EXPLO Elevate shares good ideas, practices, and wisdom to help schools and their communities flourish.
Dear Friend,
The last few days here in the Boston area have had a hint of fall about them. It’s a great time of year filled with promise and possibility. The Elevate team has been meeting with Heads of School, leadership teams, and facilitating board retreats. We’re seeing excitement stemming from fresh starts, setting ambitious goals, and dreaming big.
Managing for Progress and Results
Because we know many may find themselves this fall managing others for the first time – or know they need to elevate their management skills – we wanted to pass along a few things that we think may help.
Nuts and Bolts
Schools don’t have management training programs and that leaves most department heads, administrators, and school leaders learning the ins and outs of management by learning on the job. There are thousands of leadership and management books out there, but many are too abstract to help school leaders in their day to day work. As a foundational nuts and bolts text, grab a copy of Managing to Change the World by Alison Green and Jerry Hauser. From structuring one on ones, to running meetings, to delegation, to retaining superstar staff, the book is absolutely packed with practical advice and tools.
Faculty Engagement: Passive Versus Active Questions
As faculty retention and wellness become more and more important, leaders are increasingly trying to ascertain faculty engagement. That can come from questions asked via surveys or from one-on-ones. Understanding how employees experience their work environment is important: schools can and should focus on continuous improvement.
That said, faculty engagement is not solely a product of the work environment. So it’s important to balance the ratio of what Marshall Goldsmith calls passive to active questions.
Some school leaders believe their job is to promote harmony and to that end have named “promote positivity” as one of their core values. Harmony is something most of us crave, so it’s natural that a belief that staying focused on the positive would increase the chances that harmony will fill our hallways. But like many things, too much can have unintended consequences. A laser-like focus on positivity can result in toxic positivity and a culture of what Patrick Lencioni calls “artificial harmony”, one of the five dysfunctions of a team from Lencioni’s classic book of the same name.
When we think of “innovation”, our definition is quite simple: new and practical. It happens to be the same definition that Linda Hill uses. (It’s a key part of what we call progress culture.) Hill, a Harvard Business School Professor and her colleagues studied innovative organizations and found they all shared some similarities including embracing a variety of paradoxes and bearing creative abrasion and conflict.
As independent schools confront a volatile and uncertain future, developing the muscles to both patiently and urgently deal with change are key to building a flourishing school.
We had Alan Gottlieb and Mark Greenlaw report on the Collective Genius framework, how it can help build a culture of innovation within independent schools, and Belmont Day School’s experience using the framework.
Here at EXPLO Elevate, our executive coaching practice is called Riverbank Colleague. Ross shares some learnings from that practice including the important role a person waiting for you in the river eddy can play as you navigate through white waters.
In addition to kicking off a number of strategic planning engagements across the U.S. and internationally, and leading some professional learning days for middle school faculty, we’re also embedding an EXPLO team in a Massachusetts middle school. For the past 10 years, we’ve been working on refining the curriculum for more than 150 innovative and experiential courses and workshops, many of which we built out with the help of experts in fields ranging from engineering to psychology, from medicine to forensic science, and from archaeology to international relations. We’ll be reporting on this new endeavor in upcoming issues of The Propeller.
The Debate
Finally, it’s hard to ignore that we are in presidential campaign season, especially this one. As many of you know, since 2000, I’ve been on the senior production and leadership team for the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Every fall for the past 20+ years I’ve been on the ground helping the CPD team bring the presidential and vice-presidential debates to the public. This year things have turned upside down and we’ll be home for debate season. But I’ll be watching and I hope you will be, too. The first presidential debate will be on September 10 at 9p ET.
As always, thanks for reading.
Moira
If there are topics you’d like us to cover, good ideas or projects you’d like us to feature, or you want to talk about possible work with your school, please reach out.
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EXPLO, 932 Washington Street, Norwood, MA 02062, USA, 781.762.7400
