The Assistant Principal Podcast

| A couple weeks ago in one of my daily emails I asked for people’s experiences, perspectives, and questions about culture. A reader responded:
As far as culture, my main frustration is a lack of initiative I notice in some of our adult, professional faculty members... Behaviors like not arriving on time for a duty, being unwilling to contact parents (or reply to parent contacts), and walking past litter on the hallway floor are my frustration. My question is how to make it the norm in our school to be proactive and to take initiative?
So, what does this mean when the adults aren’t behaving like… well, adults?
The question to begin with is not “what can we do?” The question to start with is “Why is this happening?”

Celebration: Weather over 60 degrees and sunny enough to make hiking a joy!

Prelude: Who is a leader

One challenge many leaders and potential leaders face is they don’t “seem” or “feel” like leaders. This comes from a relatively narrow conception in our culture about what makes a leader. An overreliance on decision-making and charisma, as well as our culturally engrained images of the leader archetype, hamper our ability to encourage and develop leaders with a diverse set of skills.

A participant in one of my recent trainings shared a 2020 article from Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. (link in show notes). The authors (Mueller, Jennifer S., Goncalo, Jack and Kamdar, Dishan) stated in their abstract:

Study 1shows creative idea expression is negatively related to perceptions of leadership potential in a sample of employees working in jobs that required creative problem solving.

Study 2 shows that participants randomly instructed to express creative solutions during an interaction are viewed as having lower leadership potential.

A third scenario study replicated this finding showing that participants attributed less leadership potential to targets expressing creative ideas, except when the “charismatic” leader prototype was activated. In sum, we show that the negative association between expressing creative ideas and leadership potential is robust and underscores an important but previously unidentified bias against selecting effective leaders.

Simple translation: Creative people aren’t perceived as leaders unless they have high charisma…

Full disclosure: I did not read and evaluate the entire article but their thesis is consistent with other research and my own observations and experiences.

Stepping back, I wonder, in what context would creative problem solving not be a big advantage? And yet, the research suggests we are not inclined to view creative problem-solving as a desirable leadership characteristic.

Maybe it is the same for people who are really good at asking questions?

Or for people who are great at helping people collaborate with each other?

Or maybe people who are great at helping others learn to lead?

The challenge we face is that we have a narrow set of criteria we use, at a cultural level, to determine what leaders should be like. We have been conditioned to think about leaders in terms of a few specific characteristics like vision and decisiveness.

In pre-defining what constitutes leadership, we limit the possibilities for nurturing leadership in the majority of people around us. The point I’m trying to make is that if we can look at people’s strengths and seek to put people in position to leverage those strengths, we all win. I hope this all makes sense – it did to me when I write it but now, I’m not so sure 🤣

The Big Idea

Recap the situation

Symptoms versus problems

Pause: have you ever had a job, or a period of time, when you were just going through the motions? And if you have not, have you had people you respect take their foot off the gas and coast?

What would explain this?

• Physical health
• Trauma
• Responsibilities outside work
• Feeling hopeless at work
• Feeling lost at work
• Feeling like you don’t matter

How we respond depends on the underlying problem.

Let’s look at what could be going wrong from an alignment perspective, in other words, let’s think about the negative behavior as being a reflection of a poor culture. We know culture is a translation of the degree of alignment, so what could be out of alignment?

• Purpose
  
  • Mission/purpose feels broken or hollow’
• • Mission is not focused on kids
• • Friction between purpose and leaders’ actions
• • A personal purpose that trumps the school’s purpose
• • Understanding the purpose behind the activity
• Structures
  
  • Schedules are too tight
• • Excessive duties and tasks (also a purpose and resource problem)
• • Structures inhibit certain behaviors, like finding opportunities to call parents
• • Lack of support or clear expectations or processes
• Resources
  
  • Time – too much to do
• • Attention – too many different things to do
• People
  
  • Knowledge and skills: how to call home
• • Dispositions: maybe it doesn’t matter if I’m late; or a way of demonstrating dissatisfaction
• • Health caused by poor working conditions or stressors outside of school

But… we don’t know the cause, and of course it may be different for different teachers.

So now what?

Sponsor spot…

The way to answer why is to learn. There are many ways, but I might begin this way…

• What’s going well
• Have there been any surprises?
• Is there anything we could be doing differently?

Once we find out what’s wrong we:

• Support teachers by bringing purpose, structures, and resources into alignment
  
  • Purpose
    • Check the alignment of our language and expectations around purpose? Are we prioritizing growing kids, or has a different set of priorities (test scores) crept in?
    • Do we talk about and act on the idea that teachers are central to student success, that teachers have the power to change kids’ lives?
• 
  
  • Structures
    
    • Review our discipline processes - make the expectation of parent contact clear and explicit
  • • Implement school-wide common procedures
  • • Build in times to contact parents
• 
  
  • Resources
    
    • Eliminate non-essential tasks
  • • Hire playground and lunch monitors to free up teacher time
  • • Protect teachers from time-consuming new initiatives
  • • Shave time off meetings to allow teachers to invest in parent contacts
• 
  
• Grow them by helping their knowledge, skills, dispositions, and healt...