Introit

Making the Case for Investing in a Learning Culture

Poignant piece in Chief Learning Officer magazine (online version) today. The topic is talent development + learning, and the excerpt is below (it's "business-y" in terms of feel, but the principles apply to schools). Of particular interest to me is the second paragraph. In order to be impactful vis-à-vis strategy, though, schools would benefit from a greater number of folks with broad experience rather than siloed experience. Otherwise, how does a school anticipate needs in the various areas? Professional development shouldn't be just about faculty, it should be about all adult learners in the community...and that would look fairly different from most models today.

One of the most important factors in building the workforce of the future is how organizations develop and train the skills needed in the workplace. This goes beyond formal training and learning; it extends to how to build a learning culture, learning on the job and using technology to deliver embedded learning experiences. In this context, the critical role of learning and development professionals in driving impactful learning strategies becomes clearer.

To increase impact, learning leaders need to understand future business strategy and skills needs. Learning leaders need to up their game in understanding and measuring the impact of learning on performance outcomes, so that they can make the strategic business case for investment in learning programs, tools and capabilities.

 

Outdated Thinking: The Resume

Does the chronological résumé hold the same value it once did? I am not convinced. Personally, I think that the traditional résumé serves to obfuscate useful information due to being held hostage by chronological linearity. In other words, potentially useful information is passed over easily because we are trained to look at a resume in a linear fashion. From a left-brained perspective, if you will.

So, as a resolution for the New Year, who is willing to craft a contemporary résumé whose sections highlight experience according to skill set(s) rather than chronology? There has to be an aesthetically pleasing way to incorporate some chronology (pure dates) into a skill-focused resume.

I propose that we float around a few prototypes and see which ones stick.

I just don't see how we can expect ourselves to hone skill sets in new or inventive ways, yet remain beholden to an instrument that is not structured to portray them adequately.

Please tell me I'm not the only one befuddled by the state of the resume.

I recall pundits saying that there would be a seven- to ten-year period when independent schools would see the retirement of Baby Boomer heads of school. That was probably five years ago. Then the financial crisis hit and the putative retirements did not occur. There were two principal reasons: 1) Boomers' portfolios took the hit head-on, forcing would-be retirees to rebuild their portfolios; and 2) boards needed those experienced heads to remain in place in order to help weather the storm.

Now, however, we are experiencing what might be termed a velocity of retirements, meaning that the bubble of about-to-retire heads, which had expanded significantly since 2008, is popping. Heads are retiring at a remarkable rate--just look at The Blue Sheet (or several other sources) to see the sheer number of head searches announced for July 2013, with many of them having been announced this past spring. Oh, and get ready for yet another round, when any sitting heads (not of retirement age) make lateral moves to some of the big-name schools; that will produce another bubble (albeit somewhat smaller).

As Boomers transition to retirement now, I'm wondering a few things (aloud):

1. By what percentage will the pool of HOS candidates shrink? Think about it: there will be remarkably fewer sitting heads to choose from, if you're heading a search committee.
2. How will the demographic composition of sitting heads change? For consideration is what percentage of heads will be Gen Xers and/or Millenials.
3. Have we (as schools, generally) been able to prepare the Xers and Millenials for headship? Mark Crotty's post yesterday (Aug. 1) on crisis leadership prompted me to return to this question, which I've been pondering for some time.
4. Will the about-to-become Heads engage in leadership development immediately, in terms of identifying internal leaders and helping them grow? I offer what I've heard anecdotally: many independent school faculty look at school leadership and think, "That's not for me. I don't want to deal with the hassle." To some extent, such observations have been the case for decades, but it does beg the question, "Is heading a school today fundamentally different from heading a school 20 years ago?"

I hope that readers will comment on these questions, as this is an important time for independent schools. With all the uncertainties that exist today, leadership transition is something that demands our attention.

John Rice, a person of color and founder of MLT, a company that helps high-potential folks from underrepresented groups develop into senior leaders, writes a great article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review (June 2012).

He notes that most companies have been working "for years" to add diversity to the leadership ranks. Of course, too often, companies (schools too, I would add) don't have more to show for their efforts.

Why not?

Rice believes that companies (schools) are tripping themselves up in four ways:

(1) You've distributed the responsibility for increasing diversity. "If no one person or group is responsible for building a diverse senior management pipeline, it's hard to develop an integrated, game-changing strategy." For example, recruitment teams and diversity departments should work together on this effort, not separately.

(2) You're managing activities, not outcomes. Instead of focusing on 'inputs' such as "the number of mentoring programs, event sponsorships, or résumés collected, [...] you should think about performance as strategically as you do in your core operating businesses: Be very clear about what success will look like in five years. Define metrics to track progress toward that vision."

(3) Your focus is on fixing the culture. "Culture change happens very slowly--and usually not at all until new faces have appeared in your company's leadership ranks and new perspectives have begun to reshape its strategies. Your first priority should be to improve performance and promotion rates in underrepresented groups. You'll find that culture change comes more readily from a critical mass of diverse executives than from a series of diversity and inclusion seminars or one high-profile minority hire."

