“Answer Guru”
As a leader it is not your job to be what John Manning (2015) calls an “answer guru” in lesson #35 of The Disciplined Leader. It is our job as leaders to build the.culture of the learning organization where we provide support, reinforce success, and embrace team members’ idea (Manning, 2015). Both education and business/industry have been run in a command and control environment for so long it is tough to switch to an environment of trust, openness, collaboration, inquiry, or dissent (learning organization) where the “leadership” provides all the answers.
Highly effective schools and organizations with highly effective teachers and team members promote environments where everyone can be “Learning Leaders.” Everyone in an organization fits into one of these three categories: Aspiring, Beginning, and Experienced Leaders. Because of this coherent and coordinated quality learning opportunities to support our leaders must be a part of career long professional learning. As a leader, we are a leader of learning. In my case, I am a leader of learning for our staff and the students we serve.
High performing schools and organizations have fatter decision making structures. This fatter, more effective structure comes from shared leadership. Shared leadership works through its motivational impact and the staff works to create structures for collaborative decision making. The organization or school then really becomes a place shared learning. This in turn keeps the leader from becoming the “answer guru.” And, quite frankly, the answers/solutions are much better than any one leader, at least speaking for myself, could ever come up with.
Looking at this from a school perspective; built correctly, a shared learning school has an instructional ethos where there is an an acute awareness of the instructional actions and an acute awareness of teaching and learning in the school. Then, as a learning organization, everyone in the school become designers of worthwhile tasks for students.
Who are the “answer gurus” in your organization?
Reference
Manning, John (2015). The disciplined leader: keeping the focus on what really matters. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Daily Huddles
Lesson #32 in The Disciplined Leader by John Manning (2015) deals with accountability systems and checking up on goals daily. Accountability, regular check-ins are very important. Many organizations, my own school included, use dashboards to keep track of the important data that needs to be regularly monitored. Disciplined leaders are goal minded and this dashboard data needs to be linked to goals both for the organizations, teams and individuals. Besides the dashboard looks at data, Manning (2015) provides three really great ways to manage performance daily. I would like to illustrate these by providing examples of how we do these while doing our state testing for the school I lead. Keep in mind, we are a statewide school and test in 23 different locations – a monster! Here are the three practices:
- Implement flash reporting – We do this by keeping a spreadsheet that is updated by our site leads at each testing location. An important metric for us is test participation. By law, we need to hit at least 95% attendance for our Full Academic Year (FAY), those students who have/will be with us for 162 days, students. Our goal is 100% of our students to be tested. The spreadsheet shows the sites, FAY students, non-FAY students, attended vs. non-attended, and whether a make-up has been scheduled for non-tested students. This report goes out every evening to our team giving us a flash update as to how we are doing.
- Manage by walking around – I am sure you have all heard of this practice before, but I practice this during testing by picking three to four locations across the state to just show up and be an extra set of hands. This gives me a chance to visit with teachers, parents, and students and see how we are doing with our testing first hand.
- Implement “daily huddles” – This is my favorite practice during testing and the one I believe does the most good. Each night we have a daily huddle debrief call with our testing staff, site lead teachers, principals, and myself to debrief about the happenings of the day. This debrief includes a discussion on attendance, things that went well, and areas of concern/challenge/opportunity/problems. The thing I like most about these daily huddles is the fact that it allows us to implement lessons learned the very next day. Another very important component in these huddles is the time spent laughing and telling stories from the day. Most of the time these stories start with, “You can’t make this up.” This time spent telling stories laughing and having some humor really makes the stress of testing go much better and builds camaraderie among the staff. Never forget – humor is an important leadership tool!

I believe these are great tools/best practices for keeping track of important accountability data and goals. Hopefully, my examples from just one area in a very complex school are food for thought to apply to your leadership setting. Do you have other best practices you would like to share or experiences? Please share by replying to this post.
Attracting, Preparing, Developing, Retaining
Leadership development and leadership project-based programs provide participants with practical, real world, and in-depth experiences. Well implemented programs provide ongoing mentorship, and targeted training across a range of areas within the organization. The key for success is customizing and personalizing all phases of the professional growth experience. It should truly be personal professional growth. The goal is to recruit and develop leaders for our organizations. With so much micro-knowledge and tacit knowledge needed for an effective school, or most other organizations, we must be building our benches and “raising our own.” As John Manning (2015) pointed out in Lesson 28 in The Disciplined Leader we must be providing growth opportunities and investing in our team members’ future. Never forget, intelligence of an organization is, no surprise here, a product of the intelligence of its members.
