School administration has changed. It's no longer enough to practice "leadership" and expect big results for your students or your schools. The reality is, most of what we have been taught about how to move our teachers and schools forward is flawed and incomplete. It's a collection of strategies, advice, frameworks, and programs. Sometimes they work; a lot of the time, they don't … or they don't work as well as we'd like or for very long. What we need instead is something that always works and that isn't reliant on having the elusive perfect conditions of the right staff, the right students and parents, and the right boss.
What if you could transform your school with the people and resources you already have?
You absolutely can.
But you'll need something more than leadership to do it. Leadership isn't enough.
If you're like most school administrators with whom I work, you probably face several of the following frustrations at some point every school year:
Lack of control. You don't have enough control over your time each day. Instead of achieving your vision for your school, sometimes it feels as if all you do is put out fires.
No sense of urgency among staff. You're frustrated that you spend a large part of your day serving adult agendas instead of serving kids. It seems as if no one is willing to do what must be done to make a difference in the lives of students. People lack the will to change, the skill to change, or—heaven forbid—both.
A plateau. You've had some success in the past, but now you seem stuck. Everyone seems satisfied with the status quo, and no matter what you do, you can't seem to get your school out of the rut it's in and break through to the next level. As a result, you're working really hard but not seeing much progress year over year.
Initiative fatigue. You've tried various quick-fix solutions in the past and now your staff has become numb to new initiatives. You know what needs to be fixed in your school, but nothing you've tried has worked so far. You're tired of small wins and impatient for real transformation.
Resistance. Every time you try to move your school forward, you're met with resistance. Sometimes it's active resistance, where people fight you at every turn. But other times it's passive-aggressive, where people just ignore you. It almost feels as if your vision is being held hostage by a few naysayers who seem bent on sabotaging you.
Feeling overwhelmed. There are so many things that need fixing, and you're not sure how or where to start.
The reason you're experiencing these frustrations is usually one or more of the following:
You lack clarity. Your vision, mission, and core values are vague. While you may know that your school needs to change, you aren't clear yet about what your goals should be or how to articulate them to your staff in a way that creates a true sense of urgency and inspires them to want to change.
You lack cohesion. Not all your teachers are committed to your school goals. Maybe you're even feeling a little fatigued yourself.
You lack competence. You're not certain that your teachers have the skill it will take achieve your goals. Maybe you're not even sure yourself what the best path to those goals is.
You lack confidence. Even if you did have it all figured out, you're not sure that your plan will work or that it will make the difference you hope it will make.
The good news is that the clarity, cohesion, competence, and confidence you need can all be won when you make the switch from leadership to buildership.
What Is Buildership?
Several years ago, I read an article by a Harvard Business Review columnist named Umair Haque. He argued that what the world needed now was not more bosses or leaders but more builders. Haque (2009) offered this distinction among the three:
The boss says, "Go"; the leader says, "Let's go." The Builder says, "Come." (para. 32)
I remember reading that article and seeing in that one sentence everything that was wrong with how school administrators are taught to move schools forward. As Figure I.1 lays out, the boss, leader, and builder roles are very different. When we act like a boss and say, "Go," we are trying force our school to achieve goals. That never works. When we act like a leader and say, "Let's go," we are trying to push or pull our school toward our goals. That can work to a limited degree, if we are strong enough, are obstinate enough, and assemble and deploy just the right resources. But when we become builders and say, "Come," we invite others to help us create something extraordinary. There's no pushing, pulling, or dragging. We just get to work. And if what we are building is compelling enough, more and more people will choose to join us.
Figure I.1. Bosses, Leaders, and Builders
Bosses—Focus on tasks: What do we want to do? Arrange Do Control Maintain Make declarations Order Coerce Set tasks Focus on what is Remediate React Command Use people
Leaders—Focus on processes: Where do we want to go? Inspire Delegate Influence Improve Answer questions Debate Coach Pursue outcomes Focus on what will be Intervene Respond Ask Develop people
Builders—Focus on values: Who are we? What do we believe? Engage Enlist Empower Transform Ask questions Speculate Co-create Achieve goals Focus on what could be Prevent Anticipate Invite Build people
Source: Adapted from The Builder's Manual (p. 23), by R. R. Jackson, 2019, Washington, DC: Mindsteps Inc. Copyright 2019 by R. R. Jackson.
Think about the leadership training you received. You were probably taught to write a vision statement, create a strategic plan, and craft SMART goals. Maybe you were told that, in order to move your teachers, you needed to "get into classrooms" more, find the perfect conversational script for giving feedback, and then spend hours perfecting just the right nonthreatening questions that would generate helpful teacher reflection during your post-observation conferences. Or perhaps you were taught to have tough conversations that held teachers accountable, provide teachers with an instructional framework, and spend hours aggregating and disaggregating the data. This was the way to get everyone on board and moving together, with purpose, toward the goals you set.
All these strategies sound great, and maybe they have even worked to some degree, but they don't amount to a system you can apply consistently to get predictable improvement. Their success is reliant on you working very hard, often over a period of years, to convince others to do things differently and to stick with the changes, even when they aren't yet achieving what everyone hopes they will.
The more I learned about buildership, the more I saw its value as a way to reach school goals that isn't laden with broken strategies, wasted time, and that nagging feeling that, even with everything we're doing, it's still not enough.
I began to assemble all that I have learned working with schools over the years into a cohesive model that any school can use to focus on the right goals and accomplish those goals right now, with whatever staff and resources they currently have (see Figure I.2).
Figure I.2. The Buildership Model™
