Introit

The Most Important Skill

Q: What is the most important skill that you can have?

A: The ability to keep acquiring new skills.

Your Most Challenging Hire

What is/has been your most challenging hire? If you're a Head of School, was it your lieutenant? By that I mean, was it your administrative assistant? That position requires someone with a great deal of tact, an ability to handle volumes of confidential information, the perspicacity to share things with you at the right time -- even to pre-empt certain things by letting you know in the knick of time. Yes, detail-oriented, excellent communcator, and so on. What else?

If you're a division head or department chair, what has been your most challenging hire? Has it been someone whom you could groom (theoretically) to take over your position, should you either move on or something befall you? Was it intentionally hiring someone whose perspective diverges (perhaps greatly) from your own? Was it a moment of discomfort, of joy, or some odd combination of the two?

Please reply in the "comments" section of this post in order to share your most challenging hire. I will publish the comments, so that others can read. I'd love to hear what you have to say!

The Brain and Leadership

Briefings on Talent & Leadership carried an article on the biology of leadership, with a specific focus on the brain, in the Q4 issue last year. Given the discussions on brain-based education and research in independent schools, this article is valuable for its insights into organizational leadership and how we might be better aware of the role the brain plays, in a leader as well as in employees, managers, etc.

Author David Berreby proposes some "guideposts for leadership" that are helpful:

(1) "It's top-down and bottom-up." Bottom-up processes (i.e., sights, sounds, strong feelings) are important in how people within an organization behave, but so too are top-down processes (rational decision-making and conscious thoughts). "To reach people and motivate them, engage both their top-down thinking and their bottom-up intuitions.

(2) "Big challenges don't always need big solutions." One of the brain's biases is that big problems need big reponses. Not true, as Berreby says, "remember that everything you experience has multiple meanings, because the same object is treated differently in different parts of the brain." Instead of making that big change, you might consider "slight adjustments to detail that matter at other levels of meaning. These are easier and quicker. Often, they're all it takes." Berrby cites the example of "opt-in" versus "opt-out" programs. If you institute an opt-out regime, where people have to consciously choose to refuse something, they will do the action in question (most of the time). Why? Simple: people are averse to change, and paperwork (opting out) is yet another task that seems burdensome.

(3) "Awareness of the biology helps control the biology." The weather is cited as an example of an influence over an interview, etc; folks who interview on cloudy and rainy days tend to have poor interview experiences, as opposed to those who interview on sunny days. We need to plan for the possibility that our judgment may be clouded (no pun intended) on such days; we need to identify a way to correct the rain effect (or similar).

(4) "Make the story coherent on many levels." We know that all brain functions are inter-connected; they depend on one another; they do not work in isolation. Knowing that, "the best way to engage the multi-leveled brain is to tell a story [to others: employees, mid-level managers, etc.] that works at many levels. The more parts [...] you can speak to, the more effective the message."

Check out David Berreby's blog, Mind Matters.

Why Top Students Don't Want to Teach

An article from the December 2010 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. It's worth reading, not because it proposes something new that we don't know about, but rather because it underscores something we do know...and which continues to be relevant to our hiring efforts: affordability of being a teacher. In other words, top college graduates are eschewing teaching because they don't see it as a viable option for supporting a family. I might argue, though, that they haven't considered the merits of working for a boarding school (most notably the housing benefit); some day schools still offer housing as well. That (housing) tends to be a significant factor, when it comes to disposable income. Of course, when college grads see friends or acquaintances entering other fields and pulling down six figures, that makes it difficult to consider teaching as well. That's always been the case, but one wonders whether a potentially inflationary environment over the next few years will exacerbate that issue.

Chart Focus Newsletter  December 2010 Share Why top students don’t want to teach Efforts to help US schools become more effective generally focus on improving the skills of current teachers or keeping the best and ejecting the least effective ones. The issue of who should actually become teachers has received comparatively little attention. Yet the world’s top-performing systems—in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea—recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes. A McKinsey survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students confirms that a major effort would be needed to attract them to teaching. Among top-third students not planning to enter the profession, for example, only 33 percent believe that they would be able to support a family if they did. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that an ongoing achievement gap between US students and those in academically top-performing countries imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. To learn more, read “Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching” (September 2010).

