Who Needs Succession Planning?

Several years ago, the then Chief Executive Officer of Progress Energy unexpectedly passed away. Within days, the regional energy powerhouse introduced a new chief. How could that have happened so fast? The answer--someone had been groomed to take his place.

Presumably, the successor was also shadowed by a leader-in-waiting. In the view of many, the old line, "uneasy is the head that wears the crown," might be better replaced by "uneasy is the organization that lacks successors."

Succession planning has long been valued and practiced in the business world. In public education, not so much. I should know. Triangle Leadership Academy Director of Learning, Fran Riddick, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the subject.

Riddick's methodology compelled her to interview me and senior leaders in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Guilford, and Wake County school districts, inquiring of us whether, how, and for whom the three largest districts in North Carolina planned programs of leadership development and succession planning. 

Riddick concluded that, "While all three districts have a variety of strategies in place, none of the districts have a comprehensive, written succession plan and corresponding evaluation." "None," she said. And that was when TLA was going full tilt. Whatever attention was paid to building school leader bench strength before the recession has definitely been attenuated since recent budget cuts.  

But explaining inattention to leadership development and succession planing because of dwindling public dollars is really a red herring. Even three years ago when money was not as much an issue as it is now, Riddick's research suggests that there was a lack of systemic seriousness about who's next and what they need to get them to next. Why is that, one wonders. 

Let us pose to the proverbial Man from Mars, beamed down to Anytown, USA, observing the apparent seriousness to districts growing their own leaders, the following multiple-choice test item:

School and district leaders are (a) expendable, (b) interchangeable, (c) ineffectual, (d) readily poached, (e) all of the above, or (f) none of the above. No, this is not one of those dreams where you are taking a final exam without having attended class all semester.

If you have spent a single day as a public school educator, you know the answer is (f).  But if leadership matters, and if principals and other school leaders are becoming increasingly difficult to recruit at a time when we need more and more of them, how do we get the practitioners we need? In about the same amount of time it takes to quaff a hot venti mocha latte, we can get in our cars and visit some nearby models.  

Progress Energy is but one local example of a company that plans for its successors. Principals participating in the NC Principals and Assistant Principals Association, Distinguished Leadership in Practice, recently learned in field trips to GlaxoSmithKline, Lenovo, Red Hat, and others that those companies also sustain programs of leadership development, enabling employees at every level to fill a pipeline to a pool of future-ready leaders.

Senior leaders at software giant, SAS, were most articulate. They said leadership development and succession planning was part of their organizational culture, embedded in their DNA. One is tempted to conclude that SAS, who in the last 36 years has increased profits and productivity every year, been named twice in the last five years as Fortune magazine's "Best Places to Work" and in the top ten for the last eight years, might teach public school educators a thing or two.

To paraphrase the Good Book, where schools lack visionary leaders the learners perish. You can buy a few but most you'll have to develop. And when you do, the leaders need to know that there is a pathway to their future in your district. Who needs succession planning? We do. Honk if you agree. Then ask me what research and craft knowledge suggest we do next.

The Competency of Developing Leaders

I have a teaching tool that serves my adult learners well. I wish I had thought it up, but I didn't. Credit SREB with "Learning Journal," a single piece of paper with three shapes and three questions. In a square appears "What squares with my thinking?" In a circle appears "What's rolling around in my mind?" Inside a triangle is "What must I change?" Feel free to use it. Just credit SREB.

Although I do not use the Learning Journal in every time I teach, when I do, I provide 5-10 minutes at the end for students to reflect on what they saw and heard that affirmed, challenged, and spurred personal change. I review responses to help me know what to do next. Completing the Journal is non-threatening, open-ended, promotes higher-order thinking, and affirms personal responsibility--most of the qualities a good assessment should exhibit. Oh, by the way, no grades.

The reason I bring it up now is because of an extraordinary remark one of my Gardner-Webb University Master of Executive Leadership in Schools students recorded after our first class. That's what's been rolling around in my mind for nearly four weeks. Here's what happened:

I put students in small groups to review the NC Standards for School Executives, including the 21 competencies adopted by the State Board of Education as necessary for effective principals. I informed students that we would deliberately practice the 21 competencies as appropriate. Since the Department of Public Instruction ultimately assesses candidates' qualifications based on their performance in the competencies, that only makes sense.

A sample of competencies includes Communication, Change Management,  Delegation, Emotional Intelligence, Systems Thinking and Technology. An entry that seems never to get noticed, even among experienced principals, is Environmental Awareness. Defined as "becomes aware and remains informed of external and internal trends, interests and issues with potential impacts on school policies, practices, procedures and positions," that oversight is particularly troublesome. Wake County might have been spared the last two years of turmoil had senior leaders been more considerate. But back to my class.

