The Night Before Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the Triangle
Not a teacher need check a participle that dangle.
All the grade books were left behind in their desks,
In hopes that winter break would give them some rest.

All the students were hanging out in the mall,
While texting their BFFs, ignoring Mom's call.
And Dad in his Hanes at home laying back
Had just settled down to watch the Wolf Pack.

When out on the street there arose such a clatter
Dad sprang from the sofa to see what was the matter.
Away from the flatscreen he flew like a flash,
Tripped over the xBox and opened a gash.

The lamp on the post by street down below,
Gave the luster of midday to the streakers below.
Yes, neighbors and kinfolk and friends all held dear,
Had cast off their clothes for reasons unclear.

Dad nursing his shin that now was bleeding,
Knew in a moment the naked were leading.
More rapid than cheetahs the nudists they ran,
And they sang and they cheered, "Next year will be grand!"

Now, Patrick! Now, Larry! Now, Erik! Now, Steve!
On, Neil! On, Tony! On, Jim! Just believe!
No crisis is wasted when minds it doth focus,
No magic is needed nor lame hocus pocus.

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the challenge the leaders they flew,
Sans clothing and guile they knew what to do.

And then, in twinkling, we heard on the news,
TLA was peerless and reckless to lose.
As we listened and marveled and hoped in our heart,
Partners with good will would cause a re-start.

Howard with VitalSmarts came to the fore,
Gail with the Highlands she opened a door.
David and Quality jumped at the chance
To keep TLA solvent and still in the dance.

Tom and Dawnelle kept trainees quite happy,
Principal coaches and networks were never more scrappy.
Donna, Dave, and Steve kept home fires burning,
They steadied the ship and kept business churning.

And then there was MJ and SLN facilitators,
Out in the swamp they slew alligators.
MJ in the water and facilitators on the bank,
They all worked together regardless of rank.

Their eyes how they twinkled! Their dimples, how merry!
Their cheeks were like roses, their noses like cherries!
Their droll sense of humor was never more great,
Than when their consultant fees were paid late.

But they served all the APs, the principals and directors,
The teachers, custodians, even parents and hectors.
A Culture of Yes, TLA required,
A cadre of leaders with purpose inspired.

They spoke lots of words, and went straight to their work,
To fill schools and districts with leaders, not jerks.
Then laying their fingers aside of their nose,
And giving a nod, up the pipeline leaders rose. 

TLA and its leaders to the region gave a whistle,
And away they all led like the down of a thistle.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they drove out of sight,
Prosperous New Year to all and to all a good night! 

The Evolution of a Program

My friend, Shirley Hord, Scholar Emeritus of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, and fellow traveler across states too numerous to mention, said something pretty important--the predictable end of a successful change or innovation is the Stage of Renewal. By "renewal," Shirley meant that the people implementing the change had internalized it so completely that they improved upon the original design. That is, the innovation was "renewed."

Why is innovation stage theory on my radar tonight? Here's why: Since 2007, Wake County Public School System has sponsored a two-year program originally designed to enhance the leadership practice of school administrators. It was to be called the "Aspiring Leaders Institute." To say the program has changed is an understatement. But let me start from the beginning.

WCPSS senior leaders, then as now, wanted to provide opportunities in a cohort setting for high-potential leaders to learn more. They also wanted to fill the pipeline with qualified candidates for the next leadership level, generally the principalship. Senior leaders and accomplished principals worked with Triangle Leadership Academy to build the curriculum, create and coordinate the application process, and convene presenters for half-day monthly meetings.

The application process was as rigorous as admittance to a graduate program. Accomplished principals and area superintendents convened in panels of 3 or 4 to conduct a structured interview of administrators who had submitted a written application, including a resume, statement of professional interest, list of leadership experiences, essays on questions important to the district and practice of school leadership, and for the first cohort, scores on a self-administered online leadership assessment. Just to be selected was an honor.

The idea original model involved spending the first year learning from central service professionals about how, for example, student population growth was managed, students assigned to schools and new schools constructed. Year two was about going deeper into a particular leadership content, for example, leading change. During the intervening summer, participants worked together in the Langford Quality Tools Seminar. A capstone project was the crafting of an educational philosophy statement.

Nearly four years and three cohorts later, the Institute has expanded its target population from primarily assistant principals to one-third central-service administrators. This is due, in part, because of our listening to district leaders and program participants as well as to our assessing the "fill rate" of school and central service leadership positions.

We have also re-designed the curriculum to include more work with outside consultants, for example, Gail Ostrishko and her facilitation of the Highlands Ability Battery about which I wrote several months ago. Most recently, we hosted Steve and Suzi Snyder of the Choiceful Group who introduced Institute members to the Change Grid process. The idea is to look at once more deeply into one's own strengths and at what external partners may bring to the table.

Soon after we return from holiday break, I will announce to WCPSS senior leaders and other educational stakeholders an event to be held sometime in late May or early June, an event created entirely by members of Aspiring Administrators Leadership Institute III around a problem of practice.

In a few hours, I will be joining TLA Consultant for Planning & Development, Jim Sweeney, at Wake Ed Partnership where we convene the Institute. He and I will be more "guides on the side" than "stand and deliverers" while 12 outstanding mid-level administrators learn from and with each other--just like in the real world. Stand by for more.

Chief Energy Officers

Are you your school, district, or company's Chief Energy Officer? According to a guest on "The Dylan Ratigan Show" broadcast earlier today, if you are truly leading your organization, you are.

When driving home this afternoon, I was pondering what has happened this week worth sharing. The possibilities were many: the meeting I had with Steve Parrot today wherein we talked about how better to align TLA with regional and statewide efforts; day one of Principal Coach Foundation Training conducted for 18 high-performing Wake County principals on Wednesday, session 8 of Creating High Performing Learning Cultures at Forest Pines Drive Elementary School in Wake Forest this afternoon; Principles of Dialogue for Lufkin Road Middle School in Apex on Monday--to name a few.

Flooded with thoughts about my week, I got home, went to the kitchen, and flipped on the TV to keep me company while snarfing a snack. The channel was on MSNBC, left there from my brief and predictable viewing of "Morning Joe" just before I left home for work.

Amid all the thoughts vying for my attention, Dylan's anonymous (to me) guest won out. Why? The answer is easy. When I heard the him talk about the way companies like SAS are led, where employees are treated not as liabilities but as assets, where managers' main job is not to supervise work but to inspire and energize people who happen to work there, I saw the connection for my entire week, maybe for the work of TLA generally.

Every single leader with whom we have had the privilege of spending time this week is that kind of leader. The accomplished principals who want to coach new principals are Chief Energy Officers; Freda Cole and Diane Daly-New at FPDES are Chief Energy Officers; Parry Graham at LRMS is a Chief Energy Officer; Steve Parrot at Wake Ed Partnership is a Chief Energy Officer. That is the reason these leaders and others all across the NC Triangle call on TLA--they care deeply about supporting the growth and development of their people.

Folks, there is much to celebrate and only a little to carp about here. When we support each other by investing our time and energy in the well-being of those around us, the universe gives it back to us. In my own small way, I am proud both to contribute to and be part of the leadership mosaic of our little corner of the world. I hope you are too.

The Empathic Response

No, you didn't miss a blog. I took time off for the family last week and I hope you did too. So to pick up where I left off two weeks ago, I wrote then about gratitude and how, when publicly demonstrated, has a way of evoking the same sentiment in others. Let's take it to the next level.

One good turn, it seems, not only deserves another, it causes it. There appears to be a kind of generalized empathetic response at play that very well may lie beyond our ability to control. We can't help it. It's the human condition.

In fact, research has shown that two people left alone together and monitored by scientists soon begin to breath at approximately the same rate, mirror each others posture, and eventually speak with similar tonality. Don't believe it? Have you ever heard married couples who finish each others' sentences? That's the empathetic response.

Even more fundamental, have you ever noticed on the social page of the newspaper photographs of couples celebrating their Gold and Silver Wedding Anniversary? Honest to gosh, sometimes I cannot tell the husband and wife apart. I fully expect someday to see Deb in the mirror and discover it is me (apologies to Deb).

As is my wont, I hope to leave you with a leadership lesson. Here's my best effort: I am a leader and I am thinking about everyone in my life that has influenced me for the good. At some unconscious level,  I believe that I sought to be like them, to say what they said, think what they thought, do what they did. I am not unique. I believe that all of us are an amalgam of all the experiences and influences that have ever come our way. We make the world and the world makes us.

When I was talking to my son, Chris, tonight about this Friday blog, he suggested the take-away lesson be, "Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas." Well, maybe that's part of it. But as I have recently been reminded, I am a kind of purist. I strive mightily to see the ideal, the good, and the hopeful in every circumstance. Even as I write these words, I regret whatever I have written that could have been perceived as whining. That is not who we are.

