Introduction
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
People have no idea how much work goes into achieving simplicity.
Tom Warburton, Animator and Illustrator
This is a book about the three powerful steps you can take to make your school or organization great – more unified, more high achieving, more equitable, more inclusive, more responsive and more successful in every way and by any measure.
You can start taking these actions right away. Many of them don’t require a lot of time or preparation. They are practical, concrete, clear and impactful. What they do require is a shift in thinking and the commitment to begin and then to persevere to see them through. The good news is that they are all do-able right now.
Although this book was originally written largely with education leaders in mind, as I’ve learned from speaking and consulting with many organizations the strategies apply to leading everywhere – businesses, non-profits, government or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), volunteer groups, clubs and teams.
Many management principles from the most influential business-oriented leadership books apply to all fields. Superintendents often ask their principals and district administrators to read Jim Collins’s (2001) Good to Great, Simon Sinek’s (2011) Start with Why, and in year’s past Malcolm Gladwell’s (2002) The Tipping Point, Daniel Pink’s (2011) Drive, James Womack and Daniel Jones’s (2003) Lean Thinking, and making a huge impact even earlier, Stephen Covey’s (2013) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman’s (2006) In Search of Excellence. They all have value that generalizes to leadership of all organizations. I have seen countless workshops in which educators have been asked to apply these and other business books’ ideas to leading their schools and districts.
The Power of Leading Together expands the tradition of education leaders applying the lessons drawn from business examples by illustrating how everyone who leads, including those in business, can also learn and apply the lessons drawn largely (but not exclusively) from the world of education. If we could all learn to lead better lives from Robert Fulghum’s (2004) All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, think of how many rich lessons there must be in the entire school experience.
While based on research, this is not a research book. It’s a practical guide to making the moves that get your team to a place where actual collaboration takes place. When that happens, real productivity is achieved – whether your goal is raising student achievement and closing performance gaps, or increasing efficiency, or reducing employee turnover, or improving customer service.
Maybe most surprising is that there are just three steps to The Power of Leading Together. Here they are: Step 1: Visibility and Accessibility; Step 2: Relationship Building; Step 3: Collaboration.
How can that be the whole secret to leadership? After all, being a leader is a multi-faceted job with hundreds of complex factors to consider when making the decisions that affect so many people. How can all that be boiled down into three steps?
The simple truth is that you can’t get results alone – no one can. There are, of course, some unusual leaders who direct from the top and who seem to know everything and be everywhere at once. But these superhero leaders, even if they get short-term results, don’t make it in the long run. Either they burn out and make themselves sick, or they shine briefly like a shooting star and then disappear just as quickly as they get promoted, moving on to their next fleetingly held position, where they generally accomplish little. In any case, their school doesn’t continue to thrive in their absence. Why? Because they haven’t taught people to work together and carry on the good work.
Everyone knows the old African proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. (Whitby, n.d.) The first part about traveling fast alone is usually true – especially if you’re a very strong and independent person. But not everyone is. After all, most of us have a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses. Some of us might go faster being a member of a team. The proverb is certainly true that most people can go farther if they go together, but we still need to learn how to go together. That is the main answer this book provides – how to lead so that people are motivated to rely on each other, make progress together and collaborate to make the types of decisions that result in success.
The underlying idea for this book came from a conversation with a colleague. Michael Kline trained principals, assistant principals and other administrators in his job as Director of Elementary Leadership Development in one of the nation’s largest school districts, Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools. After fourteen years of being an elementary, middle and high school principal, I had recently come to central office to be a consulting principal – an executive coach to new principals – when Michael suggested we go to lunch at the Woodside Deli, a favorite of mine. I should have been suspicious. After all, everyone knows the expression, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Sure enough, after we caught up on our families and the never-ending stories about school district politics he asked me, “I know we have a really good leadership development program. But I’m always looking for ways to improve it. Since you just came from a school, tell me – what are we missing? What should we be paying more attention to?”
“Since my new job is to coach principals,” I answered, “I’m going to teach them how to work cooperatively with their students, staff, parents and community.” Then I added, “I think we do a good job training new principals to analyze data, to observe teachers, to write memos, to make plans and schedules, you know – all the technical skills – but I don’t think we teach them how to collaborate with everyone. And that’s what it takes to turn schools around.”
Michael asked, “Do you think we should be explicitly training principals on collaboration?”
I was adamant. “Definitely!” I responded, not seeing the bait he was clearly setting out and I was about to go for.
“Want to write it?” he asked, springing the trap.
What could I say? I was caught. I had just told him there was an unmet need and that I was going to begin working on it with the principals on my caseload anyway. So, what could I do? I got to work developing a workshop to teach new and aspiring principals practical strategies to collaborate with everyone in their schools. The strategies were all based on the leadership research literature, but rather than focusing on theory, the workshop emphasized authentic real-life examples and described the practical moves a successful school leader makes.
Next, we piloted the workshop and the feedback was clear. The aspiring principals enjoyed the session and felt that they were learning a lot, and that all of it was relevant and valuable. We finally figured out that the key words were a lot and all of it – which actually meant it was too much material for one workshop. They were flooded with too many ideas in one sitting. Based on this participant input, we restructured it into three ninety-minute workshops, held one month apart. In this way, administrators had a chance to go back to their schools and try some of the ideas. When they came back for the next session, we heard their reflections about what worked for them and what didn’t. Because every school and every administrator are unique, we could then brainstorm and begin to figure out how to customize the strategies to best meet their particular circumstances.
We knew we had something really helpful when principals came back months or sometimes years later to report that they were still using some of these ideas in their schools – often with their own personalized adaptations. We especially enjoyed hearing from new assistant principals who we were training in the collaboration skills, as they would tell us how their principals were using the same strategies we were teaching and had asked their assistant principals to begin making the same moves. Their principals were not only carrying on the mind-set of collaborative work; they were teaching it to the next generation of school leaders!
Before long, I was being invited to share these strategies with school leaders (administrators, teacher-leaders, parent leaders and leadership teams) in districts throughout the country, who found that regardless of where they worked: large or small schools; public, private, or charter schools; religious or secular schools; colleges or universities, the three steps applied to them equally well and they could begin using them right away. I’m sure you can too.
Now let’s explore the central question of this book:
What can we learn about the Power of Leading Together and how to put the three steps into practice to improve our results and everyone’s lives?