Leadership for What?

I am troubled. I've been thinking a lot about leadership lately, but since that is what TLA is about, I suppose that's as it should be. But there is a deeper and more nagging question: Is leadership merely a set of skills, attitudes, and dispositions that practitioners can use for any purpose? Can we simply lump the Lincolns with the Hitlers, the Martin Luther King, Juniors with the Idi Amins and be done with it? I am certain that would be a mistake.

In the case of TLA, what kind of school leadership do we espouse and what do we teach? I would suggest that what we espouse and teach is first prosocial leadership, that is, leadership aimed at producing the kind of sought-for outcomes that most parents and community leaders would say are desirable. These outcomes include educated and engaged citizens, skilled and caring workers, and societal contributors.

Second, I think we teach leadership that is inclusive, that is, leadership that taps the power of participation by all stakeholders. Another way of saying the same thing is that we teach facilitative leadership--we strive to teach our adult learners to make it easy for their followers to contribute their best work, understanding that people support that which they create.

Third, I think we teach that leadership is how we effect positive change, change in communities, change in districts, change in schools, and most importantly, change in peoples' hearts. It is to this third point that I wish to expand. In my opinion, the hearts we need most to change are possessed by educators who unwittingly devalue and disrespect fragile and at-risk learners in our schools.

When I think of leadership for what, then, I think of leadership that helps teachers recover and reclaim the students who are missing in action, the students that are waiting for a reason beyond "because I told you so" to improve their life chances by authentically engaging in meaningful work in the classroom.

I am becoming increasingly persuaded that TLA needs to be more intentional in working to remedy what may be the most pernicious problem in public education--acheivement gaps between groups of students. Because K12 schooling has such a powerful effect on one's life trajectory, solving this problem will be the beginning to solving many other societal ills. So I am troubled because I am trying to figure out how we make TLA's focus on leadership one that eliminates achievement gaps. Who can help?

Is the Dream Over?

Before coming to Raleigh, I spent nearly ten years in Greensboro with SERVE, the federally-funded education R&D laboratory serving the southeastern states. After a decade of teaching high school band and eight years as a principal and assistant principal and earning my doctorate in Educational Leadership along the way, working at the Lab looked like a lot more fun than going to a district office. And so it was.

I began as a SERVE Senior Research Associate investigating reading programs across the southeast; after nine months, I was birthed into Director of the SERVE Leaders Institute, a two-year demonstration project building leadership for NC charter schools and innovative regular public schools; I ended my career as the first Director of the Program on Education Leadership where I had the opportunity to work across the United States on various teacher and principal leadership-development initiatives whose impacts remain. 

Early on in my stint at SERVE, something big happened, only I didn't know it at the time. I met Superintendent Joe Peel.  As part of my reading program research, I found Joe in an Elizabeth City, North Carolina elementary school where he was teaching teachers. That's right, the superintendent was teaching. 

Six years later, Joe asked me to consult with Wake Leadership Academy. What began as a once-a-month contract to work with Wake County principals and district leaders, four years later grew into an opportunity to build a regional academy serving five Triangle-area districts, a kind of co-op whose member districts were to partner to lift all boats in a rising tide of leadership for improved learning. What a great dream, I thought to myself. I want to be part of it.

To my astonishment the dream of business and educational leaders in the most educated, affluent and fastest growing area of North Carolina became real. Triangle Leadership Academy grew into something unique in the United States. Educators and corporate bigwigs from near and far visited us, wanted to learn from us. Most decided they couldn't emulate it. But for a five-county central North Carolina region, TLA became a low-cost, high-impact brand. But now it appears unaffordable.

Before surrendering to the reality of a temporary economic downturn, however, does it not behoove us to consider the cost of a dashed dream on the region and its educational leaders whose school children acheive more or less depending upon the very competencies we teach? Who among us has a creative idea? Is it TLA as it is or no TLA at all? What adaptations are possible? Is the dream over?

I Cannot Help It

I have spent the last several weeks thinking about the future. I guess that's appropriate for a blog called "Future-ready Leaders Now." Truth be told, however, I'm always thinking about it. I have a good excuse.

I took an assessment a couple of years ago, one that TLA then administered to everyone in its aspiring principals program. According to Gail Ostrisko, our consultant, The Highlands Ability Battery purported to measure, among other things, one's time horizon. It did this by showing the test-taker a picture of a rectangle drawn horizontally on the page and whose bottom line extended slightly beyond the vertical lines that bounded the rectangle's sides. Use your imagination.

In 30 seconds, the test-taker was to write down all the things the rectangle evoked. The more words like "butter, brick, breadloaf, and hat" recorded, the more the test-taker was said to be situated in the here and now. Writing words like "bridge, tunnel, window and door," on the other hand, indicated a futuristic stance. Gail told us that these abilities are innate, hard-wired, nothing to be done.

How did I come out? That's right, I'm the guy looking 10 years in the future. Always have, always will. I cannot help it. For the most part, I've been well-served by the ability. Even now in this difficult time, I can imagine TLA or some variant of it serving Triangle-area leaders just like we are right now.

Far from discouraged and like the author of the Serenity Prayer, I am coming to accept the things I cannot change (being broke), demonstrating courage to change the things I can change (the TLA business model), and the good sense to know the difference between the future I thought we'd enjoy and the one we will enjoy. Godspeed into the future!

The Stockdale Paradox

Have you ever heard the cosmos knock? Today I think I did. Bang! Bang! Bang! On the back end of a day in which I was reminded by no fewer than three colleagues of this thing, each speaking independently of the others, I answer the knock and write tonight on the Stockdale Paradox.  

Do you remember the Stockdale Paradox? It is best recounted in Jim Collins 2001 classic, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't. Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest ranking officer to ever book a room at the "Hanoi Hilton" prisoner-of-war camp during the Vietnam War.

Repeatedly tortured, starved, and compelled even to disfigure himself to escape enemy attempts to videotape him as a model for a "well-treated prisoner," Stockdale affirmed the hellish conditions he and his men found themselves in even as he strategized to transmit intelligence to the outside, institute rules for what his men may reveal at what point during their inevitable torture sessions, and create systems to communicate with his fellow prisoners. Years later, Collins interviewed the admiral for his book.

After an hour or so of conversation came this: "Who didn't make it?" asked Collins. "Easy," answered Stockdale, "the optimists. They said we'd be out by Christmas and when that didn't happen, they said we'd be out by Easter. And then that didn't happen. They died of a broken heart."

Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. That is the Stockdale Paradox. Now seems like a pretty good time to remind ourselves of it. But for readers of this blog, here's my real point: What are our strategies to make it out on the other side of this economic recession?