reaching a particularly difficult student with a very discrete and challenging learning deficiency. Rather than toiling away in frustration, with just a few clicks, that teacher can reach out to a limitless number of colleagues who may very well be dealing with the same issue. Therefore, even if we have more questions than before and the questions are more difficult, our access to answers has grown astronomically.
I have spent over a decade doing leadership and organizational culture work in private industry, as well as in private and public schools. These experiences have provided me with a unique perspective on what Fortune 100 companies do to compete in outlandishly challenging environments. After coaching CEOs in some of the fastest growing, highest performing businesses in the United States and working with executives in some of the most well-established businesses internationally, I have learned that the challenges of leadership remain remarkably consistent across disciplines. While public educators often wring their hands and bemoan the fact that they don’t have the same tools or resources as private industry colleagues, it is clear to me that it doesn’t come down to the tools or the financial accoutrements; rather, it has always, and will always, come down to the capacity to create a culture that encourages leadership. After watching outrageously successful leadership in private industry, I’m more convinced than ever that, when it comes to leading meaningful innovation in schools, we can do this.
One great example of what it takes to be successful in leadership is American Express, which has a long tradition of investing in leadership training. After becoming familiar with my work, American Express invited me to train a handful of leadership cohorts on the vice president promotion track with the company. The human resources director was particularly interested in helping leaders stimulate systemic learning. At a key moment in the training, I remember one of the attendees reflecting out loud on the training components (highlighted in this book) that speak to the importance of leaders’ capacity to influence, which improves the learning acumen individually and collectively throughout the organization. During this salient moment, this future vice president said, “I think I get it now, Casey. All these tools you are sharing can really help me. I will be able to lead others by helping them become better learners. It really does seem to me that to be a great leader, I have to first and foremost be a great teacher.”
Obviously this was a teachable moment for both the young executive and for me. While I’ve always believed that what we learn in education is valuable, this exchange convinced me more than ever that the expertise educators carry with them is more important to our culture than many of us, even the biggest fans of the profession and of learning itself, could ever have realized.
To compound this, we are living in a time in which technology makes everything easier. Technology, if used correctly, allows machines or devices to do the laborious heavy lifting, freeing us up to focus on the most interesting and engaging aspects of our jobs. We are living in a time when handheld devices have given teachers access to just-in-time information about each student, allowing them to adjust their work as they go. Teachers can use technology to open up the entire world to their students—a world that wasn’t available to them just a few years ago. We are also living in a time when we can share resources and help each other dramatically increase our own performance levels like never before. With all of these blessings, however, comes a renewed need for good choices to be made and for schools to never stop striving to be well led. If we can step up and accelerate our leadership capacities and truly lead with strategies that are appropriate for today—not yesterday—I believe we can open up an unprecedented world of opportunity for the students we serve and do a better job than we’ve ever done before. So are you ready? Let’s get started.
CHAPTER 1
Establishing Vision Clarity
We tend to talk about vision in imprecise and almost mystical terms. For instance, we expect our school leaders to have vision, and that vision is supposed to provide direction and help the school consistently move forward in a focused and purposeful direction. What we’ve learned, however, is that having a single visionary leader is an outdated presupposition in an increasingly complicated world. You don’t have to go back that far to find numerous examples of well-intentioned schools working under the assumption that it’s the principal’s job to come in and clearly articulate every nuance on the path to success. The old top-down approach simply doesn’t work in this far more complex world where the choices are innumerable and the work being done by the professionals on the front line is more sophisticated than ever (Bush, 2004; McGregor, 1960). In the LEAF model, entire schools need to have a clear vision of where they are going and what they hope to accomplish. To that end, their vision must be so recognizable that they know it when they see it.
Sadly, many schools operate with great imprecision regarding their collective vision. Even if these schools arrived at their destination, it’s conceivable that many staff members wouldn’t even realize they had arrived. Why is it so difficult for us to reach clarity about vision? There are many reasons, but what learning theorists and those who have studied the brain have discovered in the last several years is that from a learning and comprehension standpoint, the process of collectively capturing a similar image in an otherwise diverse group of people is far more difficult than could have been imagined (Reason, 2010). This new information is helpful in that now we can examine this otherwise dark and murky process of establishing a vision and can break it down into a handful of working components that thoughtful leaders can use to make vision clarity a reality.
No matter how charismatic or articulate a leader may be, he or she can never come into an organization and upload his or her image of the institution to everyone in the organization . . . at least not yet. The vision is usually based on predictable construction points, and the best way for there to be a more solidified vision for your school is to construct it together. When a leader constructs the vision alone, the school becomes far too reliant on one person. No matter how great an influence a principal or other dynamic school leader may be, it’s a mistake to create conditions where the future of the institution exists primarily between the ears of one person. Even if that person performs at exulted levels, there are always other human factors that ultimately shape the destiny of the school. Therefore, for practical reasons, vision must be a shared proposition.
In some respects, it’s amazing we get anywhere at all in schools, given the difficulty in establishing a clear vision. In just about every school I have visited, I have noticed staff members with wildly different perspectives on essential school issues, such as the merits of technology, the advantages of online learning, the need to differentiate, the effects of collaboration, and so on. Our schools are more diverse than they’ve ever been, and that diversity gap is only going to increase in years to come (Cato Institute, 2013). As immigration numbers continue to expand, our teaching force will become less homogeneous. In addition, as digital natives and digital immigrants continue to work together, the cultural and experiential backgrounds will continue to create chasms that make establishing a solidified vision that much harder. This chapter, therefore, is all about setting up your school’s learning rhythms to create the clarity necessary to be more effective than ever.
Paradigms of Yesterday
As you think about this arguably more evolved set of ideas about establishing and pursuing a vision in your school, it’s important for you to directly reflect on some of the old paradigms. In Taylor’s time, establishing a vision within an organization was all about the capacity of leaders at the top to appropriately word what should be accomplished at every level of the organization (Braverman, 1998). The notion that everyone in the organization would have a say in what the ultimate goals of the organization were and would be involved in thinking about how the system worked was completely foreign to the Tayloristic model. What mattered was that you did your job, followed the rules, and simply executed your localized function. It was up to people with higher pay grades than you to see and pursue the big picture.
Key Concepts for Today
Demonstrating mastery of this concept,
