It’s Not How You Talk, It’s HOW You Talk
I stepped in at the end of an interview this week and caught the last part of the conversation and had the chance to briefly meet the candidate. When the candidate left I said, “I know I was only in here for 10 minutes of that, but I’d hire that person.” The persons doing the interview said, “She’s awesome, we intend to.” They proceeded to call her back in and give her an offer and she accepted. After the now new hire left, the comment was made that “it is not how you talk, it’s HOW you talk. Her words meant something.” Bingo! That was a perfect description of what was just witnessed.
This candidate didn’t have things she was saying that we had never heard before, although she did have innovative ideas. So, her “what” wasn’t much different. Additionally, she had not chosen to be a career changer and go into teaching for reasons much different from others. So, her “why” wasn’t much different either. This person, however, had learned how to convey a more strategic voice.
If we want to establish credibility and influence people, it’s important to be concise and let individuals know clearly what role you want to play in the conversation. It is also important to demystify the content of the message and we deliver by eliminating jargon and being a person of few, but effective, words.
This is really about developing your voice, which is less about performance and more about your strategic instincts, understanding the context we are in, and an awareness of the signals we are sending. We all have different ways of communicating, but saying it in the correct context, or how we say it, is crucial. This “how” includes being visionary and developing the ability to convey our aspirations for the future. This then sets the stage for transformation to occur.
So, if you want to show up with a strong strategic voice and effectively connect the dots for those you are speaking to remember that the context matters, be clear, concise and jargon free, and paint the picture that bridges any distance between you and those you are speaking to. Sometimes finding the right words can be the biggest challenge of our day. Remember to make your words mean something because “it’s not how you talk, but HOW you talk.”
Leading Without Kitschy Trinkets
Many times, as you know, my blog posts come from words or phrases that I hear that inspire me to dig deeper and study. This post is no exception. Yesterday, I heard someone say, and I am paraphrasing,not quoting, here, “I don’t need the kitschy trinkets when morale gets low, just treat us with respect all the time.” This was a pretty powerful statement when you think about employee retention, satisfaction, and the climate and culture of an organization.
Also, I was captured by the word “kitschy”. Of course we had to immediately look it up. What we found was that, first, the person used the word correctly; second, we found that the definition was: something to that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality. Sound familiar? Now, you will also find the term “kitsch” used in the art world. Since I believe there is no such thing as bad art, art is beyond taste. Therefore, you can leave your prejudices behind and just be uplifted by art. I’ll bet, however, you have been given things that fit the category of being kitschy.
This really got me to thinking, though, about how we really feel about our employees. Does giving trinkets get us to the level of community we desire. I think not. We must remember it is all about trust. Trust is earned; it is not a transaction. If we want those in our organizations to trust us and we want to inspire commitment, we must make the first move. We want employees to be committed to what we are doing and the mission and vision, but employees many times get the message we aren’t really that committed to them. Kitschy gifts probably exacerbate this belief.
According to Gallup, only 32 percent of employees in the United States are engaged. Now engaged to Gallup means involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace. Expand this data analysis worldwide and the number drops to 13 percent. Think about that. 87 percent of employees are unengaged. Pretty sure a kitschy gift won’t change that.
So, what will help us change these numbers? I don’t believe there is a silver bullet here, but I do believe there are some thing central to how leaders can truly become committed to their teams. First, we need to make continuous feedback and coaching central to performance and continuous improvement. This is true whether we are talking a school or manufacturing. I just finished reading a great book on feedback from M. Tamra Chandler entitled Feedback (and other dirty words). It was such an honor to get an advance copy to read. One of my favorite feedback tips in the book is, “Kick Some Ask”. I’ll let you read the book and find out what that is.
Additionally, we need to create and commit to providing development opportunities for both skill and role development. This plays to succession management and employees see you are serious about, and committed to, preparing team members for advancement from within. This also means we need to empower employee connection and collaboration.
