Plan or Strategy? (Hint: You Need Both!)

We’ve had a lot of inquiries of late from school and NFP leaders who want to launch a strategic planning process.  We always start by talking with them about their why: Why now? Why a plan? What do they hope will happen as a result?

Once we have a sense of what brings them to us, we talk a bit about what we feel is important to communicate about our approach. Simply stated, that a plan is not a strategy. Perhaps strategic planning can be reimagined as an umbrella term to describe the creation of strategy and the act of planning to execute.

I’ve written a lot on this topic, but think it’s helpful sometimes to refresh these ideas in new ways. Here are a few key differences between a plan and your strategy - what did I miss? Let me know in the comments!

Scope and Timeframe:

• A strategy is wide in scope and conveys a few key choices or decisions that move you towards your vision over the next few years. 

• A plan is narrowly targeted, short term and lays out tactics and actions as you move forward. It’s incremental.

Orientation or External vs Internal Focus:

• A strategy orients your school externally and defines your unique value proposition  - as Roger Martin describes “where to play and how to win” - as you achieve a vision for impact. 

• A plan orients you internally - what systems and capabilities are we building and what steps are we taking to fulfill our strategy? They are related, but different. 

Commitment and Flexibility:

• A strategy is about making commitments - a few key decisions that focus resources and in turn, clarify what you won’t do. It can endure over several years as you move towards your vision for impact- even as your short term tactics adapt.

• A plan is prescriptive in the short term, but flexible as you learn, gather new data, and iterate. You prototype and pilot, refine, and redirect. If you are strictly crafting and then adhering to a plan over say, two or three years you’ll likely find much of it gets trashed as you reconfigure to navigate conditions you could not or did not predict. 

Imagination and Objective Certainty:

• A strategy requires creativity - making bets and forming a hypothesis about how to succeed that cannot be grounded in data or a look in the rear view mirror. In other words: “what got you here won’t get you there”. Strategy demands new thinking, innovation, and a testing of underlying assumptions 

• A plan considers what you do know, based on data, your SWOT analysis, and how you take action in the present tense. You may need to close some gaps, align to values, and respond to immediate threats. But with a strategy, you can design tactics that attend to the present as they evolve you towards the vision you have for success.

Visuals can help. We like Amy Webb’s framework to convey how a plans (tactics) are related to, but different from, strategy.

Maverick -- Who’s Your Goose?

Imagine a new Executive Director, President, CEO, or Head of School as they enter their new role: who to meet, what to learn, how to get up to speed? Imagine a current leader, balancing the demands of their external-facing activities, an active board, and the day to day strategic operations of their organization.  Whatever the context, every leader needs a trusted wingperson navigating alongside them -- a Goose to their Maverick. 

Many years ago, I suggested to a Head of School that the creation of an executive office is what’s needed to thrive in leadership.  Build the office around a Chief of Staff (CS) to the Head (or CEO) who might then manage a shared administrative assistant for the inner team. Further, I imagined the CS role as a coveted leadership development position -- perhaps a 2-3 year role for aspiring heads. He liked the idea in concept, but couldn’t imagine a break from the traditional organization.

Now, more than ever, I think this model has a lot of advantages: 

1. It directly supports, at the strategic level, the expanded and increasingly complex responsibilities of modern school and not for profit executives

2. It presents an opportunity to build an economically sustainable and strategically coherent way to address key activities that often get distributed to new positions and/or spread across multiple leaders (organizational sprawl)

3. I creates a leadership development pathway currently unavailable in most schools and NFPS

4. It expands capacity, and increases support, for leaders in any context

Let’s start with the distinctions between an executive assistant (EA) and a chief of staff (CS).  Both jobs are important – and to be clear, a highly competent and seasoned EA often functions, at least in part, like a Chief of Staff. There are a few key differences in my conception that really matter, highlighted by the descriptions of each role.

What does an EA do?

An EA is largely a trusted gatekeeper - with a clear understanding of how to both protect and manage the time of a leader by coordinating their schedules and keeping them connected and on track on a daily basis.  EA’s have strong executive function, are organized, and attentive to detail. EA’s, like a chief of staff, are a “vault” and are able to protect sensitive or confidential matters with elegance.

What does a CS do?