 

Time to Competence

In your school, what is the "time to competence"? In other words, how much time does your department chair, division head, or head of school provide an employee to reach competence in his or her area?

With all the changes surrounding us right now, it could be argued that independent schools, being schools for which families (consumers) must pay tuition, need to assure themselves and their communities that they are the top of their game. To do so, school personnel must be at the top of their game; they must be at a level of competence that is agreed upon by those responsible for performance evaulations.

Of course, not everyone is "at competence." When that occurs, what steps does your school take to illuminate the pathway to competence for a particular individual? Additionally, how much time is the school willing to provide that person to attain competence? In an economic environment in which every business (schools included) is competing for a consumer's discretionary dollars, how long can your school afford to let someone attain competence?

Put another way, how can your school reduce time to competence?

This is a cultural issue more than it is a personnel issue. You can hire the best and brightest (if you're lucky), but you can also build a culture of competence that encourages personnel to attain competence in an informed and supportive manner. When "competence" changes as a result of emerging technologies and/or leading practices, does your culture have the flexibility to support and encourage "time to competence"?

Do you have the leaders in place to facilitate that shift? After all, schools can't manage their way to competence; they must lead the way.

Individual-Collective Relationship

What is the relationship between the individual and the collective in your school?

This relationship is paramount when it comes to hiring and retention, or, for that matter, a separation between employee and school. We sometimes call it "fit." It's a complex issue, if nothing else. I have listed three questions below, designed to spur conversation on this issue.

1. What do employees (faculty, staff, administration) and the school owe each other?

2. What is the ideal employee like? The ideal teacher? The ideal support professional? The ideal division head?

3.  What is the psychological contract? This contract goes beyond the simple paper contract; it is far deeper and carries more meaning. What do you do with a teacher who cannot maintain his/her end of the psychological contract? What does that mean for your school?

How about making this a topic for discussion at your next division-level meeting?

Strategy Execution

How would your school deal with the following four elements of strategy execution? Specifically, if you were to map out your strategy, how would you vertically order the following areas? How are they linked, and how would you prioritize them? (They are not in any recommended order here)

• Execution capabilities

• Core objectives

• Competitive objectives

• Customer outcomes

For those familiar with curriculum design, the UbD (Understanding by Design) method can be used here. Where would UbD have schools begin? With customer outcomes. In other words, what can the school provide customers that will 1) make them content with the product, 2) keep them coming back, and 3) encourage them to spread positive word of mouth regarding the school? Begin with the end in mind, and work backward from there.

Historically, independent schools have been uncomfortable with the notion of customer outcomes as a/the primary driver of the business model, as it seems to suggest that schools are placating families by providing them with what they want, when they want it, which would mean that school curricula would be manipulated constantly.

Customer outcomes can be balanced by a focus on competitive objectives and core objectives. The former signifies how each school differs from its competitors, and the latter is synonymous with what we normally term "mission." Although the core objectives tend to remain fixed (we are who we are), competitive objectives should be in flux; their change allows schools to direct the change(s) that customers might like to see, while remaining true to core objectives. Competitive objectives need to be in flux; they represent the levers and dials that schools use to translate core objectives into customer outcomes. As technology progresses, for example, it changes our competitive objectives, or at least, it should change them. These objectives consist of new initiatives, upgrades, and so forth. To provide one example, increasing the leverage of social networks can increase the intimacy between school and "customer" (parents), a win-win for both parties, but it doesn't mean ignoring or changing our core objectives, our mission.

Execution capabilities are also important: these are the capabilities of those who are in-house--faculty, staff, administration. Do these folks bring to the table everything that is needed to keep the message of core objectives (the mission) fresh and meaningful to the customer, by means of competitive objectives?