Yes, TLA is threatened by the economic cliff off which we are all falling. But in truth there are far bigger issues about which we may chose to worry--like families losing their homes, parents without incomes, and students without teachers. I am truly convinced that we will think ourselves out of this hole. But first we must stop digging. I am putting down my shovel today to advance a new vision:

For as long as the regional leadership academy has life, I want it to be the protector of the hapless man on whom the stack of boxes is about to fall, the woman who pushes the cup of coffee from the edge of the table, the guy who raps on the back of the SUV headed blindly into the parked motorcycle. I want TLA to influence all of us for the good. I want to evoke in others the empathetic response. Let's get moving.

The Contagion of Gratitude

I am pretty certain that more ink has been spilled in the name of spite and slander than ever has been devoted to gratitude and generosity. Looking toward the impending Thanksgiving holiday, please grant me a moment to challenge our baser experience in an homage to gratitude. Here are a two examples. 

Example one. An insurance company is currently running a television ad showing a woman re-center a stranger's cup of coffee poised at table's edge. A man who sees the the woman move the coffee cup helps a mother remove her child's stroller from a bus. A woman who sees the mother helped with the stroller pulls another man from a cascade of falling boxes. A driver who sees the man saved from falling boxes allows another man to pull safely into traffic. A witness to the assisted driver raps a warning on the backdoor of a truck whose driver is backing blindly into a parked motorcycle. And then it ends as it began--a circle of kindness and gratitude among strangers. Maybe you have seen it.

One might understand why a helped person would extend the courtesy of a thank you to the helper at the time of the courtesy.  That's just being polite. What is not explained by the spite and slander crowd, however, is why someone who only sees an individual assisted would extend himself to help a stranger somewhere down the road.

Example two. My mother has the energy of a tornado and the stamina of a draft horse. At 79-years young, she still works full time as a public school child nutrition professional. Mom has lived alone most of the 31 years since my father's death. She is now sheltering my brother recovering from a severe lung infection for which he was hospitalized for over three weeks. Everyone who knows my mother knows her to be loving and generous. It was not always so.

Raised by a taciturn father and a paranoid, emotionally-volatile mother, young Barbara ran away from home, married young, and started a family. Into her first-born son, she poured all the love she felt herself denied. Still and for many years, it was difficult for her to utter the words, "I love you, Son." The big chill was even more pronounced for my siblings born into more difficult years of the family.

Those of you who are grandparents may understand the next part of the story. When my son, Chris, was born, it was as if the floodgates of Barbara's heart were open, and all the I love yous that for a half a century she was afraid to utter flowed as freely as water over the dam of a swollen lake.

All this to say that Mom called me this morning to tell me she loved me and appreciated me. I was still on the phone with her when my son bounded down the steps toward the front door to leave for work.

"I love you, Chris," I said as he turned the doorknob. "I love you too, Dad." That exchange made me feel pretty grateful. I'm passing on this to you. Now it's your turn.

The Cost of Power

Lately I've been thinking about power. More to the point, I have been thinking about its use by leaders and the cost of their using it. For me this week has been a lesson in what happens when leaders sell themselves on the idea that they know best. This story hits close to home. In fact, it is about home.

I live in a neighborhood that is governed by a homeowners association. Mark Twain famously said, "When God decided to make fools, he first practiced by making boards of education." I do not believe it. He first practiced by making homeowner association boards.

Wherever I have lived that has been governed by a HOA, I have gotten myself elected to the board. In part, this has been a self-serving gesture, the result of which has been to protect me and my family from, well, fools. So it is right here, right now. I have proof.

There is an individual (let's call him Jack) who serves with me and three other people on a five-person board where we live in Midtown Raleigh. From his behavior, it would seem that Jack believes he has been elected to rule rather than serve.

Whatever the State of North Carolina has determined is within our jurisdiction, Jack argues that we unilaterally do it. A ten percent increase in homeowners fees, do it. A special assessment, do it. Borrow money, do it.

Jack reasons that by electing us, homeowners empowered the board to do that which is difficult and sometimes against any one homeowner's interest. According to Jack, we serve the greater common good by making decisions without input from homeowners.

Call me naive, but building a consensus, creating ownership, and developing community, although difficult, is exactly what elected officials should be about. Anything short of that is dictatorship, not leadership. The two are easily discriminated from each other. The former leaves in its wake anger and ignorance while the latter illuminates and instructs.

Can elected officials advance an agenda absent the instructive work of leadership? Of course they can. At the first opportunity, however, those whose interests were marginalized seek to right the scales of justice. So the pendulum swings from the dispossessed to the empowered and back again. The cost of power is awfully high.

What's Come Clearer?

Henry David Thoreau often inquired of friends whom he had not seen in awhile, "What's come clearer since last we met?" I think as educators and education supporters, we might do well to propagate the essayist's question. It seems to me that behind the question is an assumption that people are learning. Many things that have come clearer for me this week but I want to relate only one.

A cross-district training event at Wake Education Partnership this week reminded me that we human beings are predictably self-deceptive. As part of VitalSmart's Influencer training, students view a re-enactment of the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960s which, as you may recall, was a study of authority and obedience.

In the video, normally-intelligent adult subjects, playing the role of teacher, were trained by a social scientist at a prestigious university to administer increasingly-intense levels of electrical shock to adult students, depending on their recall accuracy for random word pairs. As experimental confederates, the unseen students in the next room were never actually shocked but led teachers to believe they were through audible howls of pain and an occasional, "I'm done. Let me out of here."

In ninety percent of experimental cases, teachers trained by the scientist continued to deliver shocks even after their students fell silent, ostensibly unconscious--or worse--from the shock. Even though walking away from the experiment was a teacher's option, it was an option rarely exercised.  This was true not only of the bad old 1960s original but also of the 21st century re-enactment.

But people's willingness to inflict pain in the name of science is not my point. Rather it is students' unfailing response to a straight-forward question strategically posed prior to viewing the re-enactment: "Do you believe that within twenty minutes, under fairly normal conditions with no illegal force, you could be induced to torture an innocent stranger to the point of death?" Even in the cloak of anonymity. what do you think was their answer? If you said most people say "no," you would be absolutely right--and dead wrong.

Of thirteen students in the class, only one admitted the possibility that he could be influenced to, oh say, lethally shock an unwilling fellow human being.  I see the disconnect in one of two ways. Either I tend to recruit to my classes the most moral people in the entire world or my students are perfectly ordinary people who believe, against scientifically-validated studies to the contrary, that they are extraordinary. Sorry. I gotta go with science.

I end this cautionary tale with good news: We are sentient beings who may, in fact, chose what to be influenced by. When your mom told you not to hang out with that rough crowd, she was right. You were a good kid but even good kids can delude themselves. The fact is that the graveyards and prisons are full of good kids influenced by bad things.

How much more true that is of us sophisticated adults, walking around free everyday, who can rationalize why we must do the things we do, even when Mom would tell us otherwise. Listen to your mom. Chose your influences. You are only human.

Moving Parts

Sometimes profound learning may be found in the simplest lesson. The context for the lesson I want to share with you now and shared with others earlier today is the School Turnaround Conference convened by the North Carolina Association of School Administrators at the Friday Institute on the NC State University Centennial Campus.

Beyond attending presentations by Dr. Carl Harris, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education; Pat Ashley,  Executive Director of District and School Transformation; and Dr. Bryan Hassel, Co-director of Public Impact, my role was to moderate a panel discussion with superintendents and principal practitioners. By the way, Dr. Treana Atkins-Bowling, Dr. Karla Lewis and The SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro staff is owed a debt of gratitude for sponsoring both Bryan's research presentation and the practitioner panel.

By way of setting the stage for the panel discussion,  I shared with the audience a lesson that I call "Moving Parts." The idea was to underscore the challenge that lay before all who would transform low-achieving schools into high-performance learning organizations. Here's the lesson:

Imagine yourself in a room full of people, tables, and chairs not unlike those you might find in, for example, a conference room. A facilitator asks for eight or nine volunteers to stand up and be part of an experiment. Desiring to advance social science research, the requested number of volunteer-subjects arise.

Once standing, the facilitator asks that each subject, without telegraphing intentions, identify two other subjects from the standing group with whom they will complete a human triangle. He also tells them that they cannot talk. Before stepping aside, the facilitator clarifies subjects' questions and ensures commitment to the vision. He then says, "Go."

What do you think will happen? Can the subjects create the intersecting, interdependent triangles to which they have committed? If they can do it, how long will it take them?

Since seeing the experiment demonstrated at a National Staff Development Council Conference breakout session, I include it in my own teaching. Here's what happens: As if choreographed by unseen hands, subjects move and shift their bodies in a silent dance. Tables and chairs become obstacles not to be defeated but to be worked around.

Peoples' eyes begin to meet and smiles cross their face as they realize they are in another person's intended triangle. Soon there is laughter. Huge adjustments in the beginning become smaller and smaller over time. Every now and then, however, a final half-step tweak stirs a roomful of re-shifting.

In my mind, the experiment is a metaphor for what happens when people engage in school turnaround, district transformation, or any other change initiative that requires commitment and collaboration. Psychologists teach us that humans are essentially self-directed, self-organizing beings who, once they comprehend and commit to the task before them, can accomplish amazing feats, including making triangles with their bodies in a conference room.

