Sorry folks. I just can't seem to leave the future alone. But I'll make you a deal. Stop at the period if you think public schools and their leaders are enjoying the "hap hap happiest" year ever, channeling Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Still reading? I predicted that.
As you know, our organization is up to its eyeballs in scenario planning. The Board of Advisors convened Wednesday this week and the Board of Governors and its Executive Committee convene Friday to take a cut at what things might look like over the next five years as NC Triangle school districts respond to certain drivers for change pertinent to leadership development and succession planning.
By tapping the informed opinion of current and past TLA board members, local public school and university professionals, and area business leaders, the Triangle Trends and School Leadership Survey was one means to identify drivers for change. The Survey assumed and sought predictions about seven trend areas important for effectively selecting, retaining and training school leaders.
Smart respondents told us that education funding from all sources will decrease or remain flat, collaborative partnerships with business and higher education will increase, market growth involving new school construction and business start-ups will remain flat, accountability for school leadership results will increase, district staff assigned to provide professional learning will decrease, planning for retiring school leader replacements will increase, and alternative means of delivering leadership development will increase.
We're still in process of identifying two or three key drivers from the seven and how they might inform how TLA, or the work of TLA, shows up in the future. As one of the Advisors observed on Wednesday, the act of looking into our crystal ball ends up telling us as much about who and where we are right now as it does about who and where we'll be five years from now. Another participant remarked that while money is important, not everything that may be improved requires it. Exactly.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Leadership and The Big Sort
Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog, Leadership For What. I argued that the reason that we can discriminate between Lincoln and Hitler lies in the prosocial imperative that is the mark of true leadership. Authentically leading people is about improving their quality of life, not diminishing it; uniting them, not dividing them.
Since Monday night when I had the honor of being recognized as one of many past Goodmon Award winners for regional impact at the Durham Performing Arts Center, I have been reading a book that Mr. Goodmon gave us, working with teachers at Forest Pines Elementary School in Wake County, and thinking about authentic leadership. I think there is a connection. I'll lay out in three points.
Point one: Supported by tons of research, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop argues that over the last 40 years Americans have increasingly self-segregated into enclaves. Like with like. Income and education are primary drivers. One outcome of the Big Sort is what social psychologists discovered a generation ago--when people live and listen only to people who think like they do, they become more extreme in their positions and more intolerant of everyone else's.
Point two: Principal Freda Cole and Instructional Coach Diane Daly-New are part of the Equity Coalition, a group of Wake County School educators committed to eliminating the white-minority student achievement gap. Wednesday afternoon, my team met with Freda, Diane, and their team to consider ways to help Forest Pines teachers improve learning outcomes for all student regardless of race or class.
Point three: Freda and Diane are authentic leaders. I would follow them anywhere. In the most educated region of this state, that Freda and Diane have now to address the very problem the U.S. Supreme Court sought to remedy 56 years ago in Brown vs. Topeka gives us little to celebrate beyond the fact that they are committed to doing it. When it comes to educating our children for a multicultural knowledge economy, we ignore the implications of The Big Sort at our peril.
Since Monday night when I had the honor of being recognized as one of many past Goodmon Award winners for regional impact at the Durham Performing Arts Center, I have been reading a book that Mr. Goodmon gave us, working with teachers at Forest Pines Elementary School in Wake County, and thinking about authentic leadership. I think there is a connection. I'll lay out in three points.
Point one: Supported by tons of research, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop argues that over the last 40 years Americans have increasingly self-segregated into enclaves. Like with like. Income and education are primary drivers. One outcome of the Big Sort is what social psychologists discovered a generation ago--when people live and listen only to people who think like they do, they become more extreme in their positions and more intolerant of everyone else's.
Point two: Principal Freda Cole and Instructional Coach Diane Daly-New are part of the Equity Coalition, a group of Wake County School educators committed to eliminating the white-minority student achievement gap. Wednesday afternoon, my team met with Freda, Diane, and their team to consider ways to help Forest Pines teachers improve learning outcomes for all student regardless of race or class.