Like an EA, a CS ensures a leader is prioritizing time well - but the CS has an enterprise-wide sense of where a leader’s expertise, skills, and strategic vision have the greatest impact.  Moreover, a CS can coordinate the strategic priorities of the organization and support execution by interfacing with senior leaders and trustees, driving agendas, and facilitating open communication and productive collaboration.  A successful CS is a facile negotiator, project manager, and pattern detector -- able to facilitate productive work and help a leader navigate dynamics and tensions that impact progress and culture. The CS operates with agency and autonomy often interfacing internally and externally as a representative of leadership. Because a CS operates at the intersections of the organization and its primary functions, they quickly build knowledge, expertise and experience that most individuals can’t access.  And the extraordinary access to leadership exposes them to a broader context for mentorship, problem solving, and coaching than a functional leader might experience. By definition, to be successful the CS must demonstrate the ability to build good will, trust, and strong supportive networks. An added benefit? The CS works on long term projects and helps the EA and other assistants make day to day decisions in support of the bigger picture - creating a more efficient system of support in the executive suite.

How might your life as a leader be different with a great CS? How might your organization benefit?

Why Do You Want a Strategic Plan?

Everyday, we hear from prospective clients who want support in building a strategic plan, many of whom offer a detailed RFP. We don’t fulfill RFPs. Instead, we ask: Why do you want a strategic plan? We ask this question because we’ve learned there are many reasons organizations decide they want a strategic plan. We also know that designing strategy and strategic planning are different activities. Sometimes, our quest to understand what the organization really wants means we don’t win the business. And that’s a good thing. Because the why matters.

To simplify, we generally see three overarching reasons driving the requests for strategic plans: 

BETTER MARKETING: For some organizations, strategic plans are often desired to combat declining enrollment or revenue growth: the plan is envisioned as the “silver bullet” to drive better marketing, branding, and advancement. We see this most often with  organizations who want to better articulate and promote what makes them valuable, special and distinctive. We hear things like “we need a strategic plan so we can do a better job of describing and communicating who we are — and we need to push that message out successfully”.  Often these organizations also want a feel good process that involves stakeholders to “bring everyone along”. When we hear this “why” we challenge clients to examine their assumptions. Have they defined the problem correctly? Is there a root cause or an issue of quality  they may have overlooked? If not, we steer potential clients to marketing, branding, and communications strategists.  

A NORTH STAR: For other organizations, the desire for a strategic plan is grounded in an optimistic sense of opportunity, and the need to orient everyone towards a  “North Star”.  In schools, there may be an accreditation cycle that gives the extra push -- and a recommendation that the school develop a clear purpose. It’s also not unusual for this “why” to correspond with an upcoming leadership transition or with the entry of new leadership. The organization feels like it’s on solid ground, and is eager to develop a vision for the future as it leans into its assets and strengths-- clarifying its own purpose and imagining a bold new future.  These kinds of strategic plans are also often inclusive exercises — but they  are a heavier lift — actively engaging people in affirming what matters most, and designing and testing new ideas to support effective execution.  

A WINNING TRANSFORMATION: Then, there  is the plan driven by a deep sense of importance and urgency: a sense that the current operating model may not be viable for the future --- that the conditions for success are changing — and a sense that the needs and interests of stakeholders are changing.  In these cases, organizations want to consider the changing landscape and scenario plan; they want an honest diagnosis of current operations, and a reasonable and compelling treatment recommendation. Sometimes the value of the program and the product is under serious examination, and the relevance of mission needs to be tested. Most often, questions regarding the capacity of leadership and talent surface, as do elements of culture: can the people and the culture we have now take us where we want to go? Transformation and change are the core of this planning endeavor, it’s a deep, long partnership, and the design of strategy happens within the execution of strategy -- and the plan is an iterative working approach to execution. It drives the organization towards new success. 

You may see parts of your why in one or more of these buckets: often, we find clients begin with one why and discover another why as we set out on the journey together. Our work focuses on the NORTH STAR and the TRANSFORMATION projects because that’s what strategy is all about. Goals, tactics, and laundry lists of to do’s that drive effective execution follow the creation of a winning strategy. What is your why?