I believe if we get these things right and couple this with compensation strategies that are aligned with today’s hyper competitive market, we can begin to chip away at the low employee engagement numbers. So, how about we drop the kitschy trinkets and just treat employees with the respect they deserve and provide the development, space for collaboration, opportunities for advancement, and compensation they deserve?
Scaling Partnerships In Education & Telling Our Story
I’m so sad to be sitting at the airport because I hate leaving Harvard University. I always learn so much from my friends at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As always, my thinking as stretched, what I thought I knew challenged, and new creative and innovative ideas developed. As Dr. Mandy Savitz-Romer said last Sunday, “You may not leave here with complete closure, but with new questions.” That is learning at its best! My description for my learning this week is that I have been “coached up!”
Today’s learning was just as great as the rest of the week. I loved doing a case study on a partnership with the Nike Innovation Fund for improving Oregon student success. Dr. Monica Higgins did a great job of facilitating the case study and I learned a great deal about scaling the impact of public private partnerships. This learning was followed up by a great session by Dr. Irvin Scott on story telling and its importance to teaching and leadership.
As I have done all week in Thriving Students, Developing & Supporting Our Students: Future Identity Versus No Future Identity, and Changing The Narrative For Our Students, I compiled a top 20 list of the things I learned today. Here is my list:
- It’s not just if we do partnerships, it’s how we do partnerships.
- Partnerships should match the core values or mission of the partners.
- Partnerships are great ways for industry to understand education and for education to understand industry.
- It is very important to analyze both sides of all partnerships.
- Partnerships are a psychological contract.
- Everything’s not always explicit (context, risks, et cetera).
- In partnerships everything is not always spelled out.
- Move partnerships from individual to individual to organization to organization. This plays to sustainability.
- Open communication is key to partnerships, even when things go wrong.
- Agenda items versus surface level just for show.
- Eliminate hidden targets in partnerships
- Partnerships need an exit strategy so the innovation can be sustained without the partner.
- Partnerships should be mutually beneficial, with beneficial up for debate.
- In partnerships:
- Make implicit explicit
- Have clarity of roles and limitations
- Have flexibility built in
- Have mutual goals, timelines, and milestones
- Is the voice of the student heard in the partnership?
- You never want to scale until you know you have something that works.
- Need to decide to scale deep or scale out.
- Everyone has a story of how they got where they are. What is your trajectory?
- We need to be warm demanders for our students.
- We need to give an academic press to our students.
- You can’t lead if you don’t read.
- Why story/narrative in leadership?
- Stories are fundamentally human…
- Stories build connection…critical for leaders…
- Stories bring data alive…
- Stories capture what is possible…
Changing The Narrative For Our Students
Yesterday was another powerful day of learning at Harvard University. It started out with Liya Escalera walking us through changing the narrative, valuing the cultural wealth of our underrepresented students in order to achieve equity. Additionally, she taught some great asset-based approaches to leading for student success. The best part was how she had us start this session. She had us reflect on situations in an educational setting that made us feel unwelcome and then reflect on a situation that made us feel welcome. This was a great way to get us in a mode of thinking about changing the narrative for our students. Liya also worked us through asset based communication. Below is a slide that does a great job of showing what our discussion included: 
Then we spent time digging into family engagement and making families true partners with Stephany Cuevas of Harvard University. We know that students with engaged families:
- Exhibit faster rates of literacy acquisition
- Earn higher grades and test scores
- Enroll in higher level programs
- Are promoted more and earn more credits
- Adapt better to school and attend more regularly
- Have better social skills and behaviors
- Graduate and go on to higher education
The learning did not stop here. We then spent time with Daren Graves diving into issues of race with intentionality. This was very powerful learning. We discussed how racism can happen without it being intentional. In education we must be diligent in monitoring the areas where we see disparate racial outcomes or impact:
- Curriculum
- Groupings
- Assessment
- Relationships with students and faculty
- Relationships with the community
- Recruitment/Retention
Just like in Thriving Students and Developing & Supporting Our Students: Future Identity Versus No Future Identity here is the top 30 list from our Tuesday learning:
- Reflect on a situation in an educational setting that made you feel unwelcome.
