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.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
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!
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!
Thursday, August 12, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
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.
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.
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