Learning, Leadership, and Legacy

We are nearing the end, my friends. No, not in the sense that The Reverend Camping's feckless prediction last Saturday meant. What we are nearing the end of is not the world but of Triangle Leadership Academy as we know it. But we are not sad.

Having successfully navigated the fifth stage of grief weeks ago, Donna Scanlon, my loyal and extraordinarily able program assistant, and I are actively engaged in transitioning both organizationally and personally. Beyond the tying of loose ends, the taking stock of assets, the reconciling of financial statements, and the predictable executive director recommendations, we are thinking about three things--learning, leadership, and legacy.

I am reminded of the first thing--learning--this week inasmuch as I have been assessing the last assignment of the last NC State University-Triangle Leadership Academy-sponsored Master of School Administration cohort. The current cohort is the eighth one to matriculate since 2002. Approximately 150 professionals, most of whom are still in Wake County and three-fourths of whom have been promoted to principal or assistant principal, have benefited from our attention. Yes, we believed in "growing our own." And it has worked.

As part of the cohort program, Joe Peel and I had the privilege of augmenting the standard course of study through a series of Leadership Seminars, typically convening every month on Monday evening. Among many topics, including Crucial Conversations and Facilitative Leadership. we explored Becoming An Authentic Leader, Designing Quality Lessons, Leading and Learning Through Teams, and since my tenure, a course I called Career Management 101.

One of the texts of the course is the national bestseller, The Hardball Handbook: How to Win at Life by noted political commentator, Chris Matthews. I typically ask students to choose two of the 25 chapters and respond to end-of-chapter questions that I wrote. The similarity of their choices is striking.

"How do you know when you are listening?" "What will you do when you learn that the person sitting next to you in class is interviewing for the same position as you?" and "How do you nurture your circle of professional friends?" are perennial favorites. The choices reveal a sense of immediacy, that landing that all-important first job will be not only a function of how well they have learned academic content, but of how well they have learned to navigate the white water of organizational politics.

The second thing I am reminded of tonight is leadership. We spend a lot of time at TLA teaching the difference between management--the efficient discharge of tasks known and settled--and leadership--the transactional, and sometimes transcendent, act of walking beside someone to a place they would otherwise never go alone. Management is about complexity. Leadership is about change.

But here is an insidious truth for principals: If you believe your superior knowledge of effective teaching will arouse, inspire, or instruct your staff to teach effectively in the face of challenge, you are doomed in your belief and sabotaged by your superiority. Attention must be paid not only to result, but to process and relationship as well.

In the end, leadership involves people, caring about them, wanting to be with them, hurting when they hurt, celebrating their accomplishments and life-cycle events, loving them enough to expect the best of them, and supporting them in achieving it. Leadership does not shout out in anger, wag its finger in the aftermath of failure, or shake its head in the face of best effort fallen short. Instead, it teaches.

Leadership asks questions, listens, and as a last resort suggests what the follower might do based on the leader's experience, experience which can never be an exact analog of the current circumstances. Hence leadership balances confidence with humility.

Leadership avoids obligatory language like" must, should, need to, and you had better, "language that robs initiative and personal responsibility. Instead it uses language that inquires and empowers. "I wonder how a different result could have been achieved?" "What question would be the best one to answer now?" "What can I do that will most likely ensure that you have everything you need to succeed?"

At TLA, we have tried very hard to teach this kind of leadership. It's never about a person or a position, but about a set of practices teachable and learnable by anyone at any level. So this leads me to legacy, the last thing that's on my mind tonight.

What would we like to be remembered for? On a personal level, all the MSA cohort members who matriculated through our Monday night leadership seminars and our participants in our Aspiring Administrators Leadership Institute have already reminded me in a book of notes from every one of them that TLA changed their lives. It is on my to-do list to write a personal thank-you note to each person. Believe me, they are leaving as much a legacy in my life as me and TLA staff and consultants are leaving in theirs.

Gandhi famously said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." If there is something of the Leadership Academy that we have known for the last six years, and really for Wake County, for the last 12 years, it will be that people we have touched act on Gandhi's words.

TLA is not ending. It's just beginning anew. After a few months of our existence as a regional entity, Joe Peel started calling us "a sophisticated leadership consultancy organization." So like the end to which good consultants all aspire, ladies and gentlemen, we have succeeded in working ourselves out of a job. That's a good thing.