- Reflect on a situation that made you feel welcome.
- Asset-Based versus Deficit-Based Communication
- It is a bad habit to not look at all our communication through a critical lens.
- What is the problem? The problem is not our students.
- Is the problem that our students aren’t post-secondary ready, or that our education system is not student ready?
- Cultural competence will not cut it. We need to be highly skilled, not just competent.
- We need to make sure all schools are student ready.
- Google Translate™ is a good thing, but must be edited, or those reading will feel disrespected.
- We need information to go to parents as well as the students.
- We need to offer parents parents questions to ask their students.
- Our families are collaborators.
- We need to have parents presenting to parents.
- Have parents talk to each other.
- Students need to be thought of as part of a family, and then the family as part of all the practices of the school.
- Staff needs to view families as collaborators and partners.
- Staff Relationships With Parents + School Knowledge = Family Engagement As Confident Partner
- Staff needs to think of themselves as mentors to their parents.
- Family engagement is a way of thinking, not a practice.
- Family engagement is a value, not just a practice.
- There is no gene for race. Science saved the day!
- Race is an idea.
- Race is not culture.
- Race is something that happens, not something we are.
- It’s not about doing well in school, it’s about doing school well.
- Racism is usually pretty mundane.
- A system that confers privilege and produces disparate outcomes on the basis of race.
- historically-based systems
- actions/beliefs/policies/practices/conceptions
- confers visible and unacknowledged privilege
- Sometimes we set students up for failure by trying to not set them up for failure.
- Start with implicit biases, then move to structural biases.
- Racism can happen without anyone intentionally wanting it to happen.
Developing & Supporting Our Students: Future Identity Versus No Future Identity
On Monday I had the opportunity to dig deep into adolescent development and how this plays into future aspirations, beliefs, and behaviors of our students. I was introduced to identity development by Dr. Mandy Savitz-Romer of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She advocates that articulating aspirations and expectations, forming and maintaining strong peer and adult relationships, motivation, and goal setting should become a part of our DNA in education.
Mandy has so much knowledge in adolescent development and how to advance student success. In fact, she has quite literally written the book on it. We were given her new book this week, Fulfilling The Promise: Reimagining School Counseling to Advance Student Success. I am almost done with it and have to say it is awesome. I am sure you will be seeing blog post from me about the book in the near future.
There was also the opportunity on Monday for learning from Roberto Gonzales who is the preeminent academic expert on undocumented immigrant youth and the struggles they face. It was great to spend time with him because he has spent time with these youth getting, as he called it, “a worm’s eye view.” He understands how these issues play out in real-life. Most powerful for me was the idea of our undocumented immigrant youth straddling two worlds: neither from here or there. No one should have to live like that. Additionally, it was so powerful to gain an understanding, and I still have a huge amount to learn and understand, of the undocumented youth’s transition to “illegality.” As Roberto taught, illegality is not a noun but a verb as undocumented students move from protected to unprotected. I really needed this learning and can’t wait to read his book, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press).
Then, if that was not already a lot of learning in one day, there was Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack. He wrote the book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Poor Students. Our interactions with students matter. I was struck thinking about how some of our engagement strategies favor a selected few – the students we like, that impress us, and we know. What about making sure we have the chance to know all students, not just the ones that are inherently comfortable interacting with teachers. We need to help all understand how to do that. One way he advocates for is office hours. But not like we have always done office hours. Office hours need to be collaboratively with students understanding exactly how they work. Students also need to be comfortable in asking questions and bringing anything to office hours.
As I did for Sunday’s learning this week in Thriving Students, here is my top 30 list of takeaways from the day of learning:
- Information ≠ Action
- A
college goingfuture identity - Dimensions of identity: groups, roles, self concept.
- Marshaling: how do we use our resources.
- Throwing forward: seeing oneself in the future.
- Self-efficacy is the belief in the ability to accomplish a specific task.