Leading school turnaround is more bumble bee than bullet, more dance than footrace. It is a matter of mutual adaption and working within real-life contexts and communities. Like the silent dancers in a conference room, in the end large-scale change occurs one person at a time.

By the way, the answers to the above questions are "yes they can" and "not as long as you might imagine." DO try this at home.

Oh the Places You'll Go

I hope I'm not infringing on copyright by appropriating for this essay's title the name of one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books. If my recent comments on The Why of Work and immediate thank-you from the Ulrichs are any indication, I can soon expect an instant message from a Geisel Foundation attorney. The places you'll go, she'll tell me, may include the slammer.  

But it's true. None of us ever really knows where we'll wind up. A conversation with my friend Paula Egelson yesterday vividly reminds me how valid the old saw is. We are all on a journey, especially leaders who follow their heart, and arguably leaders must follow their heart. It has been true for me and so it has been for Paula.

I met Paula in 1990 when we were both first-year students in the doctoral program at UNCG. Our first course in the Educational Leadership program was called "Problem-Finding Seminar." What a propitious name for a class! We're still finding problems, Paula and I. And as it turned out, one of the two professors teaching us, Dr. Roy Forbes, was later to become our SERVE boss. 

Our friendship continued beyond graduation. In fact, Paula was instrumental in my return to the lab in 1997 from a principal job with Asheboro City Schools. We eventually rose to the level of program directors, and although rarely together, we traveled the nation from one end to the other, trying to do some good, and always sharing with each other what we were learning.

With direction changing at the US Department of Education in 2005, and maybe a feeling that we had done at SERVE all the good we could do, we altered course. I came to the North Carolina Triangle to help in founding the regional leadership academy. Paula went to South Carolina College of Charleston where she directed a school-community partnership with the School of Education.

Paula called me yesterday as part of a new job she had taken with SREB, an internationally-renown education research and policy organization based in Atlanta. She wanted to pick my brain about the state of leaders and leadership preparation and development in North Carolina. We had a great conversation about that, and of course, about our friends now far and wide. Paula told me she never imagined living and working in Atlanta. I said the same about Raleigh.

I am happy for Paula. It's a new beginning for her. And I could tell from the sound of her voice, her heart is in it. She will do a lot of good. Whatever bloomed for the partnership at the College of Charleston in the summer of 2005 is five years later all but gone. I am as saddened by that as I am heartened to learn that my friend is well.

Wherever you, dear reader, wind up years from now, I will also declare my happiness for you. Someone once wrote that with a birth begins a death. It's the circle of life. And in between, oh, the places you'll go!

Doing Our Part

I know. You are just one person. Today, however, I want to suggest how each of us, wherever we are, can be the change agent that we need to be for public education. A confluence of two occurrences over the last few days serve as provocation for my thoughts today.

Occurrence One. Thursday morning I attended the Wake Education Partnership Annual Breakfast. My friends at the Partnership tell me that they spend most their time each year either preparing for or following up on the Breakfast. It is that important.

Thursday's event was especially remarkable because of the presentation by someone whose work I have long admired--Tony Wagner of Harvard University. Wagner began his remarks by asserting that the alliance of educators, business people, and elected officials, such as the present audience, uniquely has the capacity to address the approaching catastrophe posed by public education's position between a "rock and a hard place."

The rock, explained Wagner, is the need for new career, college, and citizenship competencies involving the application of knowledge across disciplines. Public education has a habit of neither teaching nor testing students in applying knowledge, much less doing it across disciplines. The hard place, he said, is the "net generation" whose occupants are "on" 24-7, driven by social connection and self-expression, and fearless in the face of authority.

Bottom line: If the United States is to regain a competitive standing among the world's nations, said Wagner, we must teach students to think beyond the fact-based system in which both they and their teachers are imprisoned. Wagner's ideas are advanced in his new book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It. 

Occurrence Two. Last week, I finished reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of Public Education: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Our Schools. As a graduate student and part-time SERVE employee in the early 1990s, I met Dr. Ravitch, then Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H. W. Bush administration. From her professional home at the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in Washington, Ravitch flew to our University of North Carolina at Greensboro education R&D laboratory to check up on us.

We did our best to curry favor with our federal boss by preparing a home-cooked barbeque dinner with all the fixings. We may as well have taken her to the campus cafeteria. At one point in the evening, Ravitch sniffed to our executive director as he attempted explain to her the high standards of professional transparency to which SERVE strove, "Roy, in Washington you get no points for honesty." It might be said of Ravitch that, neither then nor presumably now, is she one who suffers fools lightly.

Imagine my surprise then when I read a book review suggesting that quite simply Ravitch, now in her 70s, was blowing up everything she had stood for to that point. The reviewer was right. The old Ravitch: Vouchers--not a bad idea. Charter schools--bring 'em. Accountability--slack teachers need it. The new Ravitch: Market-based education is tantamount to market-based law enforcement--an untenable idea that will result in a nation of have and have-not schools where have-not students grow up to be economic albatrosses, moral implications of failing to "keep your brother" aside.

And testing? She could have been reading a page from Wagner's book. Perfectly well-intended people, she says, have created a fill-in-the-bubble testing system that demands nothing of what 21st century citizens and workers require.

And teacher merit pay? Don't get her started. Have we learned nothing from the recent mortgage melt-down debacle whose Wall Street architects were rewarded for bringing down the house? Systems built on extrinsic rewards, Ravitch reminds us, invariably get gamed.

Bottom line: I'm thinking that if a smart, sassy, self-assured old bird like Professor Ravitch can change her mind, then there is hope for the rest of us.

To conclude, what can you do? First, acquire and devour Wagner and Ravitch's books. Their concluding chapters are themselves recommendations for action. Two, listen critically to what elected officials say about public education. In a nation of 55 million school-aged children, the private sector will never be able to serve even half of them. The numbers just don't add up. Third, when experts talk about school reform, think re-invention. I agree with even the most ardent free-market critics of public education that the system is broken and needs rebuilding. It's just their solutions with which I disagree. Fourth, turn down the volume and listen to those whose opinions you do not share. Attending to them is not the same as agreeing with them. My last suggestion is easy. Let's act like the grownups we want our children to become.

And the Winner is . . .

I've just returned from one of my favorite events of the year. Every school district has them, but I can speak authoritatively on only one.

Since becoming an employee of Wake County Public School System five years ago and predating the creation of the regional leadership academy, I have had the privilege of attending the WCPSS Principal and Assistant Principal of the Year Celebration. In fact, I am honored to work on the Award Committee as an Assistant Principal of the Year Site-Visit Team Member.

Tonight's venue was, as it has been for the last several years, Kids Marbles Museum in downtown Raleigh. And a fitting place it was. Door prizes too numerous to mention, winner awards generous to a fault, and Cafe Luna hors d'oeuvres delicious beyond belief made the evening memorable.

What made it most special, of course, was the gathering of the tribe--building administrators who daily do the heavy lifting of seeing that children are being taught as well as humanly possible. I know from experience that the job is tough and sometimes thankless.

This Principal and Assistant Principal of the Year Celebration, however, was a not-so-subtle reminder that there is a huge network of support available and that, although sometimes not stated, the public's gratitude for their work is immense. Vice Chair of the WCPSS Board of Education, Debra Goldman, was very clear on that account.

And the thanks was reciprocated. As I listened to Assistant Superintendent Gainey's prepared remarks about the five principal and assistant principal finalists, I knew in an instant that these individuals had arrived at where they were because of a support network and a sense of gratitude.  

In fact, when Robert Grant, assistant principal winner, and Dana King, principal winner, addressed their peers, board of education members, county commissioners, central service staff, and retiring principals and assistant principals, each one stated that the award was being received on behalf of people in the audience, professionals with whom they work on a daily basis, professionals who have contributed to their leadership journey, and loved ones at home who support them.

I was humbled to hear two citations of TLA by the finalists and especially by Bob Grant's personal thank you to me and former TLA executive director, Joe Peel. And Dana, well, she and I go back nearly 10 years when as a SERVE consultant, I came once a month to Wake County to deliver a day-long session of Natural Forces, a year-long leadership-development program for practicing principals and assistant principals in which she was a student. Even then, she was a standout.

Wake County is proud of its building leaders as I am certain that you, where-ever you live, are proud of yours.  I am fond of reminding my NC State University Master of School Administration students, "principal" was at one time an adjective that modified the noun "teacher." That is, he or she was understood to be the school's main teacher. So here's to the teacher in all of us. And the winner is . . . you!

Get Curious

My friend and first executive director of Triangle Leadership Academy, Joe Peel, often speaks of the important role of curiosity. Besides leading to lots of learning, Joe explains, getting curious keeps the mind too busy to let unhealthy emotions, like anger or fear, incite behavior one may later regret. 

Joe's beliefs about curiosity are supported by the teaching in a TLA training program produced by VitalSmarts and vended in North Carolina by The Learning Consortium, co-founded by Howard and Lynda Schultz of Chapel Hill about whom I have written earlier. Here's the idea:

When faced with what seems rude, selfish, or just plain asinine behavior, students of Crucial Conversation are taught to stop and ask themselves a question: Why would a reasonable, rationale, decent person do what they did? In other words, don't get mad--get curious. It's a learner's stance. 

