"Leadership matters - Followership matters more"

The fall has arrived!

With the coming of fall I stopped the other day to pick up a new rake. Though I have a very powerful gas leaf blower, I needed a rake. I’ve learned that my leaf blower is really good at moving leaves but it misses the nuts. I have been blessed with several trees that gift me every fall with a lot of nuts.

As I was out last weekend raking nuts I had time to think.

My thoughts were centered almost exclusively on our current work including but not limited to: Human Capital Development and the transition to Common Core Essential Standards (CCES).

The Human Capital Development initiative includes the Professional Learning and Growth (PLG) plan. The PLG plan includes the Learning Development Center (LDC) initiative.

The CCES transition will involve our entire instructional division. This work will also allow us a “do over” with respect to standards, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional learning growth alignment. This alignment will manifest itself through the new Instructional Improvement System (IIS). The IIS will integrate our present Learning Management System.

That being said, our staff are exhausted.

We are working at the speed of blur.

In part, due to building the proverbial airplane in flight, we are working with the system in place while simultaneously building the system we need – our students, staff, and community need.

Further complicating this work is the fact that every level of work is doing this very thing – working in a current system while trying to build a new system. This is true for the Department of Public Instruction as well. What is happening however is an unprecedented level of confusion, chaos, conflict, and creep – mission creep.

Mission Creep?

Yes, mission creep!

Creep or slippage of the mission – the very purpose or aim of our work, is exacerbated by the current state of affairs. The feeling or sense of not knowing where we are going let alone why we are going there and how we are going to get there creates, well, a lack of trust.

We set out over four years ago on a journey to implement authentically a system of and for continuous improvement based solely on a theory of action: transparency yields trust that in turn yields hope. Not a hope founded on best wishes or intentions. Rather a hope built on results. Results realized by transparency in the day-to-day operations of the district. Transparency of motive, intention, purpose. Acknowledging and accepting where there are obvious areas needing improvement as well as taking responsibility for programs and practices not producing to date the expected or required results.

Transparency is about truthfulness, honesty, and integrity. The strategic commitments – our promises to our students, parents, staff, and community are based on transparency. Yet, transparency alone will not produce results. Transparency must yield trust.

Trust is created, in part, by transparency. Trust requires much more than transparency. It has been my experience that trust is earned. Leaders earn the right to be followed. Followership is sacred because we know effective leaders are just that effective because of the work accomplished by and through others.

Mission creep occurs when followership is weak or non-existent.

Followership is guided by factors many of which I know I learned from my parents. Such statements as “Never ask someone to do something you would not do yourself”, “Always remember from where you came”, “Lead by example”, “Your actions will always be heard louder than your words”, and the capstone, “Always do undo others as you would have them do unto you”.

Though there were many more phrases I heard from my parents and grandparents for that matter, what anchors these words are the behaviors I witnessed and experienced. There it is – followership is about leader behaviors or the lack of.

We’ve talked before about the difference between compliance and commitment. The trust engendered by followership is commitment, conviction, and courage.

Transparency that yields trust will create the hope that our students, staff, and community most desperately desire and deserve from their leaders – accomplishing the mission depends upon it.

This present work, however messy, cannot be deterred because of mission creep. Our mission is clear and must not be muddied by confusion, chaos or conflict of systems reset.

Our mission remains to ensure that each learner meets of exceeds high academic standards - no matter what it takes!