I am writing this post while sitting in the airport in Atlanta. I am heading home from a great meeting of state legislators and state boards of education members held to discuss the new federal education law, Every Student Succeeds Act. One of the things that kept coming up over and over was how imperative it is that schools have robust school leader and teacher leader development programs. It is obvious this is crucial for schools. That is why I am so proud of our Focused Leader Academy. Our Focused Leader Academy is an employee development and engagement program. The idea is that great minds and great motives still matter. Teachers with school leadership aspirations have the opportunity to become part of a cohort which will take part in monthly leadership training and be part of supervised leadership projects of the school. Cohort size is at least 10% of teaching leaders per year. The Vision is: Leadership will be born out of those who are affected by it. The Mission is: Leadership will appear anywhere and anytime it is needed. Our Theory of Action is: If we empower our teachers through leadership skill development…Then we will have teacher leaders ready to contribute to the success of Hoosier Academies and be an important part of our talent pipeline.
In fact we learned this is an important part of our talent management system. If we get it right we will be doing these four things:
- Attracting top talent
- Preparing top talent
- Developing top talent
- Retaining top talent
We need to be intentional about the development of the personal learning agendas of those we serve. In other words, we need to hyper-personalize!
Is your school or organization being intentional in the leadership development of those you serve?
Reference
Manning, J.M. (2015). The disciplined leader: keeping the focus on what really matters. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Leadership Heroin

Empowered Teachers for Action with Speaker of the House Brian Bosma
Yesterday was one of those incredible days in the life of a school leader. In the morning I was able to spend time with several teachers from our own school as well as many others from around the state as part of a program developed by one of Hoosier Academies teacher leaders, Jill Landers, in conjunction with Tosha Salyers and the Institute for Quality Education called “Empowered Teachers for Action.” The program included five sessions, four of which were held the previous four Wednesday’s, with the goal of educating teachers on governance, policy, and how to become involved in the legislative process. The program was a total success and culminated yesterday at the Indiana Statehouse with a panel discussion with Indiana Senator Hershman and Indiana Representative Cook, a discussion about how legislation comes about, and finally a discussion with Speaker of the House Brian Bosma. It was AWESOME! I might add this was Jill’s Focused Leadership Project as part of her experience in our Focused Leader Academy (FLA).

Discussion with Senator Hershman & Representative Tony Cook
As if that were not enough to make the day complete, we were then off to school for an afternoon session with our Focused Leader Academy where they were finishing up the development of our school’s new Vision, Mission, and Core Values. Last week, academy members led a school board retreat session getting board feedback and input. Now, the team was putting the finishing touches on everything. Earlier in the day there had been discussions about what a great experience and journey this has been for our teacher leaders. In fact, I would say our leaders have had an experience of truly building a vision, mission, and core values that very few top level CEOs have ever had. One of our FLA members, Alissa Davis, even said, “You know, I go through other organizations’ mission and vision statements and try to see if I can figure out what they do and stand for, and you know; many of them you can’t.” I have to give credit here to Mike Fleisch, who has been so much more than a graphic facilitator during our journey. He has been a partner, friend, and my jazz partner. We truly have become a jazz improvisation act. I’ll need to blog about this collaboration, but I’ll just say I would not be the leader I am today without the

Mike Fleisch
collaborative friendship/partnership, and jazz act, we have developed.
Those that know me won’t be surprised when I say that during our Focused Leader Academy session I get a little, o.k. a lot, excited and animated. How can you not, with a room full of great teacher leaders? Anyway, I had just said earlier in the day that I lived for these days. I was concerned yesterday,however, because there was a snowstorm coming in and I did not want to cancel or quit early (we did not have to). You know how sometimes when weather comes in how great it is when you get part of your day back when something is cancelled or ended early? Let me tell you, I do not ever wish that on these sessions.
