Principal Matters!

As a school administrator, one of your primary roles is to get people to do what they need to do, the way they need to do it, and enjoy the work along they way. Will they?

You probably have found that there is often a wide range in the effort expended by your people.

An important thing to remember: people put more into work that they find to be purposeful and personal. Maybe you are an achiever… a rule follower, and you have made it this far doing what you’ve been asked to do. When others don’t act the same way you can barely believe it!

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They may not share those values with you and might be waiting until it gets real… and personal.

You’ll never lead a faculty made up of all people like you, so you have to learn how to frame the work for people who are different than you. And, what we know about change is that most people don’t like it. Unless… it matters, and/or it matters to them.

Why that should matter to you.

Whenever you are launching an initiative, implementing an idea, carrying out a mandate, if it were you, you’d jump on board and figure out how to make it work. Reminder: They aren’t you. (Some of them, maybe, but never all of them.). John Kotter in his eight-step change model refers to this as creating a sense of urgency. You STILL need/want your implementation to be successful, so if you can’t count on everyone responding like you would, what can you count on?

• Time. Successful broad implementations (not pilots… things that are done across an entire grade level, school, system, or state) take time. Reason- the late adopters have to have time to catch up with the early adopters. Don’t let the word urgency throw you… it’s more about intensity than speed. When people get there, they need to be there on purpose.
• Safety in Numbers. It’s easy to stand with others in a crowd. If you have a lot of people on board with the implementation, it’s easier for others to stand with them; if you have very few, it is harder. Group think (aka Culture) has a lot to do with the speed of implementation.
• Pilots work if possible. People need to understand what the change is about. Words only go so far. Many people need to SEE something to understand it enough to jump onboard. If you’re able, it’s always better to have a pilot with volunteers. For real, sure enough, volunteers (not voluntolds.). If you have people with whom the change is purposeful and personal already, let them carry it out without the weight of others slowing them down. Their work gives those people a chance to see it. It also gives you peers and students at whom you can point to for proof of concept.
• Make it Matter. Remember, organizations operate at different levels. You’re on the second floor looking across the whole of the organization. You spend much of your time and energy on vision. Your teachers and staff are on the ground floor and are most effective when they are focused. What do they focus on? That’s where you connect with them. Communicate with clarity and help them know that doing *this* leads to *that* (progress towards our goals… our vision). Being frustrated with them because they don’t “get it” is shortsighted. They aren’t working on the second floor— you are. Only a few of them share your gift of vision and they are candidates for your aspiring leader program! For the rest of them, your challenge is to tell them enough but don’t overdo it. You clarify the purpose from your perch of vision, acknowledging that they need more time to PROCESS since their perspective is typically up close, and not as far away as yours is.
• Make it Real. In a clarifying, not attacking manner, make the change real. Show how it’s worked in other places (pilot at your school being a part of this). Help them change their perspective and think about their own students or even their own children. Help them connect it in their minds to their own experience, their own work.

You’re a school leader. Change is what you do! Replace frustrations with strategy. Focus on progress, and celebrate your incremental wins.