Beyond adopting a cooler mode of processing others' momentary behavior, I have found merit in using the "get curious" attitude in appreciating entire worldviews that differ from my own. For example, my brother John and I could not be more politically opposite. Assuming the best of my brother and taking a learner's stance, however, has made me understand how he has arrived at the conclusions he has. It's been a very long time since we've argued. But let's turn to something a little closer to this audience.

I look around at the state of public education, and perhaps like some of you, I worry a little bit. Judging from our diminished international ranking, some people have concluded that "the system" has failed our children. Some people say that what we have is no longer acceptable. Why do reasonable, rationale, decent people say such things? I cite two illustrations from my own experience this week and offer them as a way for me to model what I teach.

Illustration One. Thursday morning, Wake County principals and central service administrators hosted international education speaker, William Daggett, at the Webster Center in Cary. With every listener in the room, my Durham Public School guest, Tonya Williams, Eno River School principal, and I asked ourselves: Is it true what Dr. Daggett said, that in three years, without swift and dramatic change, the public school system as we know it will no longer exist? Get curious.

Illustration Two. Wednesday night, I accepted Howard and Lynda Schultz's invitation to attend a Heritage Foundation Education Panel Discussion at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. There I heard Heritage policy analyst, Lindsey Burke, characterize President Obama's embrace of public charter schools, viewed by many progressives as advancing a right-wing agenda, as itself left of center.  Say what!? Is a voucher system that potentially uses public dollars to support private schools the only acceptable option? Get real curious.

So by now, you see how you too may apply Joe's principle. In my opinion, the learner's stance is always appropriate, whatever the issue, whoever the actor. Here's what I know: We are all Americans and we all want our children to have a bright future in a thriving society where no one suffers discrimination because of the color of her skin or the language of her parents. If we can begin with that as our common educational purpose, I think we have a fighting chance at E Pluribus Unum and smarter kids.

Aspiring Leaders and Self-Knowledge

"The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates.  If it was true for the young men of ancient Athens, for aspiring 21st century public school and district leaders it is even more true. Today has been for me a reminder of just how important it is to know what you bring to the table, and of who you need to join you there because of what you do not bring.

Jim Sweeney, TLA Consultant for Planning & Development, and I were privileged to host a meeting of TLA's Aspiring Administrators Leadership Institute today. We are now matriculating the third cohort of assistant principals and central-service directors in the Wake County Public School System through the second year of the two-year curriculum.

As were their 40 predecessors, cohort three participants were selected for the Institute through a competitive application process. Beginning with cohort two, we have engaged participants in an extraordinary program called, "Shared Leadership through Self Knowledge." It has earned a prominent and permanent place in the curriculum, as far as I am concerned.

Designed and delivered by TLA contract consultant, Gail Ostrisko, the program objective is to help aspiring leaders understand and articulate their natural abilities, recognize and facilitate others' abilities and talents, and engage all abilities and skills through leadership in a team-based learning environment. Doesn't that pretty much sum up what we need in Triangle principals and central-service leaders?

Gail uses her credentials as a Licensed Highlands Affiliate to facilitate participants' self-administration of the three-and-a-half-hour online Highlands Ability Battery. She then uses her expertise as an executive coach and presenter to process Battery results, both one-on-one and in a day-long whole-group session. Essentially, the timed tests assess skills and abilities that psychologists concur are relatively fixed in human beings at about age fourteen. Through coaching and group facilitation, Gail makes sure everyone understands exactly what their results mean.

The big "so what" is obvious: When you work with your natural abilities, you're going with the flow; when you work against your talents, you're paddling upstream. Since the job of leaders and managers is to get stuff done through other people, failure or burnout is likely when leaders do not have people on their team who possess abilities that they themselves lack.

Research has shown that what folk think they are good at and what they are actually good at may be two different things. In other words, even well-intended leaders can be self-delusional. With Gail and Jim's help, TLA is replacing warm and fuzzy delusion with hard cold fact one leader at time. Socrates would be proud.

Abundant Organizations

Have you ever asked yourself, "Why do I go to work?" Studies show that you, me, and most everybody else goes to work for the same reason (and it's not money). The reason we do what we do is for meaning.

In The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win, Dave and Wendy Ulrich argue persuasively that through work, we seek "a sense of purpose, contribution, connection, value, and hope."

I am a frequent visitor of Triangle Organizational Developers Network events. At a recent meeting, husband and wife team, Dave and Wendy Ulrich, talked to about 40 professionals who primarily do for the corporate world what I do for public education. Dave is a highly-sought management expert. Wendy is an acclaimed psychologist.

The Ulrich's have talked to thousands of people, from frontline workers to C-suite executives. Combining fieldwork with an extensive review of the literature from multiple disciplines, they have synthesized in their 2010 book the "why" behind our most successful work experiences.

Using a model called "the abundant organization," the authors provide a seven-step process for creating workplace abundance, understanding your customer and employees' needs, personalizing work, and building a recession-proof business. As you might imagine, I'm excited to be about halfway through the book and look especially forward to learning the "secret"of the last chapter.

Secrets and silver bullets notwithstanding, I think public education has growing evidence that a school characterized by "organizational abundance" is a school where teachers, students, and parents want to belong. Five years of data from the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey show, for example, that the same schools where teachers experience voice and choice, collegiality, and a supportive principal, are those schools where teacher retention and student performance tend to be highest.

It is no accident, then, that the upcoming Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation evaluation study of Triangle Leadership Academy and its precedent, Wake Leadership Academy, will draw on Teacher Working Conditions Survey data to determine, in part, the impact of the Academy over an eight-year period.

Let's think in the coming week about how you and I can create abundant organizations where ever we may be, however large or small, rich or poor, public or private the setting. After all, the bottom line is more influenced by leadership than it is the balance sheet. In fact, get the former right and the latter follows.

Brutal Facts

Several months ago, I wrote about the Stockdale paradox. You'll recall that the phenomenon is named for Vietnam War era admiral, Jim Stockdale, who with many of his marines spent eight years in the Hanoi Hilton, courtesy of the Viet Cong. Stockdale and fellow survivors lived to tell their story because of clear-eyed realism combined with strategic vision.

How do leaders talk blue sky at the same time they face brutal facts? I suggest that this is exactly what leaders must do. To propagate optimism without clearly spelling out the difficulty of one's situation is a recipe for organizational failure. As it turns out, we have an exemplar of Stockdale-like leadership right in our own backyard.

Forest Pines Drive Elementary School leaders Freda Cole and Diane Daly-New, owing to their successfully receiving a Teacher Leadership Grant from Wake Education Partnership, contracted with TLA to assist in addressing a problem unconscionably common to many schools--closing the white-minority achievement gap.

We have consulted with this Wake Forest school staff about a half dozen times now, sometimes planning and sometimes delivering services, as was the case this morning. Understanding through research that an effective organization is a tide that lifts all ships, we have embarked on a four-day training program, Creating High-Performance Learning Cultures, first for a teacher-leader pilot group, and later for all staff.

TLA training consultant, Dawnelle Hyland, and I met this morning to teach session two. After I took care of a few housekeeping chores, I turned things over to Dawnelle to begin delivering content. She posed a perfectly appropriate question: What has been churning around for you since we last met? The floodgates opened.

"We've been in the new building for two years. When we were holding school in the temporary modulars, we shared a sense of community. We were family. Now I'm not so sure."

"We can't tell our African-Americans to 'just get over it.' Owning up to how they got to America in the first place has got to be part of the solution. History matters."

"We have so much on us that when I see a new teacher, I just want to say: It's not that I don't care to know you; I just don't have time to know you."

"We are doing everything we are told to do. Still, every straw that comes along, we try to grab it. It seems like all we do is focus on what is not working. Where is the appreciation for what we do well?"

"We see the data and, frankly, they are depressing."

If you read dysfunctionality and discord into these teachers' comments, you are missing the point. They are, in fact, among the most committed professionals I have ever met. Rather, what is to be noticed and applauded is that the school's formal leaders created a safe space without which these brutal facts and feelings could never have been confronted.

My hat is off to Freda and Diane. And my hat is off to the courageous teachers of Forest Pines Drive  Elementary School who desire to build a high-performance learning culture where every student's success is more a result of a community of caring, competent teachers than of where the child was born or the color of his skin. Naming the problem is the beginning of solving it. I'll keep you posted as that vision becomes reality.

Remembering

I have always loved words. I love exploring their origin, the nuances of their meaning, and the journey they took in getting to where we now find them. Because a major task of leadership is creating meaning, I would argue that leaders do well when they understand and use their words with precision.

Take, for example, the word "decide." Leaders do a lot of that, don't they? As our 43rd president famously said, "I am the decider." Does anyone understand when George W. Bush said that, he was claiming to kill off rivals. No, not people, competing ideas.

The word, "decide," as it turns out, has the same root as the words "homicide," "patricide," and "suicide." When leaders decide, they are figuratively "killing" other options. 