During the afternoon session I got all excited when the group finally put the final draft status on the vision and mission and had defined student success (you’ll have to wait for these to be revealed). Then Jill Landers looked over at me and said, “this is your heroin.” Wow, pretty profound, right! Yes, she was correct – leadership and working with our staff is my heroin. Working with our teacher leaders in the area of leadership and professional growth is a drug for me. I get all hopped up just preparing and putting the sessions together. And, at the end of the day, I go through a little withdrawal. We all laughed when Jill made the comment, but she was right. I then shared a story I had heard about why so many rock stars have drug problems – it is because of the rush and high they get being on stage with all the people cheering and then there is not that high when they are not performing and they need something to give them that high. Drugs and alcohol become the medium. Well, let me assure you I do not need the medium in between, but I think we can all understand the situation.
Last night I got to thinking about having a drug addiction-like passion for leadership. Our second President, John Adams, was concerned about this passion for leadership. He posited that leaders become so passionate and addicted to the power of leadership they have the tendency to become tyrannical. He believed that an important task of leaders was both to incite and to control human passion, both in ourselves and those we lead. Make no mistake here, however, it is the passionate leaders we need in the world. It’s the passionate people that take the biggest risks, step up to the plate, and help make the biggest leaps forward within teams, companies, and organizations. People want to follow a passionate leader. Someone who cares about not only the cause for which he or she is working, but also the other people who are involved in the effort. Passion for the projects, for the company and for the people involved are key to successful leadership.
Finally, I guess it comes down to my attitude and mindset that makes working with our future leaders one of my leadership drugs (to continue with the metaphor). I’m driven by curiosity and the motivation to learn about the world around us. As leaders, we need to find ways to connect with the world around us. Curiosity and interest are both key qualities of the best leaders I know. What is your leadership heroin?
Managing Strategies for Engagement

This post is an excerpt from the book Authentic Conversations by James Showkeir and Maren Shokeir. This book is included in BKpedia, a new digital subscription service from Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Please visit bkpedia.bkconnection.com for graphics, tweets, and other resources.
Managing Strategies for Engagement
Engagement means being able to make meaningful decisions and to have the resources to act on those decisions.
The marketplace demands results now. Your customers want attention in this moment. The necessity for flexibility and speed in the face of change is paramount. The question is how to create an organization that can:
• Quickly create and apply new knowledge
• Grant exceptions and deliver unique responses
• Foster passion and accountability throughout the entire enterprise
For these significant changes to occur, three areas in the organization must be affected: (1) culture and management/governance practices, (2) architecture, which includes the ways jobs are designed and how people are grouped, and (3) the ways in which employees are rewarded. For all these changes to be planted and take root, new conversations are required.
Individuals must accept personal accountability for the success of the whole business and be responsible for their own motivation and morale. The culture must generate passion for the work and action in service of customers and good results. This requires less focus on personal ambition and a sincere commitment to the success of others.
Organizations have to create and sustain universal business literacy and adult-to-adult conversations, one person at a time. Management practices, such as budgeting, meetings, training, objective setting, performance reviews, and so on, must be recreated to encourage partnership. Dissent must be viewed as healthy. Through different conversations, knowledge and collaboration are baked into the work process, replacing compliance and control as the operating values.
Where to start? If the longest journey begins with a single step, it won’t surprise you that our advice is to begin by changing the conversations. Better conversations will reap rich, diverse information. They will encourage an examination of who plays key roles in improving business results. They will allow you to address difficult issues in a constructive way.
New conversations will champion the kind of learning and resourcefulness that lead to innovation, cost efficiency, and personal accountability—essential elements in addressing the complex problems of organizational renovation.
*****
James Showkeir and Maren Showkeir are principals of Henning-Showkeir & Associates, Inc., whose clients include 3M, Ford Motor Company, Kaiser Permanente, British Airways, Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Levi Strauss, the Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership, and the Nature Conservancy. Together they authored Authentic Conversations and Yoga Wisdom at Work. James passed away in August of 2015.
Reading You Like A Book
Lesson #21 in The Disciplined Leader (2015) by John M. Manning is about how as leaders it is important for us to understand what kind of nonverbal communication cues we are sending. In reading this lesson I was reminded of the incredible book by Dr. Nick Morgan, Power Cues (2014). Power Cues reports new brain and behavioral science about how humans communicate, and the importance of authentic face-to-face interactions. Dr. Morgan goes into detail on the visual cues, subtle gestures, sounds and signals that elicit emotion. As Manning (2015) taught us, leaders who are not in tune with putting on the right game face on are not effective with their teams. Manning (2015) said, ‘Leaders tend to pay way more attention to their verbal communication than their nonverbal communication. Many leaders often aren’t aware of what their nonverbal habits are and how they regularly affect others (Kindle Locations 1216-1217).” Leaders who understand how to become more persuasive and how to communicate more effectively will create more influence in all dealings, and as we know, leadership is about influence.