How does your school come up with competitive objectives? Is it a board "think tank," is it the head alone, or are faculty and staff members encouraged to identify such objectives? If it's only the board or head, there will be a palpable "distance" between the board/head and faculty/staff, with the latter feeling as if the former doesn't understand what things are like in the trenches. In this case, there's work to be done on strategic alignment within the school, and much of that is cultural work. And that's perhaps the hardest work there is.

Control Culture No Longer Works

Henry Ford was famous for his assembly-line model of automobile production. In short, he was able to keep costs down and enable the average person to buy a Ford because he controled the process by means of simplicity: you can have any color you want, as long as it's black. Standardization was the name of the game. Control the process of production and keep it simple. One model, standardized parts (i.e. they did not have to be custom-fitted, as had been the case previously), a predictable manufacturing process, etc.

The control culture that Ford epitomized is similar to the culture in a number of independent schools: our product is X, this is how we provide it, you can have anything you want here so long as it's what we provide.

The problem, however, is that the control culture no longer works for our schools. As technology has progressed--and has become more disruptive, independent school families have become accustomed to greater choice and greater flexibility, to the point where they're looking for those characteristics in our schools.

Families are working on a "collaborative culture" model (they want input, in some way), and a "control culture" model no longer serves their wants/needs. If your school operates in the control culture model, can you see how you might be seeing a drop in enrollment, perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate?

Control culture schools need to move toward becoming collaborative culture schools, although the trick will be for each school to determine just how collaborative it wants to be. Some will be more, some will be less. Schools will continue to remain diverse, just as before, but they will be diverse in different ways.

Time: Enemy of the Culture Lever

In my last post, I asked whether one should consider pulling the culture lever, if all other levers were no longer viable for a given school. The underlying assumption is that the school is in such a position that levers need to be pulled in order for the school 1) to continue operations and 2) to be successful in fulfilling its mission.

So, would you pull the culture lever?

The enemy of the culture lever is time. Research in organizational theory suggests that, to significantly alter organizational culture in order to re-establish viability, the time needed is somewhere around ten years. For example, if your school's culture is what's called a "competence culture," where competent (brilliant, most likely) faculty and administrators in functional silos dominate the landscape, but you recognize that your school could be more in tune with independent school parents and educational innovation by moving to a "collaboration culture," be aware that that kind of shift could take a Head's entire tenure to accomplish. Board support of that Head will never be more important, as well as the support and leadership of a select group of visionary administrative leaders within the school.

Look at Louis Gerstner, who turned around IBM...it took him almost 10 years. But now, IBM is no longer a hardware- or software-centric company...so much of their profit now comes from services (e.g., consulting). You don't move from producing computer hardware to providing consulting services overnight, or even in two or three years. That's a fundamental cultural shift from a "competence culture" to a "collaboration culture."

So, I ask again, would you pull the culture lever?

How much time does your school have, before its position in the marketplace is compromised? Can you afford 10 years, or do you need results sooner? How might you do that?

Inattentional Blindness

"Inattentional blindness" is a phrase that references what happens when, in our case, a school is so focused on item X that it is entirely unaware of item Y, the latter being some sort of fault or glaring omission.

I'm doing an online graduate certificate program in Advanced Project Management, what one instructor said should be termed more appropriately "Organizational Engineering." I have to agree with him; it's about culture and strategy as much as the execution of a portfolio of projects. Most folks taking the course are from the Fortune 500 world, although there are a few educators or executive directors of non-profits. The instructor used the phrase "inattentional blindness" to describe companies who are focused so intently on one aspect of operations that they miss--quite entirely--what might be the real culprit causing their under-performance, their drop in sales, etc.

Permit me to translate the phrase into a more school-friendly situation. Imagine a school that is losing students, where parent complaints are the norm (as opposed to parent praise), where the program hasn't kept pace with developments in education. In that same school, the board has a single focus: finances. If they can get the finances right, it stands to reason (to them) that the school will be successful once again. Finances, they would argue, are the key to the school's viability.

Yet, they ignore the obvious: the program.

Inattentional blindness!