style="font-size:15px;"> ■ Schools celebrate powerful learning opportunities instead of hiding them.
In addition, strong messaging allows your leadership influence to grow in the following ways. You will:
■ Communicate expectations in advance and increase your ability to navigate your entire school year before it begins
■ Deal with challenges in a positive way
■ Provide meaningful feedback to teachers
■ Enhance your school’s image with digital tools
■ Promote effective strategies that work
■ Improve student behavior and performance
If you’re going to maintain a positive perspective on school leadership that keeps you committed for the long term, you need motivation and strategies for improving the platform for your message. How can you make that happen? First, you create a positive culture through your entanglements. Second, you celebrate that positivity one message at a time.
How This Book Is Organized
I have divided this book into three parts to help you learn to maximize your messaging: (1) with teachers, (2) with students, and (3) with parents and the world. Each part contains a Now It’s Your Turn section that contains questions for reflection and taking action. You will also see suggestions for digital tools throughout with ideas for ways to create effective online platforms.
If you read no further than this introduction, let me leave you with this question: What kind of lasting impression do you want to impart to your students, teachers, parents, and the community from and about your school? My fear is that many principals become so distracted in the tasks of school management that they lose sight of the importance of taking back the conversations about their schools. What about you? If you are ready to take new steps toward building powerfully positive entanglements and persuasive messages in your leadership, then read ahead and let’s learn together how your messaging matters.
Now It’s Your Turn
• In what ways do you intentionally work to keep your environment positive?
• In what ways have you already embedded practices into your school for cultivating strong relationships and promoting positive happenings?
• What is one step you can take today toward improving the entanglement experiences of students and teachers in your building?
| 1 | Building a Positive Culture for Messaging |
The less people know, the more they yell.
—Seth Godin
When I was a boy, I loved lying on the front porch at night. With no streetlights or neighbors, our West Tennessee farmhouse was enveloped in darkness, surrounded by swampy creeks and woods, accompanied by the sound of crickets and the serenade of spring frogs. The blanket of stars above me was a thick, mesmerizing maze of constellations. My dad went through a phase of interest in telescopes, so sometimes we took turns looking for planets or peering at the moon.
Did you know that only one side of the moon is visible from the Earth? Because of the Earth’s orbit and the moon’s speed of rotation while orbiting, we never see the other side of the moon. Just like we only see one side of the moon, all of us operate in contexts that no one else is able to see. This is especially true of leaders.
So, as leaders, how do we communicate as effectively and thoroughly as we can while accepting that sometimes misunderstandings still exist? How do we set a foundation for effective communication in our schools?
Cultivate the Characteristics of Great Leaders
In the classic business bestseller Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, Jim Collins (2001) examines the highest-performing companies at the turn of the 20th century to see what traits they have in common. You might be thinking, “Schools are not businesses”; however, educators can learn a lot from Collins’s findings. As you focus on being the chief messenger in your school or district, consider the following lessons from Collins (2001).
Understand Your Passion and Mission, Which Drives Your Service Goals
According to Collins’s (2001) research on the top companies in America, when an organization narrows its focus to one or two main areas, performance inevitably increases. Schools and companies have similar challenges. School leaders have a lot to accomplish, and in the mix of opportunities, leaders can sometimes lose focus on the main reason the school exists. This is why successful companies have leaders whose passion and mission are intertwined. When you focus your energy, talents, and creativity toward the most important outcomes in your school (student learning, for instance), then you have a mission that keeps you focused on what needs to be consistently communicated to others about your school. Your passion must be connected to your mission, or you are simply managing, not leading. Think about the main mission of your school. How do you keep the mission in focus in every decision and action you make for your school community? Do you express your mission in every communication you send to your staff, students, and community? If leaders can keep the main thing the main thing within their schools, then everyone has a better chance of reaching desired outcomes. One way I have included mission in my messaging with parents is with a section in my newsletter called Learning & Growing that features photos and updates on lessons teachers and students are completing throughout the school. Because student learning is the main thing, what you are passionate about communicating must include moments of such learning.
Focus on Results Rather Than Obsessing About Personal Image
Leaders often make the mistake of choosing image over substance. In his research, Collins (2001) discovered that the most effective leaders are humble, teachable, and tenaciously focused on fulfilling the main purpose of their organization’s existence. He points out the fallacy of believing that dazzling celebrity-like leaders produce lasting change. The opposite is actually true. As he puts it, the most effective leaders are “plow horses, not show horses” (Collins, 2001, p. 20). Collins (2001) describes the most effective leaders as level 5 leaders: people who are quietly and consistently committed to making the right choices again and again over a long period of time. It is important to keep this distinction of results versus charisma in mind for school leaders and messaging. The goal of messaging is not to portray an unrealistic perception of what is happening with students or teachers. The mission of your school must be based on results for students—the essential learning, growing, and developing happening in their minds and lives. Your messaging reinforces these outcomes by helping others see what is not always visible to those inside or outside of your school building.
Build Long-Term Momentum With Consistent Growth and Progress
Momentum is a powerful force, and when organizations consistently push toward common results, they begin to see their strengths grow exponentially. In other words, once long-term, consistent growth begins, it is hard to stop or slow it down. On the other hand, Collins (2001) warns against the doom loop—a pattern of constantly introducing new, radical changes that actually stall productivity and halt momentum. School leaders need to create an environment of consistent expectations, and these expectations need to be the focus of what you are communicating with others about your school. For instance, if the bulk of your email or face-to-face interaction is about announcements, calendar changes, or meeting times, then you are missing out on other ways to communicate about the long-term goals and progress of student learning in
