Leadership and Change

The district set out to acquire technology tools (a $2 million levy passed shortly afterward) and engage internal stakeholders in a discussion of how to develop individual learning plans for each child. In my mind, the board was rightfully focused on two things: resources and accountability. Similar to every other school district we were aware of, there were persistent and unacceptably high numbers of students reading below grade level K-12. That translated into lower test scores in all subject areas due to the requirement for reading comprehension for math, science, social studies, and writing exams. Two years later, we funded $50,000 for a Degree of Reading Power assessment of every child that showed, definitively, that there was no bell curve in the district. We had a two-hump camel: about half the students were below grade level, with the majority hovering around the first quartile mark; and half were above grade level, with the majority hovering solidly around the third quartile mark. It was a very compelling picture, and one that we all thought – as an elected leader team – would convene all stakeholders to common purpose.

We were wrong, and I was wrong. My last official vote as a board member was in the winter of 1999 as I resigned to work for the State of Minnesota. We ratified on a 6-0 vote the approval of the five year plan that we began discussing in 1993 at that retreat. It had taken six years to write a five-year plan. There had been surveys along the way, and twice a year there had been retreats where lead educators, administrators, and board members had pictured what we would do next. Professional facilitators had been hired to help with process management; over a year was spent in interest-based bargaining training to overcome trust issues between labor and management. Years later those innocuous, flat red three-ring binders still sat on shelves, unused.

What I needed this week from the authors was more than a reminder that clarifying vision is an “intuitive, emotional process. There’s often no logic to it. You just feel strongly about something, and that sense, that intuition, has to be fully explored,” (p. 106). Or the advice that, “We construct the future by some kind of extrapolation, in which the past is prologue, and the approach to the future is backward-looking,” (p. 108). What, exactly, does that mean in active practice of effective transformational leadership?

With every article in the newspaper about failed public schools, a gaze backward tells me that small group of leadership people I was associated with were on the right track. The simple idea was to get around a table and coordinate all the best intentions and available resources around a set of relevant, timely information as defined by best practices in teaching, assessment, youth asset development, and parent education. However, as internal resistant mounted, “feeling our passion” would only have aggravated a profound breakdown of trust with the unions in the district. Those leaders pointed to the same past to remain very apprehensive about the future we were envisioning. In other words, there was no leadership prerogative to be forward-looking, not if it impacted the actual structure of educational delivery or administration.

What is the process, or what are the conditions, whereby leaders can think aloud about the future and then start to act on those convictions?

The authors strike a condescending tone with their statistic that 3 percent of senior manager time spent on forward-looking issues is a “pathetic percentage given the responsibility they have for the future of their organization.” Who in the class believes it would be acceptable to set a higher percentage openly? What would happen if Figure 5.1 came to pass, and leaders spent three or four days of every week on “future orientations,” (p. 119)? Which leaders would be afforded such a luxury to look 20 years ahead, when the agendas require action on near-term issues? There is little tolerance today for rhetorical talk that sounds political. I hurt recalling the conflicts with educators as they accused the board of being political, not caring about the kids who were in the chairs right then, right there. Experiment with little kids? No way, they said.

It was impossible to hold conversations about the past, for that was seen as damning personal criticism, or the future, for that was seen as threatening to change work conditions. Those were days without cable television broadcasting the discussions live, yet even then the raw reaction to talk about future change made honesty very difficult because it came off as criticism of the here-and-now. There were fractured relationships. The board was accused of micro-management, the single-most effective tactic I’ve observed for convening opposition to change against citizen boards of directors in government or the nonprofit sector. All in all, I look back at those last two years as the lowest point in my lifetime leadership experience. But, what would I do if given the chance again?
I truly believe that more forward-thinking action by local public school leaders (make that more effective, forward-thinking action) would have pre-empted the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The conventional wisdom in Washington in 2001 was that local leaders weren’t forward-looking, couldn’t hold teachers accountable, handed out meaningless diplomas, and wasted public resources. We couldn’t prove otherwise.

In 2006, I enrolled in graduate school to acquire a theoretical foundation about leadership and followership in this time of rapid change and innovation to 25 years of work in and around public issues. I struggle through these texts looking for tools to add to my leadership toolkit. I imagine using these models in real life situations. As we are advised this week, I spend days looking back, struggling to make sense of events of the past through the lens of each author. Does anybody else feel like you are sifting through a very deep sandbox, hoping to find tools tangible enough to master and use with real people who have a very short fuse for abstract concepts that could change the way they work?

Kouzes and Posner actually are too much like me for me to feel comfortable just doing more of the same that I've done.. They come to the question of envisioning the future with optimistic language, a lack of concern for efficiency, and a strong preference for collaboration. They caution leaders to slow down in dense fog, so as not to endanger ourselves or anyone else. I was on an elected school board that slowed way down, for six years, feeling our way through an unmapped section of road. We leaders stayed true to the original vision, but failed to attract "followers" or "stakeholders." There was a quiet conscientious objection to what we were trying to accomplish among certain union leaders at the principal, teacher, and staff group levels. We believed we were heading to a destination we had the authority to determine, as O’Toole suggests, but few people were on the proverbial bus Collins describes in Good To Great. There were hierarchical thinkers on the board, and those of us who wanted a new labor-management model. Unfortunately, trust broke down further, probably due to inconsistent messages.

At a personal, ethical level, I cannot help but think that an entire decade of graduates fledged out into the same chaotic world that challenges us as graduate students, many in mid-life and mid-career. That means that about 5,000 district graduates were surveyed annually under the state mandated post-secondary follow-up program. In 2006, Joe Nathan of the Center for School Change reviewed those data and determined that 47 percent – just under half -- of all that district’s graduates attending Minnesota’s state colleges and universities (MNSCU) did not succeed in the first institution he or she attended as a freshman. I had heard anecdotal stories every year around the Holidays, but here was evidence that there was a systematic issue to address.

If I understand the intentions of organizational change models at all, that is a bad report card on a leadership group’s intention to enact transformational change for the children we were all entrusted to serve. Your comments and thoughts are invited and encouraged, within the blog community or one-on-one in person or on the phone. I am truly trying to piece together what I would do differently, or more appropriately, the entire leadership team do differently, using the research-based information from these readings as a guide.