This afternoon, I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself, a bit down about the state of our national economy and the havoc it has wreaked on our state education budget, and from there, to every Triangle district's budget. Until TLA figures out how to make money beyond collecting member district fees, it's living on borrowed time. After a three million dollar investment in a regional leadership academy, it is looking more and more like it may be another casualty of the recession. That thought depressed me.

My pity party was crashed, however, by one of Wake County Schools' special assistants to the area superintendents. We were getting on the elevator at the same time and he asked about me. With what was probably a hint of weariness  in my voice, I said "I'm fine. And you?" I was not prepared for his answer.

"I am fantastic!" he beamed. "Since the first day students' returned from summer break, I have been visiting schools and classrooms. Kids are great. I love their enthusiasm. I love what I see their teachers doing to get them ready for the new year. It's all good."

I got off on my floor grateful for my brief exchange and feeling a little ashamed of my earlier mood. Larry's cheerfulness and the reason for it made me remember.

We all know what it means to remember, don't we? Generally, we understand the word to mean "return to memory." But it is more than that. When we re-member, we collect all the separated parts and pieces that reassembled make us whole.

When my colleague shared with me his joy at being among the children, he made me re-member that without their being, we educators have no reason for being. Arguably, without children the world itself is living on borrowed time. It's good to be alive. It's good to be challenged. It's good to serve. The next time I forget it, I will remember why I do what I do by visiting my nearest public school.

Creating a Mission Statement

A highlight of my week has been assisting the Person County Board of Education in re-creating its district mission, vision, values, and core beliefs statements. We actually began our task last month by talking about the big picture. We then bore down on mission.  Mission is synonymous with purpose. Why exactly does this public school district, or any district, exist and what does it want to accomplish?

That question led to more questions. Why did the board perceive a need to change what it already had? Whose interests would be served by new statements? What's different in or about the county since the last statements were written? What's new and different in the world comparing then to now? 

In my experience, the actual crafting of new mission and vision statements is the easy part. What's hard is the conversations that lead up to it. This board is exceptional. In fact, Person County board members unanimously admitted that neither their nor any county in North Carolina is confronted by the same challenges today as it was yesterday. That admission opened a floodgate of conversation.

They talked openly about moving from a manufacturing-based to a knowledge-based economy and of competition for jobs not from the next county but from the next continent. They talked about the need for developing in their graduates self-respect, adaptability, and critical thinking skills. They talked about valuing its teachers, administrators, and staff as if they too were customers.

At the same time, board members had to admit that large numbers in their parent community were unaware that business as usual was no longer good enough. Old tapes are hard to erase. But here's the dilemma: If parents are truly unaware of the kind of education required for success in a changing world, how do you give them what they need as opposed to what they want? 

I suspect that Person County is not alone that dilemma.The good news, however, is that the board not only created an elegant 13-word mission statement but, by avoiding the usual and useless verbiage of political correctness, it tells the community that the community itself is responsible for the mission of its schools. Brilliant.

Happy New Year

As a teacher, I greeted the opening of school each year with great anticipation. This week I am living my classroom days all over again as teachers across the Triangle welcome the near-quarter million children who return to traditional calendar school next week.

I envy those teachers. Facing new students each year, teachers get a kind of do-over, an opportunity to re-create themselves and what they do with a brand new set of pupils. Apologies to our fundamentalist Christian friends, it's like a chance to be born again. But here's the leadership lesson: If you are a school or business leader, you are mostly leading the same people this year you did last year. That you as an organizational leader manage a more or less stable workforce has at least three challenges. I am certain these problems have a research base, but for now I cite lessons-learned in the School of Hard Knocks.

First, your followers, especially and ironically the ones whose performance you'd like most to improve, have long memories. The gaff you made, the faux pas that embarrassed you, the words said in haste, grow like a blood-sucking Audrey II from The Little Shop of Horrors  in the minds of your followers. For better or worse, you begin to develop a history and a reputation.

Second, your less-than-perfect ways become predictable. Dare-I-ask questions become elephants-in-the-mind as your employees adjust downward the probability of a warm reception to that crazy idea whose ideological cousin you shot down at the last meeting. Over time, your habit of walking rapidly shows up as an unapproachable boss whose mind is on a distal task. The employee hesitates to interrupt what must surely be a mission whose importance exceeds her proximate and petty concern. Mole hills so become mountains.

Third, over time and among a stable workforce, you are liable to strike unwitting deals with your employees. Educators may remember Ted Sizer's 1980s-era text aptly titled, Horace's Compromise. A composite of many teachers whom Sizer, in his role as a professor and researcher at Harvard's College of Education had observed, Horace made an unspoken deal with difficult students: You want to put your head down and mentally check out of class? Fine, just don't disturb the students who want to learn. This "I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone" attitude becomes untenable when the "good students" begin to wonder how it is that Bobby Lee loafs and gets by while worker bees bust their chops and reap more or less the same reward. Morale ebbs when incompetence is ignored. Horace's deal was not with a student but with the devil.

There is, however, good news for organizational leaders! When you give the job your best and serve your employees for a few years, you begin to develop a family. Like a family, squabbles are expected. Challenges are par for the course. Hard words may occasionally be spoken. Differences will arise. But you will get over them because, as in the best families, you succeed together or not at all. Remember this the next time you feel the pressure: You a leader second and a human being first. Be willing to lead no harder than you are to follow because, as in a healthy family, everyone gets a say although not perhaps their way. Let's have a great new school year, TLA family!

Beyond Miracles

I was pretty sure I was seeing a ghost. There he was, my brother John, sitting upright in a chair giving the nurses a hard time about being hungry. God knows what happened last Friday night. And I mean that quite literally. Like Lazarus from the dead, the subject of last Friday's blog, the man poised between life and death, was by Saturday noon a man ready to run a foot race. What caused the change no one seems to know.  

What I do know is that I got an extraordinary response from the readers of this blog. In personal messages, many of you remembered my family in your prayers, remembered us in your thoughts, told me stories of the Johnnys in your own family, shared your recommitment to be your brothers' and sisters' keeper. I am moved. I am grateful.

Lately I have found myself realizing that the practice of leadership is not done in private. While it is true that at minimum we are leading our own lives, it is never a solo act. We are being helped by hands seen and unseen. We are also being watched, you and I, every waking hour. We are leading even when we do not intend it. Sometimes we are seen at our worst.

Yesterday, for example, I was shamed to realize that I had spoken harshly to Deb, my wife, releasing I suppose some of the stress I have felt during my brother's rollercoaster ride between this world and the next. This is no excuse. I love my wife and she deserves only honor. I judge my behavior to have been a failure of leadership. And I will likely fail again. Because I am human.

I told you last week that I had made peace whatever the outcome of Johnny's battle. That he is still here is to some a miracle. To me a miracle is a blade of grass growing or a child's smiling face. What happened to my brother is beyond miracles. If you participated (and by reading my words you did), I want to thank you. My family and I can now celebrate his life and learn from his example. John is a good man. John is a flawed man. John is you and me.

Our Brother's Keeper

For an executive director of a public education leadership-development organization, I am a private person. I tend to leave my work out of my family life and the opposite is also true. On only two occasions have I used this blog to write about family issues, the first time in honor of Mother's Day and the second time to recount my daughter's birthday celebration. Four days ago I knew once again I had to penetrate the work-family membrane in order to share a leadership lesson. Without apology, I promise that this blog will be as hard for you to read as it is for me to write.

It began last Thursday. My brother John, a lifelong bachelor, was spending the night with our mom at her Greensboro condo. He was there because upon visiting his Asheboro home, Mom determined that John's recently-broken foot and lack of appetite too infirmed for him to stay at his own house, a delapidated trailer situated in a park that my dad built 50 years ago. Tonight John lies poised between life and death.

What happened, you ask? I could write that John broke out in a fever and began to have difficulty breathing while a guest in Mom's house; that she called an ambulance that rushed him to Randolph Memorial Hospital; that he was bleeding internally; that his kidney's, lungs, and casted leg were terribly infected; that his heart, already burdened by one major attack, was failing; or that John's breathing could be sustained only by an oxygen mask that soon became a ventilator. I could write those things and, although true, they would be only part of the truth.

What happened was this: Johnny had an older brother that got all the good genes and good luck while he got the bad genes and bad luck. He was born prematurely, weighing little more than two and half pounds, and kept in an incubator away from his mother for nearly a month. Johnny's young father was less interested in his mother and him than he was in continuing to sow wild oats.

Johnny nearly drowned when he was toddler; fell victim to the manipulation of an emotionally-ill grandmother who methodically sowed in him seeds of self-doubt; struggled throughout public school with an undiagnosed learning disability; set off a pipe bomb on the playground of his junior high school as his brother was graduating from high school across the street; failed ninth grade and eventually dropped out of high school when he was 16; lost his driver's license by attempting to outrun the highway patrol and driving while impaired when he was 18; and lost his dad when he was 24. John's early adult life was punctuated by repeated skirmishes with the law.

