Category: Leadership

Tribal Leadership, Chicago & Organizational Culture

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Tribal Leadership, Chicago & Organizational Culture

I’m in Chicago this week attending the National Charter Schools Conference, and on the plane this morning I continued reading a book that was recommended to me last week by Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, called Tribal Leadership.

It’s a fascinating book to be reading as we prepare to start a completely new school. And as someone who has written previously about the prevalence of the wrong sort of business thinking in school reform, I’m struck by how poorly most of my field’s most visible leaders heed the authors’ advice.

To test this theory, check out the following quotations and post a comment to let me know if you think it sounds a lot like (or unlike) any of our current national figures in education:

  1. (Describing a hospital that had effectively remade itself) — “The leaders spent most of their efforts building strong relationships between the company’s employees, volunteers, and patients. Instead of telling people what to do, they engineered experiences in which staff members would look at the same issues they were dealing with, so that strategy became everyone’s problem. And they got out of the way and let people contribute in their own way to the emerging goals.”
  2. (Describing a dehumanizing organizational culture) — “Within this sort of culture, knowledge is power, so people hoard it. People at this stage have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors,’ wanting help and support and being continually disappointed that others don’t have their ambition or skill. Because they have to do the tough work (remembering that others just aren’t as savvy) , their complaint is that they don’t have enough time or competent support.”
  3. (Describing the late 19th/early 20th century origins of our public education system) — “The solution was to train a new generation of workers by teaching them inside a system that looked a lot like a factory. A star pupil is one who does the homework and has the right answers. This new system undid the classical liberal education, which said that the value was in the well-designed question, and this shift in focus made the worker exploitable. The system didn’t emphasize creative thinking, strategizing, leadership or innovation. Stars were smart conformists, and people who stuck to the pattern became model students . That approach also bred the “I’m great (and you’re not)” mentality, based on homework, grades, and knowing the right answer. It does not emphasize empowerment, creativity, or individual satisfaction.”

The main point of the authors — who, although they may sound like Linda Darling-Hammond or John Dewey, are actually career business consultants — is that the best leaders are those that “focus on two things, and only two things: the words people use and the types of relationships they form.” Words, because they shape how we view the world and our place in it; and relationships, because without a strong amount of trust, transparency, and mutual accountability, the best you can hope for is short-term (illusory) change.

I can understand why we must be mindful of tending to these insights as we grow our school from the ground up. What I can’t understand is why doing so puts us largely at odds with the most visible “reformers” of our day.

Democracy in the Workplace

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Democracy in the Workplace

I’m in Las Vegas this week, attending Worldblu’s 2010 conference, at which Worldblu CEO Traci Fenton will honor the world’s most democratic workplaces. It’s an eclectic group of people and industries, and although there will be a few other educators at the event, it’s primarily an opportunity to learn what some forward-thinking folks in the private sector have learned about how the use of democratic principles can help create an optimal learning environment. In particular, I’m looking forward to hearing more from Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos and the recent focus of an extended profile in the New Yorker.

I’m also preparing to test-drive my belief that the core challenge in any organization — whether it’s an elementary school or an online shoe retailer — is to strike the right balance between providing a few clearly-defined, goal-oriented shared structures, and reserving enough space for individuals to feel free to express themselves, ad lib, try new ideas, and find ways to improve the overall flow of the organization. I’ll be blogging about it all week, so please stay tuned and share with me any questions you think would be particularly worth considering.

Best Questions — Starting a School, Part II

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Best Questions — Starting a School, Part II

I’ve volunteered to take the lead at putting together a plan for recruiting, interviewing and evaluating prospective principals for our new elementary school here in DC (scheduled opening, August 2011), and thus far it’s been a really useful process of trying to surface the “best questions” one should ask to get the fullest sense of a person and his or her philosophy about education and how best to help children learn.

As is always the case when I’m trying to get to the root of an issue in education, I begin by calling Kim Carter, the head of the QED Foundation and, as I said recently on Twitter, the finest thinker/doer I have met in K-12 education work. Kim pointed me to the work of The Haberman Foundation, which has done some great research on teachers who make a difference. She also said the core question to ask should be: What do you think are the most important factors that determine student success?

I like it, and I was also thinking of asking the following. Please check them out and offer any and all feedback and new ideas so we can be sure to get the process as finely tuned as possible.

  • Which ideas/approaches to learning have had the greatest influence on you, and why?
  • What are the core questions/riddles that drive you professionally?
  • What was your most powerful personal learning experience? How would you go about creating a similar environment and similar opportunities for our students?
  • What’s your personal motto?
  • When you interview potential staff members, what traits are you looking for?
  • What’s your vision of the ideal school?
  • What is your most marked characteristic?
  • If you could change something about your approach to work, what would it be?
  • If you could replicate something about your approach to work, what would it be?
  • What core habits of mind & work will you want to see our graduates embody, and in what ways do you intend to help ensure that they do?
  • Describe your ideal system for measuring student outcomes.
  • Describe your ideal system for evaluating educator effectiveness.
  • What do you feel are the core attributes of an optimal learning environment?
  • If we’re having this conversation five years from now, what would you like to be able to say are the five things you’ve done successfully — and how will you know you’ve succeeded at them?

John Wooden, Barack Obama & Why Smart People Are Stoopid

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on John Wooden, Barack Obama & Why Smart People Are Stoopid

This week’s Frank Rich column may not be about education policy, but it might as well be.

Writing about the president’s handling of the BP oil spill, Rich believes Obama’s “most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it.

This is the primary issue I have with the leading voices of education reform today. I’ve heard Joel Klein suggest “we know how to do this” — referring to comprehensive education reform — when the truth is all we know how to do is move the needle on student test scores, not transform an apartheid education system that relies on one method of instruction for the poor, and another for the privileged. I’ve heard Michelle Rhee assert that “collaboration and consensus building are quite frankly overrated in my mind.” And I’ve grown weary of the myraid other voices who confidently participate in a groupthinkian rush to the illusory Altar of Certainty, long before we have in place the necessary metrics for a much more finely calibrated understanding of whether our schools are giving children what they really need — a balanced comprehensive education that teaches them to use their minds well over the long haul.

It seems fitting, then, that Rich’s piece would appear in a day the Times’ Sports page offered its paean to the Wizard of Westwood, John Wooden, our country’s greatest-ever coach, an exceedingly humble man who always considered himself a teacher first — and a molder of men first, and basketball players second.

Coach Wooden was known for many memorable maxims, many of which — like “Be quick, but don’t hurry” — could helpfully guide our current reform efforts if heeded. But it’s another Woodenism I thought of as I finished Rich’s piece about Obama’s Best and Brightest: “Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.”