“No one gets led anywhere they don’t want to go. Machiavelli was wrong; leadership is not manipulation, not in the long run. It’s alignment, the leader with the group and the group with the leader. But you first have to maximize and focus your leadership strengths in order to be ready when your moment comes.” ~ Dr. Nick Morgan


“What this means is that body language doesn’t lie and can make or break what and how well you communicate to others.” ~ John M. Manning
The first three Power Cues deal with non verbal communication (Morgan, 2014):
- The first power cue is all about self-awareness. How do you show up when you walk into a room?
- The second power cue involves taking charge of your nonverbal communications in order to project the persona you want to project— through your emotions. What emotions do you convey through your body language for important moments, conversations, meetings, and presentations?
- The third power cue helps you learn to read unconscious messages. What unconscious messages are you receiving from others?
So, as you can see it is important for us to think about the nonverbal cues we are sending, but it is also important for effective leaders to read the nonverbal signals of others. Morgan (2014) told us that body language always trumps the spoken content. He also taught us in Power Cues that most of the emotional colors and tones of conversation are set through gestures (Morgan, 2014). For those involved in education reading this, Morgan (2014) pointed out that researchers have studied how children learn and have determined that they learn nonverbally first.
The bottom line is we need to be very aware of what message we are sending in our gestures, eye contact, hands, arms, stance, and attentiveness. As Morgan (2014) pointed out, the nonverbal communications, such as gesture, happen in the brain ahead of the verbal (spoken) communication. These nonverbal signals send messages that speak to the whole person and influence our ability to build effective relationships with our teams, influence those individuals, and lead our organizations.
If you want to dig deeper I would recommend getting a copy and reading Power Cues (2014) by Dr. Nick Morgan. Combine that with reading Manning’s The Disciplined Leader (2015) and you are taking major leaps toward your professional growth and becoming an even more influential leader.
References
Manning, John (2015-06-15). The disciplined leader: Keeping the focus on what really matters. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Morgan, Nick (2014). Power cues: The subtle science of leading groups, persuading others, and maximizing your personal impact. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.
Professional Growth Puzzle
It never ceases to amaze me how when reading a book with 52 weekly lessons, how each week can somehow be related to something in my weekly leadership journey. This week is no exception. Lesson #18 in The Disciplined Leader (2015) by John M. Manning was titled “Write Your Professional Development Plan.” I am a firm believer that personal professional growth must be personal. In fact I blogged about this back in 2011 back in 2011 after being a part of reimagining 21st century education with the Pearson Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. Click here to read Autonomy – Professional Growth Must Be Personal.
At the completion of our January Focused Leader Academy session yesterday I had a teacher ask me if at the end of the program in June if I would be doing an evaluation of each participant to see where they were as a leader and what they still needed to work on. Honestly, I had not given that a lot of thought yet, but my answer was: “I hadn’t thought about that yet, but yes that must happen.” Then I told her that part of that would have to be developing a personal professional growth plan. As I explained to her, leaders must own their own professional growth and she would need to continue to take responsibility for it. It is simply ludicrous to think that any organization can provide every piece of professional develop that every individual needs. As Manning (2015) pointed out, “having a professional development plan— a blueprint for where we want to go, what we want to be, and the steps we need to take to achieve it— can make the difference between professional fulfillment and failure (Kindle Location 1053-1055).” Now, it is part of mine and the organization’s responsibility to help mentor this teacher leader and help her to develop her plan. That is really an important part of the Focused Leader Academy. 
Our knowledge base is growing so quickly that individuals will no longer be able to think in terms of career education, but rather of a lifetime of multiple careers. It is the job of the organization to assist its employees in coping with this rapid change. The organization must be prepared to help its employees avoid the erosion of their skills and the onset of individual obsolescence. This is such an important concept as a believer that every person must lead from where they are. A professional development effort is most effective when it is integrated in the organization and internalized by the participant. It is why our Focused Leadership Projects are such an important part of our Focused Leader Academy.