- Self-efficacy is domain specific.
- We all have the ability to build self-efficacy.
- What shapes self-efficacy?
- Mastery of experience
- Vicarious learning
- Social persuasion
- Affect
- The “why” students go to college is very important.
- There is a big difference between wanting to go to college and someone telling you they want you to go to college.
- Motivation = Goals + Beliefs
- Students need to be better planners for obstacles. We need to be their GPS and give them three different routes.
- Control of Thoughts + Control of Emotions + Control of Behaviors = Self Regulation To Attain Goals
- Many students straddle two worlds; they are neither from here or there.
- We need to pay attention to how issues play out in real life.
- We forget how powerful having an I.D. card is to a person.
- Access is not inclusion.
- Beware of unwritten curriculum – the unwritten rules of getting along in an institution.
- We need to teach students how to interact with teachers and faculty.
- Doubly disadvantaged = Lower Income + Attended Public School
- Privileged Poor = Lower Income + Attended Private School
- Secondary school and college officials disproportionately reward proactive engagement strategies. Instead of who deserves reward, it becomes who we like, who we know, and who impresses us most – not necessarily the deserving students.
- Impress upon students it is more than normal to ask for help.
- It is smart
- It is expected
- It is rewarded
- We must inspire students to build an inter-generational support network.
- There is a difference between building a network and networking.
- Language matters.
- We need to make explicit what is now hidden to our students.
- We need to make basic things accessible and digestible for our students.
- We need to partner with families and promote our parents as super heroes.
Think about how great our country’s education system would be if we were able to make all 30 items above values that were in the DNA of our system and not just desired practices or boxes to check?
Thriving Students
I have been learning at Harvard University this week on post-secondary success. As an exercise to help myself digest all of the information and make some sense of the learning, I like to come up with a top list from each day. This day’s (Sunday, June 23rd) learning came from Mandy Savitz-Romer and Francesca Purcell, and included learning about post-secondary gaps and opportunities and the data and trends behind public policies to increase post-secondary success.
One of the things that really jumped out at me from the reading and learning was the introduction of the Thriving Quotient. I was very interested in the thought and reality is that we always want to measure student success primarily in terms of academic performance and persistence to graduation. I became enthralled when reading “The “Thriving Quotient”: A New Vision for Student Success” by Laurie A. Schreiner, where she introduced this assessment tool. Thriving students are academically successful and also believe themselves to be part of a community and psychological well-being. These things make it possible for the student to get the most out of their educational experience. The thing I like about Academic Thriving is that it goes beyond what I call compliance – attending class, doing homework – going through the motions. In the Thriving Quotient, Academic Thriving students are psychologically engaged in the learning process. What really resonated with me about this was that the idea of making a connection between what the student already knows or is interested in. This connection to relevant contexts helps the student be an engaged learner and THRIVE.
The Thriving Quotient also includes Intrapersonal Thriving. This thriving is about the student having a healthy attitude toward themselves and the learning process. Additionally included is Interpersonal Thriving. We can’t truly thrive without relationships. So, time spent on the Thriving Quotient and so much other discussion on Sunday led to the following top 20 list of things learned:
- Learning with and from each other from different sectors.
- Pull don the walls and step outside our lanes.
- We have to get the singular narrative out of our mind.
- Sometimes we are creating a narrative for students that does not fit their why, or what is best for them.
- Actions of students do not match their aspirations.
- Only 10% of students that drop out of college had below a “C” average.
- Student problems vs. institutional problems
- We highlight student problems, but sometimes instead of highlighting problems, we need to change the process.
- With multiple pathways available to students, we need to make sure we are sorting in a way that is about best fit, not about other factors.
- We need to get better at moving from thinking about student success in terms of just quantitative box checking like graduation rates, number of applying or accepted to college, and test scores by moving to the idea of students THRIVING!
- We can’t think of college as just one singular thing because there are many different outcomes from many different types of colleges.
- The highest stakes tests students take are the placement tests once in college. Then, in some cases, we waste the students’ time in developmental education.