Johnny worked in a variety of occupations. The one that fulfilled him most was owning and cooking in  several restaurants that he operated with Mom. In every case, however, lack of planning or misjudgment of employees led to business failure. He was unable to hold on to a job at the Department of Sanitation in Asheboro because he could not pass the state examination mathematics section. Johnny sabotaged all his relationships with the opposite sex and ultimately fell in with a bad crowd that led to a 10-year addiction to crack cocain. To feed his habit, he stole from his mother, stole from local merchants, dealt drugs, and was eventually arrested. He resisted the family's repeated attempts to intervene.

Johnny was, however, a funny and intelligent human being with whom people were ready to relate. Something about the man made everyone see in him a little bit of themselves or at least something of which they wished they dared to be. He would regale friends and family in long reinactments of JFK's inaugural address or MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. Johnny had a trick memory that caused him to remember not only the lyrics to every Elvis Presley song ever written but the things you said at a family dinner 20 years ago that you wish you hadn't. And Johnny didn't hesitate to remind you of your inconsistency. He loved animals and took in strays, possessed a heart so generous that he took toys destined for the K-Mart dumpster to give to needy children, took interest and pride in his nephew and niece and taught them every foolish limerick and country proverb known to mankind. Johnny was so bold that, at the age of 5, he demanded from a larcenous playmate the toy pistol of his older brother who was impotently analyzing how he might retrieve his property without a scene. Let the record show that Johnny loved and was loved.

Yet the family finds itself having to face increasingly brutal facts. Beyond social and spiritual corrosion, the other thing that was happening to Johnny all those years was the destruction of his body. Last night, my sister, an education professional like me, told me that when she researched the effects of crack cocain use over time, every symptom now killing our brother could be traced to the drug. Combined with heart and artery disease, Johnny's lungs may now have been so damaged that we could be forced either to keep him on artificial respiration or let him go.

I promised you a lesson. It is not just say "no" to drugs or that some people have been dealt a bad hand. Simply it is this: The world is full of Johnny Binghams. They attend our schools and they work in our businesses. We may share Sunday dinner with them. But if we love our students and our employees as our family, we will know our Johnnys and we will do everything within our power to help them. We may or may not succeed but we must try and when the trying is done, we will celebrate another chance at life or we will eulogize a loved one in death. Either way, we are our brother's keeper.

The Way We Do Business Around Here

One of the best definitions of organizational culture that I have ever heard is also the simplest--the way we do business around here. The subject of culture is on my mind owing to its being the focus of the second meeting of the accomplished principals participating in the new NC Distinguished Leadership in Practice program at the Raleigh Sheraton last week. I’d like to share a bit of what happened there to underscore how we can all improve both workplace relationships and the bottom line by benchmarking how local industry leaders do business around here.

A primary task last week was to go on “field trip” to some of the NC Triangle’s most successful businesses where, with the assistance of on-site senior managers, principals explored the cultural practices that have contributed to the well-being of those industry leaders. All principals visited SAS, named this year by Fortune magazine as “The Best Place to Work in the World.” Due to time constraints, however, principals experienced first-hand only one other company—either Marbles Kid’s Museum, BB&T, GlaxoSmithKline, WakeMed, RBC, or Progress Energy.

Guided by Patricia Willoughby, a member of the NC State Board of Education and Executive Director of NC Business Committee for Education, DLP leaders had requested in advance that business representatives make a brief presentation about their company, focusing on organizational mission, vision, values, and core beliefs; policies and practices; and the history of the organization. Guides were also instructed to take principals on a tour of the workplace where they could ask any question of any employee.

So what happened? For starters, principals began to notice how written mission, vision, and values statements actually live in a successful company. While the letters in BB&T, for example, actually stand for “Branch Bank & Trust,” employees say the acronym means “Best Bank in Town.” I was personally on the visit and every time I asked that question, I got the same answer—with a big smile.

Principals also learned that how managers treat employees is recapitulated in how employees treat customers. At SAS, they heard this: “The employee is not only our first customer but our greatest asset. When they drive out of the parking lot at night, we want them to look forward to coming back the next day. Our bottom line depends on it.” Principals also learned that M&Ms, a gymnasium, a childcare center, a banking facility, and other amenities too numerous to mention are available at no cost—a hard act to follow!

Finally, principals began to notice how architecture, symbols, and stories inform and influence the culture. WakeMed employees, for example, talked about “The Wake Way,” sharing narratives about specific patients admitted to the emergency room who were treated and released not only within a time exceeding industry standards, but that left patients and family secure in the knowledge that they had just experienced high-quality care at the hands of compassionate medical professionals.

I feel really good about what was taught and what was learned. Sometimes I think that organizational culture is like air—as long as it’s healthy we hardly notice it. When it becomes fouled with ugly stories, attitudes, and relationships, however, the stench of it is all you can smell. I am betting that our principals have a new understanding of the importance of using their nose before it is needed rather than afterward. How’s the air where you lead, I wonder?

Listening

I was an eager, fresh-faced young professional on the move. That's when I met three people, all school superintendents at the time, who indelibly redefined for me what it means to be a leader. And I met another leader-in-progress yesterday. Although my new professional friend with Harrington Bank is not an educator, she has the same essential quality that has subsequently propelled my then superintendent acquaintances to even greater positions of influence. That quality is the ability to listen. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The year was 1991. I was a field representative with SERVE, the new educational R&D laboratory for the southeastern states. In all honesty, my job was created to permit me to earn a salary while completing my required year-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Roy Forbes, the founding executive director for the lab and a UNCG professor, tasked me and two other doctoral students with making cold calls to superintendents across North Carolina. Our job was to tell them about products and services at the new lab of which at the time there were embarrasingly few.

My phone calls to gain an audience resulted in scheduled appointments with superintendents from Currituck County in the far northeast, down the coast to New Hanover County, taking a northwestern tack back to Guilford County, up to the state line through Rockingham County, and following the North Carolina-Virginia border back to the coast again. Of the scores of superintendents I met and subsequently worked with, three stand out--Mike Ward at Granville County, Tom Houlihan at Johnston County, and Gerry House at Chapel Hill-Carrboro City.

What distinguished these leaders from the others? Their capacity to connect with me as a human being and then just listen to me talk. There I was a graduate student and second-year assistant principal on leave from a small-town district, peddling little more than a smile and a promise. But when I sat down to talk with them about the lab, do you know what Mike, Tom, and Gerry wanted to hear? Who was Steve Bingham? What does he hope to accomplish at SERVE? What does he want to be for the world? What are his dreams? Imagine that. And now imagine the hard work I have put into myself all these years hence just wanting to live up to the great things Mike, Tom, and Gerry evoked from me the day I met them.

As many of you know, Mike went on to become state superintendent, Tom to lead the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Gerry to direct her own education foundation in New York. I am not sure what Morgan Grainger does at Harrington Bank. I do know that her company sponsors the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Teacher of the Year Program, that she read something about Triangle Leadership Academy serving CHCCS, and that she called me to learn more about TLA. And here is something else I know about Morgan--she has the same magic that Mike, Tom, and Gerry showed me lo those many years ago. At the risk of offense, she probably now knows as much about me and TLA as you do. Why? Because she asked good questions and just listened.

Long story short, Morgan is to talk to Harrington Bank senior leaders about the possibility of TLA-VitalSmarts trainings for their employees. You'll recall that, thanks to our friend, Howard Schultz who went to bat for us at corporate, we can invite and profit from business participation in Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, and Influencer trainings. That's a promise for much-needed revenue.

Whatever comes of my conversation with Morgan, however, I will count as a second benefit. The first benefit is her affirmation our work, you and me, together. I remain grateful for the opportunity to serve as your executive director and for the opportunity it affords me to connect with future-ready leaders like Morgan Grainger.

Pay for Performance: A Red Herring?

Last week, I wrote about how my wife and I spent two days of our summer vacation, this only to share some thoughts about Jim Sweeney and the remarkable leader that he is. While not hiking the High Sierras or chilling in the California wine country, however, I stole a little "me time" to read two books that had been sitting on my shelf for way longer than I care to admit. Relax. This is not a book report.

If, however, you have not yet perused Dan Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and Dan Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, you owe it yourself to do so. To make a connection to the world of TLA, I need to say just a word about both books. And I do have a point to make.

In Drive, Pink draws on 40 years of research on human motivation, exposing the mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Although carrots and sticks worked in the last century, he argues, that is exactly the wrong approach for today's knowledge workers. For folk in complex, creative jobs, employers should tap into the ingrained need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

This got me thinking about the Obama administration's educator pay-for-performance scheme. The fact that multiple large-scale merit-pay demonstrations have failed to increase student achievement notwithstanding, Pink's research suggests that such attempts are doomed to fail from a scientific, motivational perspective. I asked my wife, a middle-grade family and consumer science teacher, could she work any harder if she was paid more. She laughed at me.

And now Dan Ariely. Many of you may know that he is Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. In The Upside of Irrationality, Ariely marshals data from his own original and sometimes hilarious experiments to draw compelling conclusions about how and why we behave as we do. To stay with the pay-for-performance issue, Ariely's first chapter explains why neither CEOs nor professional basketball players perform any better with increased compensation. Among other things, his studies show that with increased pay comes increased performance anxiety. At best, the data demonstrate an inverted U shape suggesting that pay and performance are related--but benefits accrue only up to a point and then drop off.