“Even leaders with the best of intentions often do not realize the dramatic impact they can exert by being a role model or by providing guidance to employees seeking new paths to career satisfaction.” ~ Beverly L. Kaye
I appreciated this reminder of how important it will be for each of our teacher leaders to develop a professional growth plan. I will need to help mentor each participant and provide feedback. But… the plan will need to be owned by each individual. As Manning (2015) taught us, “Disciplined Leaders have been self-driven, lifelong learners who always put their goals down on paper and assigned a timeline with action steps for accomplishing those goals. They remained personally accountable to whatever they were pushing themselves to learn, do, or achieve (Kindle Locations 1065-1067).” In response to the original question of providing an evaluation – I prefer to call this feedback – I would posit that the feedback must be focused on behavior rather than on personality, that is based on observations rather than opinions, that is descriptive rather that judgmental. She will need for me to share ideas and information, that is specific about situations, and that is given at the appropriate time.
During the writing of this post I am reminded that in addition to taking responsibility for my own professional growth, I must also take personal responsibility for supporting the professional growth of all those I lead.
Reference
Manning, John (2015). The disciplined leader: Keeping the focus on what really matters. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Driven Crazy By Data
Yesterday I was involved in some pretty deep discussions on education. During one part of the discussion I made the comment that many times instead of being “driven by data” we are “driven crazy by data.” As usual, I got some weird looks, but it’s only because I was stating what many aren’t willing to discuss. I am calling this Part One because today I am going to use a personal example from our farm to make my point and will come back later in another post and prove an educational example. I believe those of you outside education in other industries and organizations will be able to use this example as well.
Today, my son and I needed to install a continuous 65′ run of matting for tie stalls in our dairy show barn. Pretty great Saturday Dad and Lad activity for a Saturday, I might add. Now here were the data points: Mat roll was 65′ long
Mat is 75″ wide
Mat weighs 2,000 pounds – 1 ton
Need to leave two inches on each end for the mat to expand
Needs to be 22″ from the wall at the top of the mat
Now, the company kept reiterating the mat was 2,000 pounds. Nice to know, but really I don’t care. The weight, however, was driving us crazy because we started the “what if” games. What if it’s not square? How will we move or change it? What if? What if? Well, we live on a farm and have the equipment to easily deal with one ton of material. We were truly letting one piece of data drive us crazy. I finally told my son. “We don’t care what it weighs.”We marked our 2″ starting point 22″ from the wall and squared the mat and began unrolling. The point: we only needed two data points to begin. We squared off the 2″ starting point and then checked the data point of 22″ from the wall (which meant we were keeping it square) as we unrolled. By checking every 4′ as we unrolled, we were able to make adjustments as we went. Bottom line – SUCCESS! The mat was perfectly square at the other end.
The point is we could have tracked barometric pressure, took temperature readings, timed the unrolling, measured fuel use of the tractor, video recorded the install, taken pictures (I did take three for this post), or who knows what else. All of those data could be valuable in other situations, but to us it would have been “noise.” In other words, it would have distracted us from the task at hand. In reality, if we would have done all that, we would have screwed up the install.
I am guessing that no matter what field you are in you can relate to this. Those in education could make a list of all the data points able to be tracked. But… we need to make sure we focus on data that really matters. Data that informs instruction and highly effective facilitation of learning is what matters most. If we are to be successfully driven by data, we must not let data that does not matter drive us crazy!
What data in your organization drives you crazy? What are the data points that will drive you to success?
Leadership is Responsibility
This week’s entry in A Year With Peter Drucker (Maciariello, 2014) deals with integrity in leadership. By posing the question “What do leaders stand for?” (p 369), Maciariello (2014) posits that leadership inspires trust and commits leaders to viewing the world as it is and not as they wish it to be. This is why core values are so important. I believe that the organization needs strong core value and then individual team members must be selected that have core values that match and compliment the organization’s. What a leader stands for is much more important than specific personality traits.
“By the way, the [great] CEOs I have known – and I have know quite a few – did not see themselves as supermen. They built a team. They were team leaders. ~ Peter Drucker
Effective leaders go to work on the priorities of the organization rather than those tasks they thought were going to dominate their tenure. In my world as a school leader it has been very important to have core values about what is best for students. I have had the opportunity to see the school’s and teachers’ core values develop organically in this this past year. Education is not unlike many industries in that it is so complex and ever changing. In fact, it is probably more complex and fluid. Leaders therefore must be continuous learners and surround themselves with experts in areas necessary to solve present and emerging problems. 