- We must find a way to scale up the things that work!
- A college credential is a solid investment that will pay off over time.
- More likely to give back to the community and vote
- Higher levels of personal well-being (health, et cetera)
- Higher earnings and tax payments
- What is it that the adult wants, versus what the student wants.
- Adults always think we know best, but many times we don’t know all the options, or nor does the student know all the options.
- “College is not for everyone, but it is for everyone that looks like you when you are a school.”
- We maybe need to think about amending the 14th amendment of our constitution to include higher education.
- We are nearing universal enrollment in college. What does this mean?
- A
college goingfuture identity.
As you can see, there was a lot to digest after a single afternoon of work. If any of these statements resonated or made you think, please comment here on this post.
Soaring Like A Malcontent Eagle
This past Saturday night I got caught up watching the documentary “The History Of The Eagles” on CNN. As a student of rock and roll bands and artists I became engrossed. Particularly when you think about all the artists that were members of the Eagles, like Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and Joe Walsh; or those who influenced and mentored the band, like Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt. There were so many things that I could blog about after watching this. I took a couple of pages of notes.
One of the things that caught my attention was when the Eagles manager said that Don Henley was a “malcontent.” Henley, however, just wanted the band to keep getting better. A malcontent is someone who is dissatisfied and rebellious. I believe many tines those of us who have a very defined purpose and are very passionate are viewed as, and rightly so, rebellious. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.
Isn’t a malcontent really someone who is not satisfied with the status quo? Couldn’t a malcontent be that person who sees a need and opportunity for change? Finally, couldn’t a malcontent be a catalyst for change? When all three of these questions get answered with “yes,” that constitutes a person being a productive malcontent.
This is the person who challenges what is being done, but always has an alternative to offer. This is healthy. It’s the person who just complains and fights change with no alternatives that is toxic to the organization or community. So let’s embrace the productive malcontent and be vulnerable to positive/constructive criticism/change for the betterment of our organizations, schools, businesses, communities, or even rock bands.
Triageformational Leadership: New Hybrid Definition of Triage and Transformational Leadership
You all know how I like to make words up, so here is my latest: Triageformational Leadership. Actually, I made up the word and the definition over a year ago while in a meeting, but am just now blogging about. Does that give you any indication of how long my “want to blog ideas” list is? Anyway, here is the definition: The process of leading by core values to determine and prioritize needed changes so limited resources can be rationed efficiently and effectively to support the organization’s realization of vision and mission.
The important thing to note about triageformational leadership is that that the transformation is done by triaging by using core values. So many times this is given lip service, but not really done. By putting our core values at the forefront of our triageformational leadership we:
- determine our school or organization’s distinctives.
- dictate personal involvement.
- communicate what is important.
- embrace positive change.
- influence behavior.
- inspire people to action.
- enhance credible leadership.
- shape teaching/employee character.
- contribute to educational/organization success.
…it is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper; out of generally held values. ~ Vaclav Havel
So much goes into truly embodying what it means to be a triageformational leader beginning with the sense of community we develop within an organization. Those that I believe that would make great triageformational leaders place a high value on fostering an environment or community of collaboration. This community is balanced, diverse, and equitable. These leaders build community and culture by truly living out their own core values and the organization’s core values. Just like doing triage in an emergency situation, these leaders are prioritizing what gets done next by matching core values to the situation. This in turn brings about transformation and service oriented leadership.
Strategic Urgent Action
My son Heath’s Pin Oak Tree
Fostering Innocence
Recently, in a meeting, someone made the comment that we need to create places where innocence is fostered for our children. This really got me thinking about how we do this both with our own children and the students we serve in our schools. The notion of innocence refers to children’s simplicity, their lack of knowledge, and their purity not yet spoiled by mundane affairs. Such innocence is taken as the promise of a renewal of the world by the children. One of the most delightful things about children is their sense of innocence and wonder, yet helping them maintain that sense of wonder can be challenging in our sophisticated, hurried society.