(4) You prioritize minority candidates for diversity department roles. Rice points out that folks who manage diversity departments, especially if from underrepresented groups themselves (a ubiquitous practice), "may be risk-averse," when it comes to "solving" the issue of not enough employees from underrepresented groups. Why risk-averse? They "are usually struggling themselves with the issues their companies want them to solve," especially since their own strategies are highly visible. "A company that wants its diversity executives to advocate for bold new approaches should think about rotating high-performing line executives (whether minority or nonminority) into diversity roles. Having already established their reputations internally as revenue producers, they can navigate any setbacks that come from new approaches."

How does your school promote hiring and advancement of underrepresented groups within the teaching ranks as well as the administrative ranks?

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

A: The ability to keep acquiring new skills.

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!

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.

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).

 

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.

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?

The Transition Begins in Earnest

I recall pundits saying that there would be a seven- to ten-year period when independent schools would see the retirement of Baby Boomer heads of school. That was probably five years ago. Then the financial crisis hit and the putative retirements did not occur. There were two principal reasons: 1) Boomers' portfolios took the hit head-on, forcing would-be retirees to rebuild their portfolios; and 2) boards needed those experienced heads to remain in place in order to help weather the storm.

Now, however, we are experiencing what might be termed a velocity of retirements, meaning that the bubble of about-to-retire heads, which had expanded significantly since 2008, is popping. Heads are retiring at a remarkable rate--just look at The Blue Sheet (or several other sources) to see the sheer number of head searches announced for July 2013, with many of them having been announced this past spring. Oh, and get ready for yet another round, when any sitting heads (not of retirement age) make lateral moves to some of the big-name schools; that will produce another bubble (albeit somewhat smaller).

As Boomers transition to retirement now, I'm wondering a few things (aloud):

1. By what percentage will the pool of HOS candidates shrink? Think about it: there will be remarkably fewer sitting heads to choose from, if you're heading a search committee.
2. How will the demographic composition of sitting heads change? For consideration is what percentage of heads will be Gen Xers and/or Millenials.
3. Have we (as schools, generally) been able to prepare the Xers and Millenials for headship? Mark Crotty's post yesterday (Aug. 1) on crisis leadership prompted me to return to this question, which I've been pondering for some time.
4. Will the about-to-become Heads engage in leadership development immediately, in terms of identifying internal leaders and helping them grow? I offer what I've heard anecdotally: many independent school faculty look at school leadership and think, "That's not for me. I don't want to deal with the hassle." To some extent, such observations have been the case for decades, but it does beg the question, "Is heading a school today fundamentally different from heading a school 20 years ago?"

I hope that readers will comment on these questions, as this is an important time for independent schools. With all the uncertainties that exist today, leadership transition is something that demands our attention.

Strategies on Increasing Diversity

John Rice, a person of color and founder of MLT, a company that helps high-potential folks from underrepresented groups develop into senior leaders, writes a great article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review (June 2012).

He notes that most companies have been working "for years" to add diversity to the leadership ranks. Of course, too often, companies (schools too, I would add) don't have more to show for their efforts.

Why not?

Rice believes that companies (schools) are tripping themselves up in four ways:

(1) You've distributed the responsibility for increasing diversity. "If no one person or group is responsible for building a diverse senior management pipeline, it's hard to develop an integrated, game-changing strategy." For example, recruitment teams and diversity departments should work together on this effort, not separately.

(2) You're managing activities, not outcomes. Instead of focusing on 'inputs' such as "the number of mentoring programs, event sponsorships, or résumés collected, [...] you should think about performance as strategically as you do in your core operating businesses: Be very clear about what success will look like in five years. Define metrics to track progress toward that vision."

(3) Your focus is on fixing the culture. "Culture change happens very slowly--and usually not at all until new faces have appeared in your company's leadership ranks and new perspectives have begun to reshape its strategies. Your first priority should be to improve performance and promotion rates in underrepresented groups. You'll find that culture change comes more readily from a critical mass of diverse executives than from a series of diversity and inclusion seminars or one high-profile minority hire."

(4) You prioritize minority candidates for diversity department roles. Rice points out that folks who manage diversity departments, especially if from underrepresented groups themselves (a ubiquitous practice), "may be risk-averse," when it comes to "solving" the issue of not enough employees from underrepresented groups. Why risk-averse? They "are usually struggling themselves with the issues their companies want them to solve," especially since their own strategies are highly visible. "A company that wants its diversity executives to advocate for bold new approaches should think about rotating high-performing line executives (whether minority or nonminority) into diversity roles. Having already established their reputations internally as revenue producers, they can navigate any setbacks that come from new approaches."

How does your school promote hiring and advancement of underrepresented groups within the teaching ranks as well as the administrative ranks?

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?