out that school boards have to be about the worst boards around to work for!  Generally, the members have little or no management experience.  Most have never been on any board with a similar public profile and responsibility.  The political nature attracts issue-oriented folks and bomb-throwers.  Typically they have no clue how to evaluate the system's performance overall, much less any way to judge whether it's headed in the right direction.  And, they want to "do something" -- that's why they ran for the post!  But, "doing something" from the board level is quite often a REALLY bad idea, and the super often knows this, even if he or she cannot articulate why in a way that will work with board members.  Great.  What a position.  And I campaigned for some of these jobs!  What was I thinking?

All Hail the Vocal Minority?

The January 2005 issue of Laptop magazine has a column by Joel Johnson with the above title, except for the question mark.  I added that. 

Mr. Johnson's point is that the very knowledgeable tech users push vendors to provide benefits and value that they would otherwise withhold to maximize profit.  His specific example is Verizon deliberately crippling the bluetooth capabilities of a new phone so users would have to pay them to do things like moving phtos taken with the phone's camera to a printer or laptop, rather than using the inherent capabilities of bluetooth to do that directly.  Amazingly, Verizon even admitted that was what was going on and that it was only a vocal minority who noticed or cared.  Here are some passages from the column:

And that’s fine, because customers have a way to respond in kind: by not purchasing these items if the overall experience is unsatisfactory.

If I can avoid being too preachy, though, I think it’s important to point out that being the sort of person who understands when a company is slighting its customers also has a certain responsibility—or at least opportunity—to be as vocal as possible.

Some companies will take their customers for granted, focusing on what “fits in their revenue model” over what is a fair value. Others, however, will listen to those of us out there on the blogs, review sites, Amazon, and even the Web sites of the companies themselves, making as much noise as possible about the short-shrifting we’ve received.

Now, compare that to the small group of knowledgeable, vocal parents or citizens in a school system.  What happens to them?  Well, first, many are afraid to say anything for fear retribution will be directed toward their children.  Are they wrong?  Maybe, but I'd never tell them not to worry and go ahead and speak up.  In fact, I didn't tell them that when they called me when I was on the school board.  I also didn't tell them they were right.  I just said I couldn't say their fears were clearly unfounded.

Second, neither those parents, nor any others have much in the way of choice in the public schools.  And, to the extent they do have choice in the public system (or choose to go private), their exercise of that choice is viewed by the system as evidence of flaws in the parents (!), not the schools they choose to leave.  Racism, elitism, "pushiness" -- something negative is attibuted to the parents by school system personnel (and, in Nashville, a number of school board members), thus relieving the schools of the necessity to change.

I'm not a big believer in either vouchers or charters because I don't think they are going to happen quickly enough to put enough pressure on school systems to make a difference in a time frame I'm comfortable with.  But, as systems continue to make stupid responses to the evidence of test data; as they try more and more to "make teachers do it right" -- with "right" being  the current administrator's particular favored pedagogy, curriculum, or discipline approach -- rather than stepping  back and realizing they need to lead in ways that maximize and enhance teachers' passion and engagement with their teaching, so long as these things keep happening, the pressure for more of the free market world in education will grow.  Not because everyone who favors that is out to "make money off the kids."  But because they want the schools to show some sign that they will respond reasonably, rationally, and responsibly to the messages they get from parents and students, as well as from test data.

So, if you're an educator, and you hate the idea of vouchers, start listening, really listening, and listening respectfully to your vocal minority.  They're on your side!

Can the plural of "anecdote" be "data"?

I've been known to say that, when we don't have believed, meaningful data, we argue by anecdote and analogy, and, since we all have at least one of each for our point of view, we get no where.  But maybe I've underestimated the power of anecdotes, at least if viewed as source material for understanding culture.  "How to Use Stories to Size Up a Situation" is a white paper by Shawn Callahan that describes the use of "anecdote circles" as a narrative technique in lieu of surveys and interviews -- techniques he finds lacking in the ability to find out what is really going on in an organization.  He writes,

We are continually surprised with what we discover.  In every case, we enter the 'discovery phase' without any particular hypothesis -- in an attempt to dispel our preconceived ideas of what is happening.  We then collect anecdotes around broad themes of interest.  Invariably, new insights appear.

The "anecdote circle" is ten or fewer peers in an organization.  Get them started telling stories with a question like, "When have you been most frustrated or elated..." and complete with the broad area of interest.  In a school system, it might be "...as a teacher in this system?".  Record the results.  Steer away from opinions and toward stories by saying something like, "That's your opinion.  Can you give an example?"  Repeat this with a number of groups, then analyze the results to understand what's really going on in an organization.

For all the "We need to do a better job communicating" one hears out of school boards and superintendents, this isn't what they mean.  They think they just need to do a better job of either a) telling the public and parents how good the schools really are (PR), or b) telling teachers how to teach (training).  The idea that the problem may be that they aren't doing a good enough job of listening never enters their minds.  Pity.  If it did, schools might start living up to their potential to be great places for kids and adults!

Structured Knowledge Application

Individuals and organizations face the challenge of bringing their best knowledge to bear on tasks and challenges.  I use Map Parts from MindManager X5 Pro as a tool in this regard.  For example, if I'm beginning work on a presentation, I click on the Presentations map part I created, and inserted in my map is a set of topics grouped at level 1 like this:

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These major categories organize the best suggestions I've come across for thinking about a presentation.  In it's full complexity, it could be overwhelming at first glance:

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And, as I gain new perspectives, I can add it in, as seen in the subcategory for persuasion shown below.  It contains information from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Notice the power of this tool to propagate an understanding or technique through an organization.   Or, even for an individual, to help best practices to bear consistently, even to tasks that arise sporadically.

Peter Drucker on Leadership

Rich Karlgaard has a rare recent interview with management savant Peter Drucker, interestingly done at the request of the pastor of the fastest growing church in the country, 15,000 memeber Saddleback Community Church in California.  These two points struck me the most, but read the article.  It's a keeper:

What Needs to Be Done

Successful leaders don't start out asking, "What do I want to do?" They ask, "What needs to be done?" Then they ask, "Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?" They don't tackle things they aren't good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, "Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself."

Creative Abandonment

A critical question for leaders is, "When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?" The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, "Don't tell me what you're doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing."

Or, as W.C. Fields said, "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.