The One Thing

Today was the day. I submitted to Wake County Public Schools Human Resources my paperwork for retirement from the North Carolina Teachers and State Employees Retirement System. My effective termination date is Thursday, June 30, about 90 days from now.

The decision to retire was hastened, of course, by an economy which provided little financial incentive to stay. Joblessness, home foreclosures, and depressed consumer sales continue to strain public budgets such that next year for the third year in a row, North Carolina teachers and principals will have no raise.

On a personal level, another year in the system at my current salary amounts to a monthly benefit approximately equal to the cost of my cable bill. So economically, it is just a smart move.

But we have unfinished business, you and I. So let me be clear: I intend to work very hard in the next 90 days to effect whatever transition we need to make to ensure that a regional organization remains as a preferred provider for developing NC Triangle leaders. If it is possible for me to continue to be a part of the vision we created for ourselves in the summer of 2005, I too will remain.

There are, however, three abiding principles that, for me, are important. First, the regional approach to leadership development is the only one that makes sense. Forget economies of scale for the moment and concentrate on impact. It is a fact--school leadership improves when practitioners have the opportunity to learn with and from cross-district peers. It is a matter of convening and catalyzing.

The inaugural cohort of the North Carolina Principals and Assistant Principals Association new Distinguished Leadership in Practice is a case in point. Thirty-three principals from across the state graduated this afternoon from the 10-month program. Not only did I have the privilege of co-developing their course of study and teaching them, but I was there to applaud them. They have no intention of discontinuing their cross-district learning now.

Second, leadership needs to be developed at every level. Distinguished Leadership in Practice is about principal development. Principal development is necessary but insufficient. Unprecedented high performance from teachers, assistant principals, principals, central service staff, and even support staff is required to transform public schools into a system capable of educating workers and citizens of the global village that is the 21st century. We need to tap the power of participation by everyone.

In creating new citizens, as important as what is to be done, is how it is to be done. Leadership development is about the "how." Think about it: the most effective, research-based intervention in the world is no better than the process skills of the people implementing the intervention, including skills of dialogue, conflict resolution, decision-making, team-building, problem-solving and collaborating. 

Third, it would be helpful if leadership development could become integrated and aligned with district staff work. I know folk think they are doing it, but ask the customer and see if you are remain persuaded that what you think is happening is actually happening. No disrespect to my district-level colleagues, but what you need is an organization with a singular focus on leadership development and succession planning. You are already doing four or five jobs now.

To the last point, do you remember the Jack Palance character, Curly, from 1990s movie, City Slickers? I haven't seen the movie in a long time, so I expect I'll be taking some unintended poetic license here. But here's how I remember it.

Curly is sitting by the campfire with Billy Crystal's character who is in the throes of mid-life crisis. New Yorker Billy and two buddies have signed up for a week at a dude ranch and now find themselves on a cattle drive. Crystal's character carelessly lets some "doggies" stray and so, alone with Curly, goes in search of them. Against a starless night sky and howling coyotes, Crystal's character, in both fear and awe of old Curly and after a long silence, finally asks:

"Curly, what is the meaning of life?" Curly slowly holds up his right-hand index finger, gloved in worn black leather. "Your finger? That's the meaning of life," Billy jokes.

"It's the one thing," said Curly. "When you can answer for yourself what is the one thing that makes you get up in the morning, that makes all other things less by comparison, then the meaning of life will become clear."

I found my one thing six years ago. Maybe together we can keep my one thing working for you.

Eyes Wide Shut

Readers of this blog have already begun to send condolences. Arguably, condolences are premature. If you have not yet heard, the Superintendent's Budget presented to the Wake County Public School System Board of Education this Wednesday did not include Triangle Leadership Academy.

TLA's lack of inclusion in the budget was not unexpected. As you know, the financial downturn we continue to experience made service in other member districts this year possible only by drawing down on carry-forward funds accrued over the last five years. The drain was unplugged but the spigot was off. On the other hand, we cannot now pretend not to know what we know. So what do we know?

The record shows that we have not sat idly by waiting for Superman. Instead, we have worked on multiple fronts to envision future scenarios, including alternative revenue streams and organizational identities for TLA. We have drawn on the wisdom and experience of consultants, stakeholders and customers far and wide. You have likely been part of those conversations and for that, we are grateful.

Our journey from a well-funded, award-winning school leadership development consultancy to one fighting for its existence is worth noting. In the last six years, TLA and its consultants developed and delivered a portfolio of products and services that represents over 1200 hours of face-to-face learning. Its portfolio includes the complete VitalSmarts suite (the only organization in the Triangle to be so designated), Leading and Learning Through Teams, Leading Change, Creating High-Performance Learning Cultures, Using Data to Focus Improvement, and and many, many others.

Our courses say nothing about TLA's induction, mentoring, and coaching programs nor its partnerships with two regional universities in designing and delivering graduate programs in School Administration and Educational Leadership. The record shows that these home-grown leaders tend to stick around in far greater proportions than those not matriculating through our cohort programs at a time when more than half of school leaders are within five years of retirement. Demonstrating our efforts in succession planning, the other bookend of our scope of work, TLA has created and coordinated programs and experiences for leaders at every level, from classroom to boardroom.

Perhaps our most surprising accomplishment, however, was the adoption by the North Carolina State Board of Education of TLA's functional leadership development model to serve as the new standards for school executives. I recently asked a group of 40 of the state's best principals if they knew the source of the standards and the evaluation process they supported. No one had a clue. That's okay until it's not okay. Maybe now is a good time to remind folk of the work of the Academy.

