Half the Leadership Picture

Fitzgerald.001Recently I stumbled on a blog that told only half the truth about school leadership. I’m not going to link to it—it wasn’t a bad blog, but when we over-focus on some aspects of leadership we ignore equally important responsibilities that end up undermining what we were trying to accomplish in the first place. Let me show you what I mean.

  • Of course leaders need to be visionary, but not at the expense of reality checks. There are limits to time, dollars, the cognitive load involved in juggling various initiatives, and to energy available for different efforts.
  • Of course leaders need to be flexible, but not at the expense of planning. In fact, great leaders build checkpoints into plans to ensure they are remembering to evaluate whether the plan needs to change!
  • Of course leaders need to communicate, but they also need to listen. The latter is so uncommon in school leaders that a principal who is also Native American told me his new staff didn’t believe him when he said at the start of his first year, “My goal is to listen and learn from you this year—what is working, what the students need, what you need. Then we’ll plan our strategies together.” His staff accused him of hidden agendas, sure he had his big initiatives waiting in the wings like every other principal they’d worked for.
  • Of course leaders need to use their strengths, but they also need to manage related weaknesses so they don’t undermine their own good works.
  • Of course leaders need to give clear-cut directives and make decisions, yet allowing room for individual pathways to the same goals and for creativity is essential for innovation.
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The Myth of the Leadership Silver Bullet

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAEarlier this week in just 60 seconds of perusing my news digest app, I counted over a half dozen articles promising quick, essential cures for leadership woes. “The Six Traits…” “Five Things Every Leader…” “Seven Secrets of…” You know the blogs. The headlines capture reader attention and the content generally provides some truth. But not the whole truth, for at least four reasons:

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Let’s Stop Underestimating What Others Can Do

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“I have to hold their hands.” “They need constant supervision.” “They don’t think!” “They aren’t creative.” Have you heard leaders and managers pass these kinds of judgments on employee abilities?

Frequently, as I conduct employee focus groups or review 360 results, leaders who make these kinds of statements receive the following kinds of comments: “What a micromanager!” “Constant meetings and checklists and interference keep us from our work.” “We’re treated like children!”

“But I tried giving more autonomy and it was a disaster,” many leaders say. Frequently, they provided autonomy without clarity of goals or the benefit of wisdom learned from the past. There’s a happy medium of structure AND autonomy, a polarity that leads to results AND happy employees!

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Are You Thinking About Writing?

Note: This blog is one of many that are part of a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) campaign www.webucator.com initiated to encourage new writers. Check out others at  May you find a bit of inspiration, whatever your writing goals may be!

 

25 years ago, I quit my day job–well, sort of. With the security of enough consulting contracts to cover day care for a year, I began the laborious background research for a novel based on my great-great grandmother, a feisty pioneer if there ever was one.

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To really become a writer, though, requires writing, not just researching, so I joined a committee at church that was working on materials for an intriguing course. On that committee was a published author. A few weeks into the project, she called and asked me to revise a speech, then a paper. Next thing I knew she contracted with me to edit the third edition of one of her books. Then I assisted her with a brand-new title. And the church course became a book, so I became the co-author of three titles. Nonfiction. Not what I had in mind at all.
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Three Real Reasons to Read Fiction

I read everything. The best in every genre has something to offer, even if the overall genre doesn’t match my core tastes (after all, at its heart Anna Karenina is a romance novel…). Thus it always surprises me when people proudly say, “I only read nonfiction.” The result of bad experiences in high school English courses? Perhaps, but I also wonder whether they’re aware of what fiction has to offer:

  1. The Truth.
    I once had the great privilege of attending a writing seminar taught by Madeleine L’Engle. Perhaps best known for A Wrinkle in Time,she won awards for both her fiction and nonfiction books. She pointed out that often through fiction, the truths about human motivations and the causes of events, both personal and historical, can be much more deeply explored and conveyed than in nonfiction. Nonfiction, remember, is written from a point of view that doesn’t convey all sides of an issue, event or idea. If learning truth from fiction seems crazy, try The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. It’s a deep exploration of the mindsets, motivations and emotions of the generals on both sides at the battle of Gettysburg.
  2. Emotional Intelligence. Studies are showing that reading fiction increases our ability to empathize with others, one of the key components of emotional intelligence that is tied to overall leadership success. Fiction helps you step into other people’s shoes and understand why they did what they did. As more research concludes that the “soft skills” of leadership are truly the hardest to learn, adding high-quality literary novels to one’s reading list may make more sense than another tome on leadership (the ones I’ve written being an exception, of course!)
  3. Creativity. Let’s trust Einstein on this one–he recommended that to develop a scientific mind, children should read and reread fairy tales. Why? Because true science requires imagination, creativity, and a drive to understand, all of which are found in fairy tales. You’ll be hard-pressed to find careers that don’t require creativity these days–even assembly line workers are encouraged to and rewarded for finding ways to improve systems and processes. Fiction allows you to envision what might happen, what might be, and other big what if’s in ways that nonfiction can’t.
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3 Key Mindshifts for REALLY Leading Change

“Get the resisters on board–that’s why we’re bringing you in” is what I often hear from leaders when change processes aren’tBerlin ped signals.001 going smoothly. In most cases, though, a few simple yet profound changes in leadership attitudes and practices are what is really needed. Here are three mind shifts I’ve seen in effective leaders:

1. Instead of Leading, Think Leading and Listening

As a school leader I know stepped into a new principalship, he told the staff, “I’ll be spending this first year listening, watching and dialoguing with you to understand the strengths and needs of this particular community of learners.”

No one believed him.

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