Knowledge Ruining Innocence
This rapid and early gain of knowledge by our children is quite the paradox. We all know that knowledge is powerful, but when children learn the wrong things to early it can really be detrimental. Vast amounts of knowledge and information is readily available to our children, and we, as parents, want our children to have this knowledge because we believe it will help them grow and compete. However, this same knowledge can ruin their innocence.
What Can We Do?
Have fun. Build time into your schedule to allow for silliness, downtime, and play.
Leverage nature. Children are instinctively attuned to the wonders of nature. We do not have to prompt students to enjoy playing in the mud, seeing the beauty of flowers, watching kittens play. I love the idea I heard one time of planting a family tree and then having family time at each season change to note changes in the tree. My family has a Pin Oak tree that my son brought home from school when he was in the fourth grade that we use for this. In fact, I blogged about this tree in Lesson Of A Pin Oak. Now, it is a beautiful iconic part of our yard (pictured in this post).
Reading together. This is so important and can still be done with high-schoolers. I chose to read the same books my son had to read for school. Wow, what great conversations this spurred for he and I. All I can say is, “try it.”
Use technology wisely and discreetly. Children should not be burdened with information that is too adult in nature. They have neither the cognitive nor social-emotional skills to process this information.
Family events. Or, family events where the children bring a friend. We do a lot of family activities and my son and I have always done Dad and Lad events/trips. The beauty of these is that we control the content.
This is way too complex an issue to solve with a blog post, but I believe we all need to be reflecting on creating places of innocence. Most importantly we need to be mindful of what our children are being exposed to and give them more age appropriate choices.
Buy In From All Vantage Points
This week I had the opportunity to present a leadership academy workshop session entitled “Buy In From All Vantage Points.” The gist of the session was how to get an entire school staff to “buy in” to a continuous education model and other important school initiative. When I was first given the title I balked a little, but then decided to leave it so I could refer to not liking the title. I don’t like the title because “buy in” to me implies that there needs to be a “sales job” done after decisions are made. In my view, decisions should be made by including a wide range of individuals so the initiative, challenge, or opportunity can be looked at from all Vantage Points©. I refer to and use this model often when discussing leading change, which is what I would have titled the session. Here is the Vantage Point© model developed by MG Taylor Corporation:
When I want people to understand how powerful using The Vantage Points© is to leading change, I like to compare it to board games. If you think about it board games have a philosophy, culture, policy, strategy, tactics, logistics, and tasks. So, I had the groups pick a board game to use as an example. The group picked Candy Land™. Then they had to discuss board game from the seven Vantage Points©.
One of the groups of the two sessions I did on this did some research on the Candy Land™ board game and we learned some history. We were reminded that in the 1940s the dreaded disease of Polio struck thousands of Americans. In response to this, Eleanor Abbott, who was a victim of the disease herself, set out to develop games that would help recovering children pass the time. Milton Bradley, which is now Hasbro® began marketing the game in 1949 and is still being marketed today. Additionally, it is now available in electronic forms.
As the group made the comparison to leading change, they found that the philosophy was to be attainable and challenging to all – what we want in all education initiatives. Just like a board game, we need to give everyone a chance to play and have the opportunity to be a part of the decision making. It’s important to acknowledge that you will never convince everyone to get on board. An unfortunate truth is often that a better future for your school or organization doesn’t always mean a better situation for every individual in the end. It should, however, mean a better situation for the students we serve.
We need to always remember, when leading change, that change is always personal. Think about it; any time there is a change we all question how the change will affect us personally. As leaders, we need to be cognizant of this, and address this. By involving individuals from all vantage points we are able to help everyone, including ourselves, understand how the change will affect everyone. Leading change and new initiatives is a process, we need to use all our tools and techniques to manage the people side of change to achieve the required school or organization outcome. Effectively leading change incorporates the organizational tools that can be utilized to help individuals make successful personal transitions resulting in the adoption and realization of change.
Byron's Babbles 
leave a comment