initiatives are underway so as to identify those that are the most critical.
Reeves and Eaker supply strategies and tools to help leaders get on course and stay there. After clearing the decks, leaders find out about the importance of keeping a not-to-do list. Reeves and Eaker follow with guidelines that support the leader each step of the way to short-term wins: defining high-leverage practices, assessing specific results, energizing people with what matters most, breaking down the hundred days into doable chunks, and ensuring accountability and persistence. They advocate collaboration where it counts to leverage their practical ideas. And they provide an account of what effective collaboration looks like in practice, ensuring—not just encouraging—collaboration; creating a shared understanding of teamwork; and building aligned teams districtwide to get continuous results.
Reeves and Eaker have written a powerful and inspirational resource. My recommendation is that, before reading 100-Day Leaders, you take a moment to reflect on the following questions.
• Do I find myself doing things that don’t have much of a positive impact?
• How energetic and focused are those in my organization?
• Are we getting anywhere?
• What results can I point to?
• What can I do in the short term to change things for the better?
Now you are ready to benefit from this practical and thorough book on leadership. Take a hundred days at a time, and follow the lead of these two authors who combine more than a century of practical leadership experience in these pages. They share the wisdom they have collected by working with hundreds of leaders who have found their way one hundred days at a time.
INTRODUCTION
WHY ONE HUNDRED DAYS?
IN OUR TRAVELS around the world presenting at educational conferences and consulting with schools, we have noticed that too many educational leaders are experiencing frustration, fragmentation, and burnout. They face more demands than ever before, yet they have the same amount of time they have always had—just twenty-four hours in a day—to get the job done. Many leaders are overwhelmed with priorities, projects, and tasks and feel like they are in an endless game of whack-a-mole, attempting to hit every demand that arises, while not making progress on their most important priorities. Although leaders can’t add hours to the day, they can make every hour more productive and focused. If you have felt the frustration of too many demands on your time and a horizon full of things to get done, then this book is for you.
In this book, we present a system for focusing on the highest-leverage leadership actions that will yield significant results in just one hundred days. Most importantly, this first one hundred days will set the pattern for the one hundred days after that, and for every succeeding one hundred days, as long as the leader bears responsibility for personal and organizational results. Our focus on short-term wins will energize your colleagues, students, and communities. While you will always have longer-term goals, this 100-day plan will provide the organizational focus and psychological energy that people in your school or district require to know that you are making progress. This plan allows you to steadily encourage and support the teachers and administrators in your building or district who will get the job done. You will replace the cynicism often associated with long-term strategic planning with a laser-like focus on what matters most.
If you think that one hundred days is not long enough to produce significant change, consider these remarkable accomplishments that people have achieved within that time frame: the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the longest-surviving governing document in the world, in the 18th century (Walenta, 2010); in the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler (Hoey, 2017); and the presidential and legislative enactments that lifted the United States from the Great Depression and set the stage for saving the world from fascism in the 20th century (Alter, 2006). Great things can happen in one hundred days!
Our observations of effective school change confirm these lessons from history. In a single semester—usually about one hundred days—schools have achieved dramatically improved student performance, better climate and culture, improved faculty morale, and better discipline and attendance. Our research conducted in schools around the world and published here for the first time, demonstrates that schools can do the following, within one hundred days.
• Reduce the failure rate by more than 90 percent.
• Reduce chronic absenteeism by more than 80 percent.
• Reduce the suspension rate by more than 50 percent.
• Radically transform faculty morale.
We have witnessed these results in elementary, middle, and high schools. They occur in urban, suburban, and rural schools; in schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families and schools where the students are affluent; and in schools where large numbers of students do not speak English at home and schools where the entire student body consists of native English speakers (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010; Reeves, 1999, 2001, 2016b). These results happen among students with a wide range of demographic characteristics. If we have learned anything in more than a century of combined leadership experience, it is that leadership makes the difference for student achievement and educational equity. Although most of our experience is in the K–12 public education field, we also have leadership experience in universities, private schools, charter schools, nonprofit organizations, and the military. Regardless of the setting, we see a consistent theme: short-term wins—gains in confidence that occur within one hundred days—establish the confidence and credibility necessary for long-term success. We acknowledge the value of longer-term goals and strategies; however, we find that those have no chance of successful implementation without the momentum that results from 100-day leadership.
Years-long strategic plans that offer more platitudes than substance make stakeholders weary. What these stakeholders—parents, students, teachers, community members, and educational policymakers—long for are results. They want short-term wins that restore confidence that the hard work teachers and students engage in will yield something more than vague promises of reform.
This book suggests a new way of thinking about leadership. Whether the project is large in scope, such as transforming a school into a professional learning community (PLC; DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016), or smaller in scope, such as developing formative assessments or new grading practices in a single semester, 100-Day Leaders brings a sense of daily accomplishment, from the classroom to the boardroom. The approach is rigorous, clearly distinguishing between implementation that is PLC lite (DuFour & Reeves, 2016) and the courageous, risky, and often unpopular decisions involved in implementing effective and lasting change.
We wish to make it clear what this book is and what it is not. In this book, we offer an integrated approach in which the leader will see connections that others in the organization may not find apparent; curriculum, assessment, facilities, transportation, food service, teacher evaluation, board relationships, and a host of other complex interactions lie at the heart of 100-Day Leaders. Therefore, this book is not a policy manual, academic treatise, or checklist. Rather, it is a practical guide for leaders at every level—from state, provincial, and national policymakers to superintendents, principals, and department and grade-level team leaders—that will support immediate transformations in culture, practice, and performance. We provide a coaching and development model for leaders who are willing to challenge themselves and their leadership teams to rise to greater heights of effectiveness.
In the chapters that follow, we begin with the moral imperative of leadership. This is the fundamental obligation educators owe to the students
