Rethinking leadership
Five Sonoma Valley educators recently spent four days at an invitation-only, all-expenses-paid conference near Santa Cruz. Sponsored by the Stuart Foundation and The Society for Organizational Learning, this event provided us the opportunity to think about leadership in new ways. I was joined by Sonoma Valley High Principal Kathleen Hawing, and SVHS teachers Pedro Merino, Janet Garcia, and SVHS counselor Maricela Sanchez.
While the surroundings were certainly luxurious, the work was just plain hard. Led by the prominent business consultants and authors Peter Senge and Robert Hanig, 60 participants labored through intense, challenging and exhausting presentations and small group sessions.
One of the key takeaways was this: Are we so busy that we cannot find time to think about systemic organizational change and what it would take to achieve it? For there is no doubt that we need to engage in this kind of thinking to avoid stagnation.
In my day-to-day work, it is easy for me (and others, I think) to fall into a struggle with an impressive to-do list, considering myself successful if I check some things off the list and if nothing big slips through the cracks. But when I string several of these task driven days together, I look back and wonder, sometimes, what it is that I have to show for my efforts in terms of sustainable improvements in public education in Sonoma.
Senge and Hanig met this mindset head on. My colleagues and I learned that our primary responsibility is to model effective leadership. By empowering more and more employees to see themselves as leaders, we can vastly expand on our ability to reach a shared vision and to take specific steps to realize that vision.
In order to forward on moving towards a collective vision, communication becomes one of the key cornerstones. With this in mind, a powerful communication strategy involved a model called the Ladder of Influence. The rungs of the ladder start at the top with Taking Action and in descending order include: Adopting Beliefs, Drawing Conclusions, Making Assumptions and Selecting Data. What I already knew but was quickly reminded of, we sometimes tend to “select data’ which aligns and supports our beliefs about the motivations about another person. In moving any type of difficult communication forward, asking questions and truly listening with an open mind before rushing to judgment is what we all need to do if we really want to come up with creative solutions moving towards a shared vision.
It is not enough for educators to be excellent in our own spheres of influence (superintendent’s office, school site, or classroom) if we do not move outside of those spheres to be engaged in the larger challenges that the District faces. Once we do so, we need to balance advocacy with inquiry; i.e., are we putting forth our own ideas without setting aside our own biases and listening to the ideas that others may put forward.
Senge is the author of a popular book, “The Fifth Discipline,” published first in 1990 and then republished in 2006. This conference was one of the first of its type with additional conferences scheduled for the fall. We look forward to continuing involvement in further work in this area.