Point three: Freda and Diane are authentic leaders. I would follow them anywhere. In the most educated region of this state, that Freda and Diane have now to address the very problem the U.S. Supreme Court sought to remedy 56 years ago in Brown vs. Topeka gives us little to celebrate beyond the fact that they are committed to doing it. When it comes to educating our children for a multicultural knowledge economy, we ignore the implications of The Big Sort at our peril.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Our Friend, Howard
I have written now about three and a half months-worth of Friday blogs. In terms both professional and personal, I have pondered the past, the future, TLA present work in the Triangle, what has bothered me, what has delighted me, and what has kept me going despite our economic and political challenges. Right now, I want to tell you what is making me feel pretty good. It is simply this: We have a friend. His name is Howard Schultz.
Howard is the co-founder of The Learning Consortium located in Chapel Hill. His wife. the other co- in co-founder, is Lynda. She is also a gourmet chef and a writer. Like any good couple, they are a team. I met Lynda's Howard not long after I came to the Triangle area to work with Joe Peel, then Director of Wake Leadership Academy. TLA was little more than a twinkle in Joe's eye, but owing to Joe's persuasiveness, I left a great job at SERVE, the education R&D laboratory for the Southeastern US, to work with him in launching a regional academy. I so respected Joe that any friend of his was a friend of mine.
I guess I am thinking about Howard because I have now spent the past two days in one training or another with him and will spend tomorrow with him also. Howard connects to TLA because he is the VitalSmarts vendor for North Carolina. Anyone who has experienced Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, or Influencer has Howard to thank for their changed life. But there is more to Howard than that.
At great professional risk, Howard negotiated with VitalSmarts to allow the seats in up to one half a class in any of their trainings to be purchased by business leaders and managers. The price each business person pays defrays the cost of a teacher or principal. Moreover, Howard stood with me for four hours last year at the Business Roundtable at RBC Center to explain to business people how TLA can enhance their leadership development and business results. For reasons too complex to articulate here, Howard is taking a financial hit in working with us, such is his commitment to public education.
I don't know what's really motivating Howard to be our friend. Who among us can ever really say why we ourselves do what we do, much less weigh in on other's motivations. I will offer only this: there is something decent, visionary, and expansive about our friend, Howard, that should make us all want to stand up and applaud. So, Howard, my friend, this blog's for you.
Howard is the co-founder of The Learning Consortium located in Chapel Hill. His wife. the other co- in co-founder, is Lynda. She is also a gourmet chef and a writer. Like any good couple, they are a team. I met Lynda's Howard not long after I came to the Triangle area to work with Joe Peel, then Director of Wake Leadership Academy. TLA was little more than a twinkle in Joe's eye, but owing to Joe's persuasiveness, I left a great job at SERVE, the education R&D laboratory for the Southeastern US, to work with him in launching a regional academy. I so respected Joe that any friend of his was a friend of mine.
I guess I am thinking about Howard because I have now spent the past two days in one training or another with him and will spend tomorrow with him also. Howard connects to TLA because he is the VitalSmarts vendor for North Carolina. Anyone who has experienced Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, or Influencer has Howard to thank for their changed life. But there is more to Howard than that.
At great professional risk, Howard negotiated with VitalSmarts to allow the seats in up to one half a class in any of their trainings to be purchased by business leaders and managers. The price each business person pays defrays the cost of a teacher or principal. Moreover, Howard stood with me for four hours last year at the Business Roundtable at RBC Center to explain to business people how TLA can enhance their leadership development and business results. For reasons too complex to articulate here, Howard is taking a financial hit in working with us, such is his commitment to public education.
I don't know what's really motivating Howard to be our friend. Who among us can ever really say why we ourselves do what we do, much less weigh in on other's motivations. I will offer only this: there is something decent, visionary, and expansive about our friend, Howard, that should make us all want to stand up and applaud. So, Howard, my friend, this blog's for you.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Quality Leadership = Quality Results
I was listening to a story on the radio last night. It was about the Toyota Production System. Despite recent problems surrounding Toyota quality, what happened to the people who built the cars at a former GM plant in Fremont, California during the 1980s bears retelling. There is undoubtedly a lesson here about how to lead for quality results in business and education.