“Values, like nutrients that sustain an organism, also sustain an organization.” ~ Joseph A. Maciariello
Maciariello (2014) uses two of our great Presidents to drive home his points in this entry. Both Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman are lauded for the strong individuals they surrounded themselves with. I would add that it was the set of strong, well developed core values that gave both of these great men the ability to do such a great job of selecting their cabinets and generals. By understanding their own core values and truly living them, Lincoln and Truman were both able to navigate the selection of individuals whose own core values were the same. When we study the history of the times of these great men we find that even in personnel struggles, those Lincoln and Truman struggled with had like core values. These men had to lead in extraordinary times and certainly were not doing the normal day to day tasks of most Presidents – at least at that time.
“It is also the business with these values, the business that believes it exists to contribute rather than just to take, that will weather adversity. In good times, values may look like an ornament. They may be treated – and frequently are – as something we can indulge in as a “nice little extra.” It is in times of adversity, in times that try a man’s soul, that values are a necessity. For if the right values are absent at such times there is no incentive for human beings to walk the extra mile, to make the extra commitment, to do the hard work of rethinking strategy, of trying new things, of rebuilding.” ~ Peter Drucker
This quote by Peter Drucker (Maciariello, 2014, p372) really sums up why I am so blessed to have been a leader of a high school and now a school corporation in turnaround mode. I have truly experienced why core values are so important. As Drucker said, core values become ornaments in good times, but a necessity in adversity. I have learned why it is important to not let core values only be words on a page. All decisions, in good times and bad, must match a leader’s personal core values and the core values of the organization.
At the end of the lesson Maciariello (2014) poses the question of “What are the espoused values in your organization?” (p 373) The word espoused means what do we say we intend to do. I like that Maciariello used this word because what we say and what we do are many times two different things. If the core values are just espoused then they are just ornaments, probably posted on a plaque somewhere – fair weather values. So, my question to you is; Are your and your organization’s core values just espoused, or are they real guides that are used everyday to make the important strategic decisions of your organization?
Reference
Maciariello, J. A. (2014). A year with Peter Drucker: 52 weeks of coaching for leadership effectiveness. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Knowing Your Mission & Purpose
We are working on this very process right now in the schools I lead, Hoosier Academies. I have attached some visuals of our work in this area thus far. It is our desire that this process go so much further than just having words. We want our mission and vision to truly represent the shared purpose of all stakeholders in putting students first. By doing so, we can then budget on purpose, structure on purpose, staff on purpose, program on purpose, and strategic plan on purpose. We must know our mission because not everything is in life is worth doing. Without purpose it is hard to discern what is worth doing. In week 45’s lesson in A Year With Peter Drucker (Maciariello, 2014), five reasons for being purpose driven:
- Purpose builds morale.
- Purpose reduces conflict in organizations.
- Purpose provides vision.
- Purpose allows concentrating.
- Purpose provides a system of evaluation.
Drucker (Maciariello, 2014) posited that a theory of business needed three parts to be successful. First, there needed to be defined assumptions about the environment of the organization. Second there must be a specific mission. Drucker put this so well, saying, “The assumptions about mission define what an organization considers to be meaningful results – they point to how it envisions itself making a difference in the economy and society at large.” (Maciariello, 2014, p.353) Finally, core competencies define where an organization must excel in order to maintain leadership.
One of the main reasons we are going through this process right now was driven home by the fact that a mission must be tested against reality. Our schools had not taken a look and really studied it’s mission and vision since the start of the schools. No mission lasts forever. Also, we have to remember what Drucker (2014) taught, “Knowledge is a perishable commodity.” (p. 355) We must not procrastinate if our mission and vision are obsolete or no longer match our purpose. Additionally, we must rethink the assumptions and core competencies on which our mission and vision are based and update the premises on which our organizations are operating. I always have to remind myself and our team to stay focused on the things our organization must do extremely well in order to succeed in carrying out our mission. You will notice in the graphic representation of our mission and vision we chose to use a Jenga theme (I will be doing a post dedicated to the process we are using with our Graphic Facilitator, Mike Fleisch, later). We really think in the case of a school this is such a great way to look at our purpose, vision, and mission using because we have the student at the top, but if any other area fails it brings down the tower and does not allow us to carry out our core value you of putting students first. We must support those areas of required excellence by offering continuing professional development and education.
Reference
Maciariello, J. A. (2014). A year with Peter Drucker: 52 weeks of coaching for leadership effectiveness. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.





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