Don't get me wrong. Change is good. Tough decisions must be made. Adaptation is the strategy of survival. But in coming blogs, I want to reflect on other TLA accomplishments, not because we are prideful people but because we know that what we have done has served many leaders well. We know this because of our evaluation of each and every event we have sponsored and frequent follow-on surveys and interviews. In fact, Wake Education Partnership has earned a Z. Smith Reynold's grant to explore more deeply how and to what extend TLA-trained leaders have impacted student learning and educator retention.

Part of what the Academy teaches is that effective leaders balance confidence with humility. We are unabashedly going to work on the former without forgetting the latter. We want to create a new and improved model and we thank you in advance for your ideas and even your objections. At the same time, it is important to understand the trade-offs we may be poised to make and to keep as much of the baby with the bathwater as we can. In other words, let's not pretend not to know what we know, eyes wide shut.

Check Your Ego

I experienced a minor perturbation this week. It started on Monday with a less-than-perfectly evaluated training event.  By Tuesday, I was so irrationally perturbed that I was ready to throw in my lot with the feckless teacher who says, "I would have done better if I'd just had smarter kids to teach."

Of course, when kids fail to perform at high levels, it is never the intelligence of the kids that is at fault. Rather it is the lack of the teacher having designed and delivered high-quality lessons that engage all students. It's the same for adult learning. But thinking that way is way too much to expect for a man caught up in a self-justifying delusion fueled by ego and pride.

As I have intimated, the source of the perturbation were data proving that I may not be the effective service provider that I strive to be 100 percent of the time. Imagine that. The heck of it was that it was little more than a year ago that I was consoling a colleague for her upset about exactly the same thing.

Here's the thing: when you've dined on straight As, Bs are hard to stomach. Just ask the mom of the eighth grader who aced math until the boy, barely in the stage of abstract reasoning, gets slammed by algebra. Principals, you know what I am talking about.

After years of getting 4s and mostly 5s on TLA's five-point evaluation scale administered immediately after training, we got a few 3s on a new course we are piloting for Wake County administrators. Called Using Data to Focus Improvement, the course was originally designed by SREB, an educational research and policy organization based in Atlanta. TLA delivers four or five of their high-quality products, usually to rave reviews.

This particular course is designed to help building administrators pose better questions to improve their schools as they lead teachers in identifying, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data in a cycle of continuous improvement. What happened to the rave reviews for this course?

First, let the record show that the middling evaluations were given not in response to questions about facilitator expertise. Rather they were about participants' perceived sense of confidence and competence in actualizing the learning in their schools.

Still, we are challenged to discover why we facilitators did not create in these high-quality professionals near-mastery in their ability to focus and lead school improvement. Was it the instructional design that was at fault? Was it the week-long space between the training days? Was it the sheer amount of information to which they were exposed? All of the above?

One thing is certain: to improve anything--this course included--leaders need to give up perfection for the illusion that it is. And as a mentor once said to me, "Steve, if you do not want to improve, don't ask for feedback. You just might get it." My way of paying it forward is to share this with you: When things do not go as well as you have planned, check your ego at the door. You'll learn a lot more when you aren't so full of yourself.

The Unknowing Hand

Readers of this blog know that I do not typically discuss late-breaking news. I've always felt that a little time to acquire some perspective before publicly commenting is a good thing. But that's just me.
Imagine a world in which politicians or celebrities followed that advice. We'd never have anything to read about. So in breaking with tradition, today's leadership lesson is ripped from the headlines.

I refer, of course, to a News & Observer front-page story yesterday reporting that US Department of Agriculture officials declare that free and reduced-cost school lunch data are confidential. The writer noted that this statement is on the heels of earlier comments by the US Secretary of Education urging the Wake County School Board of Education to consider unintended consequences of eliminating socioeconomic data in student assignment plans. Uh-oh.

What happens when one hand is unaware of what the other one is doing?  At best, speakers look foolish.  At worst, it drives public trust in elected and appointed leaders in the ground. In the middle lies all manner of mischief and mayhem thanks to trumpets blown uncertainly.

Folks, in my mind, it is just plain old bad leadership when citizens downstream are subjected to officials upstream who have apparently failed to compare notes, much less statements of public policy.  To say it happens all the time makes in no less tolerable.

To drive the point home, I invite you to think about, well, home. If you tell your children one thing and your wife or husband tells them another, what is the result? I am sure your little thought experiment is only theoretic. But here's what happened in my theoretical home as the kids were growing up.

Bang! That was the sound of my bedroom door being shut with me on the outside and my wife on the inside. Before that you could have heard this: "Your father told you what?!"

That was my wife's response to our teenage daughter telling her mother that Dad said it was okay to spend the night with the daughter of the parents who had left the girls alone until two o'clock in the morning last time our daughter spent the night at their home. Except I did not know it. Okay, I forgot. Theoretically. 

The point is that whether a citizen, child, or employee is at issue, they all deserve to hear a uniform message from those who are responsible for them. Such messaging depends, of course, on leaders working together.

Leadership is not a title. It is a practice. Part of the practice of effective leadership is constantly monitoring the environment, asking questions, collaborating, and learning from mistakes. I invite you to eliminate unknowing hands in your organization. It's not only bad leadership. It's bad business.