Lake Trips and Friendships

Turn up the volume and let me tell you 'bout my best friend.

Leadership and Two Things

I was part of an interview panel for a leadership position within the county a couple of weeks ago. When one of the candidates was given the opportunity to ask questions at the end, she asked, "What does it take to be a good Coordinator in the system?" I took the question to mean, more broadly, what does it take to be a good leader, a question over which a great deal of ink has been spilled. If you type "leadership" into the search bar on Amazon, you'll get results 1-16 of 40,000 hits in books. That's a lot of ink.

When I was a youngun' just starting out, I had a pretty good idea of what leadership was all about. Of course, I was wildly wrong, as younguns tend to be about most things, but I was confident in my wrongness. Fortunately for me, I had the good luck to work for a great many truly excellent leaders over the years who helped show me just how wrong I was. Department chairs like Gus Galuzzo and Pat Brown; Assistant Principals like Rick Archambault and Tom DeHart; Principals like Linda Wilson, Jay Thanner, and Jay Ward. These people, and others like them, formed my personal leadership faculty over the long years of my career. I watched, listened, and learned at the feet of some true masters.

So what do I think good leadership is? I think it comes down to two things that are simple, though not necessarily easy: character and competence. Everything important about being an effective leader falls into one of these two broad categories. It's who you are and it's what you do. And no one can be a truly effective leader without both in equal measure.

I say all this because it's on my mind (that's what this little blog is all about,after all) but also because, as C&I staff, we are all leaders regardless of where we sit on the org chart. I continue to count myself fortunate to work for and with people of high character and impressive competence, including all of you. I can honestly say I wouldn't want to be in this boat with anyone else. Except maybe Spiderman. I'd like him to be in the boat. But not anyone else. It's good to have a crew full of captains and I continue to learn every day from each of you.

Hope you all enjoy your weekend!

Problems, Original Thinking, and Adam Grant

I was in a meeting the other day discussing the problems we're currently facing in education generally and in our little corner of it specifically. The gist of the discussion was that neither our problems nor our solutions are new. If we truly want to solve anything, some original thinking is in order. This is itself a problem, since the vast majority of our thinking is mundanely derivative at best. As we consider the challenges we face as an office, it behooves us to consider how we might promote original thinking. I hope you find this TED talk a step in that direction.