This is what my student wrote in his Learning Journal circle: "Why isn't leadership development one of the 21 competencies?" I could have responded that developing leadership is more a practice than a competency. I could have said that it is already embedded as a philosophical foundation of the standards. I could have said a lot of things to disabuse the precocious young man from the need to think "above his pay grade." But I didn't.

Truth is, I sort of agree with him. And I was particularly happy that he was asking the question. I learned long ago that the purpose of leadership is to develop leadership. Whether it is a competency or not, I don't know.  In my mind, helping people become more effective, promoting personal and social responsibility, and building community are pretty important tasks. I think that's what leaders do. At least that's what those who have most influenced me have done. And it truly is a skill set whose elements are subject to deliberate practice.

In the final analysis, I think developing leadership is too important to be called a competency. It may be more broadly conceived as a return on investment of all the good things in your life that would not have happened without someone's intervention. It's a give-back. On the other hand, developing leadership may be a kind of pay-it-forward, a gift for your children, their children, and for generations to come. Whatever it is, it's my job--and yours.

To Better Futures

Some say it's what makes us human, the search for a meaningful future, that is. As much as we are learning about non-human mammals with a brain-to-body ratio approaching our own, scientists still lack evidence suggesting that porpoises or primates dream of a better future. We do.

In preparing last month to work with two Wake County Renaissance Schools--schools re-populated with new teachers and principals specifically hired for their potential to improve flagging student performance--I had occasion to re-read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. The book's message took center stage when I prepared staff to re-image their school's vision statement. As I'll demonstrate, Man's Search for Meaning is really about leading the future.

I once read that tomorrow is "a highly-probable event." Supposedly, if you write .9 followed by nine nines, that is the probability that you will wake up tomorrow morning. But once awake, will tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that be the future you prefer? What would be the difference in outcomes that matter of our living aimlessly versus our intervening to make a most-improbable thing possible in the face of most-challenging circumstances?

If we are leading both our lives and our organizations responsibly, Frankl suggests, the choice between indifference and intervention may not be so hard: "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future . . . And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task" (p. 73). Who is this Viktor Frankl anyway?

An eminent psychotherapist who also happened to be a Jew working in Vienna in the middle half of the 20th century, Dr. Frankl was a survivor of Hell on Earth--the Nazi concentration camps of World War II.  Jews captured who were not killed immediately were forced into labor. Most laborers died.

It was not the work, however, that killed men compelled to endure mind-numbing, bone--bruising, sixteen-hour-days; rather it was the inability to work brought on by psychological resignation. Malaise led to physical illness and even self-induced starvation. If a man couldn't or wouldn't work, the Nazis had no use for him. In a sense, such a life was more given than taken. But not everyone succumbed.

Early in captivity, Frankl made a conscious decision that he would live if he could. Only a few men joined him in that decision. But why would he or they chose life under such brutal, uncertain circumstances? The answer: to do something yet undone. A consummate healer of the mind, the undone thing and compelling future that Frankl imaged for himself was one in which he was addressing his peers on the psychology of the concentration camp. Imagine that.

What seemed to be working for Frankl, he noted, appeared to be true of everyone who survived. Whether a book yet to be written, a loved one with whom to reunite, or a dutiful act yet to be rendered, finding what meant most in each man's life, as demonstrated by what and for whom his undone act represented, literally meant the difference between life and death. What are our dreams of a better future? Here are a few of my own as a citizen and a professional:

Standing at the edge of the ten-year anniversary of the most horrific act of terror ever to victimize citizens of the United States, I want our political and faith leaders to fix our mind on a better future, a preferred future where such acts are rendered unnecessary even by our nation's most ardent critics. I want a nation where a job is available for everyone who needs it. I want to be part of a people who care for one another. And I want us to be responsible for whom we vote in seeking that preferred future.

Professionally, I want a future where my Gardner-Webb and North Carolina State University students who are just now taking the first steps in school-leader preparation become the wise principals we need in our public schools. I want a future where every learning professional with whom I am working use research and craft knowledge to improve students' life chances, turning possible futures of hopelessness into preferred futures of societal contribution.

Nearing death at 92 yet still actively teaching, Frankl was asked to express in one sentence the meaning of life. He wrote on a piece of paper, folded it, and asked his students to guess what he had written. After no more than five seconds, a young man confidently responded, "The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs."

"That was it exactly," said Frankl later. "Those were the exact words I had written." I urge the leader in you to consider the same.