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!