What Pink and Ariely say to me is that there are no magic bullets when it comes either to improving leading or teaching in schools. We know that money matters and we have woefully little of it in public education right now. Until we learn more, however, about the connections between compensation, motivation, stress, and performance, I urge caution in creating high expectations around what may ultimately prove a red herring to school improvement.

Our Friend, Jim

By now most of you have met Dr. Jim Sweeney, a retired educational leader living in North Raleigh currently working as TLA Consultant for Planning & Development. Jim's role with TLA is, by his own description, a "jobette," a way to stay engaged in one's passion while remaining free, say, to spend the summer at your Sierra Nevada mountain cabin. So in this Friday's blog, allow me pull a few thoughts together, the sum of which I hope will inspire you to be like our friend, Jim, when you grow up.

If you missed last week's blog, it is because I did not write one. This was so, in part, because my wife, Deborah, and I were spending two of our eleven-day California vacation with Jim and his wife, Jan. Having retired from Sacremento City Schools as a superintendent and then later as a superintendent coach for the Stupski Foundation for Education, Jim moved to North Raleigh only a couple of years ago, once again demonstrating the talent magnet that is our little corner of the world.

By the way, Jim had enjoyed an earlier career as a professor at Valdosta State and Iowa State Universities, this on the heels of being a successful public school teacher, coach, and principal. What Jim is able to share with our clients is way beyond useful. I will save for another occasion exactly how he is helping TLA.

Several years prior to moving east, Jim and Jan bought a place in Graeagle, California, a beautiful high Sierra town about an hour northwest of Reno, Nevada. Although Jim is a septuagenarian, we "young folk" struggled to keep up with him on our daily hikes in this nearly mile-high land. At night, we ate and drank like kings and queens and slept like babies. Clearly, Jim and Jan share a philosophy that friendship, the beauty and bounty of nature, good food and wine, and spirited conversation matter and matter a lot.

As Jim and I typically hiked ahead of "the girls" each day, we had an opportunity to talk about books we were reading, people with whom we have worked, and the general state of education, leadership, and the world. For a man who has undoubtedly experienced his share of potholes and pitfalls, Jim has an amazingly sanguine view of the future. Whatever disappointments or regrets he may have, I never learned of them. With Jan, Jim seems determined to live life eyes straight ahead, as if everyday could be the last and so, a day to be celebrated, drank to the last drop.

So when I say that Jim is our friend, I mean that I am better for knowing him, more blessed because of his experience liberally shared with me and all those with whom he has worked at TLA. He is our friend because he is someone who patiently asks the right questions, listens deeply to your responses, and leaves you feeling as if what you said was the most important thing he heard all day. Jim is our teacher. In every way that have known Jim Sweeney, he has demonstrated, in this student's mind at least, the embodiment of a transformational leader. When I grow up, I want to be like just like Jim.

Launching Distinguished Leadership in Practice

One of the first rules of writing is to know your audience. I know you. What I don't know is how many of you read our other print medium designed  to keep you abreast of all things TLA. I refer, of course, to the monthly newsletter. If you are a regular reader of the newsletter, you will not be surprised by this week's blog.

I have just finished two days of face-to-face training with principals from across the state launching Distinguished Leadership in Practice at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Raleigh. As I previously wrote in our newsletter, DLP is a new model of principal development sponsored by the NC Department of Public Instruction and UNC Learn NC, and produced by NC Principals and Assistant Principals Association. Populated by 40 experienced principals endorsed by their superintendents to be in the first cohort of the yearlong program, DLP uses a blended-learning design incorporating traditional face-to-face sessions and online instruction using Learn NC's platform and technical assistants.

As for my role, I am honored to partner with education leader notables Kermit Buckner, Stephen Greene, Muriel Summers, Tom Williams, and Shirley Prince to develop and deliver the curriculum. Shirley, our team leader and NCPAPA executive director, is ably assisted, as are we all, by associate executive director, Emily Doyle. Adria Kempner of Learn NC is our expert and amazingly patient online curriculum development coordinator. Producers from UNC-TV will eventually help us by shooting footage of outstanding NC principals doing what they do as it applies to various components we develop. Working behind the scenes now for the better part of a year, we have created a committed, cohesive team ready to contribute to school improvement across the state. And we learn more everytime we meet.

One way we intend for school improvement to happen is by localizing and supporting principal learning in each of the eight education regions. Triangle districts are primarily in Region 2. Principals like Jason Johnson, Deshera Mack, Matt Wight, and Sylvia Wilkins, all participants in the first cohort, are poised to take on leadership responsibilities by convening other Region 2 principals to dive deeper into the leadership curriculum. As a matter of fact, the accomplished principals of the first cohort, having had only a little better than an even chance of getting into the program as it turned out, are helping co-design the curriculum by providing feedback on content and processes.

Here is where we are going: Building from the new NC Standards for School Executives, each of the six face-to-face sessions and five-six week intervening online course, focuses on one of more of the standards and on improving skills and competencies leading to designation as "Distinguished" on the new principal evaluation instrument. Some of you might know that Joe Peel and I, working in the heat of the summer of 2005, sythesized the extant research on school-leader effectiveness as a framework for our own regional leadership academy curriculum. Little could we have predicted that the NC State Board of Education would eventually adopt our framework as the standard for the entire state. I'm still pinching myself.

In any event, we are off to the races. You may be interested to know that all of what we are creating will be available for use by TLA schools and districts. It is an exciting opportunity to partner that only increases TLA capacity without increasing our costs. Now that's a win-win!

Action Learning Redux

I think they call it a "cliff-hanger." You know. What I did last week. By way of review, I wrote then my wish that you all could have been part of my 3-hour experience with a diverse group of professionals training to be "action learning coaches" who, under the tutelage of a master coach, attempted to re-define and solve my organizational "problem" while attaining from me a long-term commitment to action. What I failed to tell you was anything about the content of my coaching session. Let me resolve the tension.

It should surprise no one that my "problem" was how to sustain TLA in a perfect storm of financial crisis, leader churn, and community uproar. Following my 3-minute problem statement, a coach seeking a deeper cut at who we are and what we do asked me for my 30-second elevator speech. I finished with 8 seconds to spare. Here's what I told him:

"TLA is a unique leadership consultancy serving public school districts, created by a public-private joint venture agreement, and staffed by employees of the districts and supporting local education fund. Using member-district fees and in-kind contributions, its purpose is to build leadership capacity at every level, classroom to boardroom, central office to corner office. TLA's service region is comprised of the most affluent, best-educated workforce in North Carolina. It was created by the corporate leaders who have invested in the workforce and customer base in and around Research Triangle Park and the superintendents that serve the families of those employees and customers. Understanding the power of leadership, business shares skin in the game with education so that the entire region benefits from high-performing leaders and schools. To that end, TLA deploys over 1,200 hours of training, provides upon-request facilitation, designs coaching and mentoring programs for school administrators, and consults with district senior leaders to improve programs of leadership development and succession planning."

The next question was quite powerful: "How many of your stakeholders do you think could say what you just said?" I was asked. "I am not sure," I said. Could you have said what I just wrote?

When it came time for each coach to weigh in on what they perceived my "real problem" to be, their responses included: "building credibility of TLA among its stakeholders," "lack of a conduit for dollars," "lack of a written plan for professional development," "lack of predictable success," and "uncertainty of funding and influence." Although everybody initially had a different piece of the elephant, the consensus was close to the last observation: TLA has a funding problem linked to an appropriate influence strategy.

So what strategies for sustaining TLA did my coaches suggest? Their responses included: "change the infrastructure to get necessary dollars," "increase influence over the Executive Committee," " build partnerships with additional businesses," "tell the TLA story far and wide and be sure to ask for what you need," "translate what TLA success means for the business community," "ask TLA users to share stories about the power of its service," "galvanize teachers to address the need for TLA," and "investigate the legal structure of TLA to make it able to support itself." Good ideas all.

Since my coaching session, I have talked once with action-learning program sponsor, Chuck Appleby, who asked how things went for me during the session, what worked, what would have been even better. It was no problem for me to say. What I am still processing, however, is commitments to make, including what to ask of whom. I don't mind asking. I just want to be sure we all want the same thing.

The Power of Crowdsourcing

I had the most amazing experience yesterday. I wish you all could have been there. I'll wager that there is not one of you who would not benefit from a similar experience. Here's what happened: For three full hours I was provided the opportunity to present to nine coaches-in-training an organizational problem about which I was asked clarifying questions, provided a consensual take on the "real" problem, and offered solutions. It ended with my commitment to take action based on shared understandings. You are reading Commitment Number One right now. But let me start from the beginning.  

A couple of weeks ago, friend and TLA consultant MJ Hall, introduced me to Chuck Appleby out of Vienna, Virginia. Chuck trains organizational and leadership developers in a methodology called "action learning." He finds organizational leaders like me who agree to be "problem owners." Under Chuck's expert guidance and usually by telephone or Skype, action learning students convene to practice. For the "problem owner," it's not unlike going to the barber college for a haircut, I suppose. But believe me, I got a heckofa good-looking haircut and paid nothing for it.