In the radio story, the narrator and his interviewees, all former employees of the Fremont plant related how, in the days leading up to GM's abandoning the facility, people routinely came to work drunk or got that way shortly after arriving, sold drugs to and used them with fellow employees, deliberately and dangerously sabotaged production by putting wrong parts on cars, and secreted random objects inside door panels to cause mysterious noise for the unwitting buyer downstream. And this was happening on the days workers showed up at all. Records showed that the absentee rate was 20 percent on average. In fact, it was not unusual that on Mondays and after holidays that the line had to be shut down altogether so few were the hands to turn out product. In short, everything was happening at Fremont except quality work.
Then Toyota bought the plant. The narrator told how their new and altogether unwanted Japanese owners required that all employees come to Japan to learn their production system. They came in groups of 30 employees most of whom had never been outside the United States. What they learned from Toyota was totally game changing. They learned that the production line, heretofore as unrelenting as the tide, could be stopped by anyone at anytime for any reason that had to do with quality. They learned that working in teams, not as individuals, led both to better products and more committed workers. They learned that to speak up to management with ideas to improve work processes was not only valued but expected. They learned to have pride. Grown men cried, one auto builder said, when it was time to leave for the US, so profound had been the experience of learning to care and be cared for in the workplace. The rest is history.
What is the leadership lesson? Simple: empowered workers produce quality results. The same vandals, theives, and drug addicts who came to the Fremont plant disguised as auto workers turned out to be producers of some of the soundest, most reliable cars on the road once leadership understood the power of giving voice and choice to skilled labor. Very interesting, isn't it? Deadbeats become dedicated workers when the structures and systems within which they labor change. That is a function of leadership.
So I worry about federal education legislation that preaches removing principals and teachers from underperforming schools when, in fact, the fault may lie with the system. Let's agree to do some thinking over the next few weeks. Let's learn what we can do better with the people we have rather than giving them all the pinkslip only to expose new educators to the very conditions that led to the ouster of the last bunch. Let's think about how quality leadership equals quality results.
In the radio story, the narrator and his interviewees, all former employees of the Fremont plant related how, in the days leading up to GM's abandoning the facility, people routinely came to work drunk or got that way shortly after arriving, sold drugs to and used them with fellow employees, deliberately and dangerously sabotaged production by putting wrong parts on cars, and secreted random objects inside door panels to cause mysterious noise for the unwitting buyer downstream. And this was happening on the days workers showed up at all. Records showed that the absentee rate was 20 percent on average. In fact, it was not unusual that on Mondays and after holidays that the line had to be shut down altogether so few were the hands to turn out product. In short, everything was happening at Fremont except quality work.
Then Toyota bought the plant. The narrator told how their new and altogether unwanted Japanese owners required that all employees come to Japan to learn their production system. They came in groups of 30 employees most of whom had never been outside the United States. What they learned from Toyota was totally game changing. They learned that the production line, heretofore as unrelenting as the tide, could be stopped by anyone at anytime for any reason that had to do with quality. They learned that working in teams, not as individuals, led both to better products and more committed workers. They learned that to speak up to management with ideas to improve work processes was not only valued but expected. They learned to have pride. Grown men cried, one auto builder said, when it was time to leave for the US, so profound had been the experience of learning to care and be cared for in the workplace. The rest is history.
What is the leadership lesson? Simple: empowered workers produce quality results. The same vandals, theives, and drug addicts who came to the Fremont plant disguised as auto workers turned out to be producers of some of the soundest, most reliable cars on the road once leadership understood the power of giving voice and choice to skilled labor. Very interesting, isn't it? Deadbeats become dedicated workers when the structures and systems within which they labor change. That is a function of leadership.
So I worry about federal education legislation that preaches removing principals and teachers from underperforming schools when, in fact, the fault may lie with the system. Let's agree to do some thinking over the next few weeks. Let's learn what we can do better with the people we have rather than giving them all the pinkslip only to expose new educators to the very conditions that led to the ouster of the last bunch. Let's think about how quality leadership equals quality results.
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