Chuck likens action learning to a Quaker tradition. He told me that when someone in the Quaker community has a problem, he may request an audience with a "clearness committee" Once convened, an officiating clerk sets out the ground rules: The problem owner may speak for no more than three minutes after which the only permissible time to speak is in response to a question; committee members may pose clarifying questions; members are encouraged to pose questions of each other; members come to agreement on the problem and ask the owner to reflect; members reflect on how the owner might address his problem, continuing to check in with the him until an agreement to act is reached. One hallmark of a quality session, I was told, is the amount of time spent in silence. Oh, could we learn a thing or two about practicing silence!

In action learning, educators will recognize elements of Critical Friends Group protocols and the like. Part of what made my experience so valuable, however, is missing when teams of like-subject or same-school teachers conduct these protocols--diversity. Attending my problem were for-profit business owners, nonprofit organization leaders, independent consultants, and employees of the federal government, including individuals from the US Geological Survey and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Their diverse perspectives and lived experiences provided me with exactly what I needed. Living inside your own head is bad but talking to other people just like you can be worse. We've got to find better ways to get different voices, especially those we do not wish to hear, at our table.

About my experience yesterday, I am sure you want to learn the details of my shared problem, my coaches' proposed solutions, and my commitments to action. Alas, we have come the end of this Friday's blog. I'll take up next week where I have left off. But as Chris Matthews says, "let me finish" with this: The power of crowdsourcing that we are learning from Web 2.0 tools like Wikipedia is huge, it's real, and in keeping with this blog, it builds future-ready leaders now. When appropriate protocols are employed by people of good will and common purpose, there truly is wisdom in crowds. More to follow.

Principals On My Mind

I set a goal for myself earlier this year to visit each of our four facilitated School Leader Networks at least once. Two down, two to go. Truth be told, I'd love to go a lot more often but I am reluctant to insert myself into the private, professional space these colleagial networks have created for themselves.

What kinds of things are these school leaders doing when they meet, you ask. I can say with certainty that, although an evening meal at a decent restaurant is involved in these monthly meetings, there is a lot more talking than eating going on. The meal, I think, only serves as an excuse for being with each other. My conclusion was born out last year when our budget forced us to stop paying for their meals and principals had to pick up their own tab. Guess how many principals stopped coming? Zero.

No, what is happening is peer-to-peer learning, the most powerful professional development on earth. Our trained facilitators (and in no particular order), Muriel Summers, Jesse Dingle, Sherron Leplin, Terry Rogers, Lynn Williams, Wiladean Thomas, Denise Tillery, and David Ansbacher--themselves current or recent principals--lead conversation around shared problems of practice. I've never sat in on the deliberations of a team of medical or legal experts readying itself for action but I can imagine that what they might do is not unlike what our principals engage in. And in the four years TLA has sponsored them, they are getting better and better at it.

Here's what I've seen at meetings I've attended so far: Everyone at the table takes a turn checking in emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and of course physically; professional readings are discussed; current school issues are shared; how-to knowledge is swapped; poems are read; music is listened to. The hunger for affiliation among these people performing a job sometimes so difficult it could make angels cry is palpable.

To my everliving shame and after all this time, we are finally getting around to presenting these principals and their facilitators a certificate at their district-wide principals meeting this month. I've signed them, facilitators have signed them, and superintendents have signed them. Our acknowledgment seems so inadequate a reward for these dedicated professionals. Maybe that's why I've waited so long. If you see one of our facilitators, thank him or her and ask that they thank their network principals on behalf of us.

The Importance of Evaluation

I am feeling gratified. Our near yearlong efforts to acquire funding from Z. Smith Reynolds for an evaluation study of TLA has finally paid off. Julie Crain, Vice President of Programs at Wake Education Partnership and Board of Advisor member, received preliminary notification Tuesday that the two-year grant was in the bag. Many of you have sent congratulatory messages to me and for those I am grateful.

As with any complex effort, our proposal was created as a team. I got the ball rolling and was soon joined by then TLA Director of Learning, Fran Riddick; TLA Training Consultant, Dawnelle Hyland; outside evaluator, Sally Bond; and, of course, Julie Crain. ZSR staff also weighed in with some suggested revisions. Thanks to all who contributed.

So why is program evaluation important? Simply stated, we want to improve. This requires us knowing the extent to which TLA participants are impacted by what we do and, assuming that they are, how those impacts are effected. In other words, what's working, what's not, and why. A secondary reason is that potential funders want to be sure they are backing a winner. You should want to know it too. A third reason is that, if positive impacts are demonstrated, TLA may provide a model for how others can create a regional solution to building systemic leadership capacity in individual districts.

There is one thing that worries me a little bit. TLA is by design and desire a "with and through" organization; consequently much of what it does and how it does it is up to people in the districts it serves. That means that there is no singular leadership development solution to measure. What happens in reality is that people are exposed to a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It all adds up to something but the extent to which any one thing can be extricated from another thing is nearly impossible.

I am sure that there are those who may think that conducting a valid evaluation of TLA will be like trying to extract a drop of chocolate syrup from a glass of white milk. (Thank you, Michael Evans, for the metaphor.) They may be right but that is no excuse for our not trying. Of one thing I am certain. We will be a more focused, more effective, more collaborative organization for our having been studied by an outside evaluator. No doubt the evaluator will want to interview you at some future point. I hope you're reading the blog!

Leadership Begins at Home

As a testament to business and education leaders everywhere who more brightly shine at work than at home, I want to share a bit of my life over the past 72 hours. I am beginning to believe that, if we have become any good at all at leading our organizations, our practice, for better or worse, will have endured its greatest challenges at home. Case in point, a birthday party for my daughter last night.

Caitlin is our youngest child, now 23 years old. Caitlin graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last December with a major in voice. She aspires to a career in music production and marketing, and to that end, is interning for six weeks with the Eastern Music Festival in Guilford College, former summer home of classical luminaries Wynton Marsalis and Yo Yo Ma. Of course, we are proud of Caitlin, but raising her, as all daughters' parents know, was no picnic. But that's for another blog.

Caitlin's ultimate success in life will be due to the same qualities that she employed to influence my wife and I to host a birthday blowout for her and a few close friends on the heels of two other major celebrations for which we were responsible this week. If you know me well, you know that I am an introvert, neither shy nor reserved, just one who derives his energy from his private time. Only now on a Sunday afternoon, is my private time happening. Thank God for this blog.

Deborah, my wife and Caitlin's stepmom, had planned a gourmet meal for the event, most of which was to be grilled on our patio by your's truly at about 6:30 last night. Of course, our deck and picnic table had been decorated and adorned with loving detail for friends and relatives from far and wide, all of whom arrived within 15 minutes of each other. Does anyone know what happened in and around Raleigh last night around 6:30 pm, give or take half an hour? That's right. We enjoyed a great dinner inside.

Our enjoyment was preceeded, however, by 20 minutes of storm-and-mojito-fueled mania punctuated by incredilous shouts of, "I thought you charged the camera battery last night!" "The placemats are flying over the deck!" "For god's sake, get the seat cushions inside!" "Where's the directions for this thing?" and "I told you it was going to rain!" But the promise of the perfect birthday was not yet fulfilled.

Like most 20-somethings, my daughter and her friends enjoy downtown nightlife. In the weeks preceeding her birthday, Caitlin had somehow attained from us a commitment to transport her and her friends from our home in North Raleigh to the Moore Square area. I foolishly declined the intelligent option of renting a limo and proposed that Deb and I, using two sedans, taxi the entourage to and from Tir Na Nog, the popular Irish pub on Blount Street in downtown Raleigh.

When dinner ended around 9:00 pm, I arose from the table announcing,"We're ready to go if you are." Here is where I learned that socially-adept people do not arrive on the club scene until 11:00 pm. Dog-tired from the homeowners association early-morning garage sale and afternoon cookout, Deb and I departed for our bedroom to catch a nap. At 10:30 pm, my son and Caitlin's confederate, Chris, awoke the old folks to their duty.

One 40-minute trip to and from downtown Raleigh, one back-to-normal kitchen, three bags of party garbage and recycled adult beverage containers, one episode of Saturday Night Live, and a far-too-short nap later, a call from Chris came again, this time to fetch the Birthday Bunch from the club. Once home, the party continued until about 3:45 am, while Deb and I struggled to fall asleep upstairs. When Caitlin arose at the crack of noon today, she said for the tenth time in ten hours: "I love you guys. This was one of my best birthdays ever. I feel very grateful to have parents like you." I felt like a hero.

An act of leadership? You decide. Admitedly, there were moments of barely-masked anxiety amid frustrated plans for an outside dinner and definite feelings of bewilderment at young folks' inability to square a beer bottle with a coaster, but you know what? I would do it all again. The gift of a grateful family is without equal. And I will wager you this: If we love our employees and our customers as we love our families, we can be their heroes too.

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