Back to School: Let's Reclaim Some JOY

In our work with K-12 schools, universities, and not-for-profits, GLP emphasizes the need to establish a shared set of core values that serve as essential filters for organizational priorities, practices, and policies. Clearly articulated and purposefully cultivated core values foster a deeply connected community and positive experience – for ALL.  

For ourselves, the GLP team has named the following principles for our work with clients and our collaborations as a team:

Our focus on JOY is not accidental and not merely about “having fun”. It's about enjoying the work and the relationships we make along the way.  It’s about valuing the people we work with.  

JOY is about forging connections and doing purposeful work that matters.  

It’s a cliche to say, but…  “Now more than ever”, JOY is an essential element of learning that our schools, educators, and students desperately need to reclaim.  

Over the past three years, much has been made of the negative impact of COVID-related stresses on student and educator well-being, engagement, and performance.  The phrase “learning loss” has been turned into a mourner's lament as schools grapple with the long term impacts on student learning and glaring inequities revealed by student performance data, including attendance and test scores.  

To be frank, the term “learning loss” gives me the heebie-jeebies.  It’s classic deficit mindset language that communicates to our students and teachers that they are already behind the 8-ball and better “catch up” or get left behind.  

But what are we “catching up” to? 

More often than not the answer is performance on standardized tests and the proposed “fix” is more intensive instruction focused specifically on test prep.  Approaches that we already know quash students’ curiosity and intrinsic motivation and, in the end, result in shallower and less “sticky” learning.  

As so eloquently described by Susan Engel (author of the book The Intellectual Lives of Children) in a February 2021 Harvard EdCast interview and quoted in the excellent Harvard GSE Ed Magazine article “A Space for Joy”:

“I heard a first-grade teacher say to me, back in August, when she was planning her remote teaching, she said, ‘The parents are so worried that their children aren’t going to keep up this year.’ And I said, ‘Keep up with what?’ And she looked surprised, and she said, ‘Well, with the standards.’ But I mean, the standards are completely arbitrary. Who made up those standards? Just a lot of people sitting in rooms. I don’t know. And I’m not sure they were good standards in the first place, but it’s silly to let those constrain you too much as a teacher right now.”       

I couldn’t agree more!  Standards -- when used healthily -- are a deeply valuable tool.  They can help educators develop consensus about essential skills, mindsets, and capacities while also ensuring that all students are given the gift of high expectations combined with deep support.  However, post-COVID we can still have high expectations for the performance of our learners and educators without demanding adherence to arbitrary proclamations of “But, you should already know this!” -- or be able to do that, or have arrived at a specific destination -- “by now!”  We can “meet students where they are” without sacrificing high expectations for all!

What we really need to “catch up” on -- what learners and educators really lost during COVID-related disruptions -- is JOY.  That’s where we need to recommit -- in forging connections between educators and learners, creating the community conditions that will allow for deep, meaningful learning and promote intrinsic motivation and resilience.  

So how do we do that?  How can we intentionally cultivate JOY in the classroom?  Essentially, it’s about fostering spaces of shared ownership and purpose.  

• Start by building trust with and between students, “slowing down to move fast”.  I like to begin the year with low-stakes collaborative problem solving challenges.  Favorites include the Marshmallow Challenge, Inquiry Cubes, and the Paper Bridge Design Challenge.  These challenges allow students to develop shared purpose and to reflect on conditions that foster collaboration and strong teamwork.  Deliberately involving students in drafting shared classroom norms and establishing a “Team/Classroom Charter” also helps ensure that students develop a sense of ownership and responsibility for both culture and learning.

• Commit to pedagogies of purpose.  Project-based learning, place-based learning, experiential learning, Socratic seminars and more! What do all of these powerful approaches to learning design (and assessment!) have in common? First, a commitment to student-led learning that centers student interests, choices, and agency while fostering critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.  Second, connection to real-world events, issues, and questions that establish a shared sense of purpose and urgency.  Third, intentional instruction, support, and modeling for effective student collaboration to wrestle with and “make meaning” around complex ideas and problems. 

• Commit to authentic assessment. Student exhibitions, student-led conferences, presentations of learning, collaborative exams and other approaches to assessment can ensure that student work is appreciated by more than “an audience of one” -- turning assessments into powerful learning experiences in and of themselves.  Authentic assessments shift the emphasis away from just earning points and letter grades to producing quality work that matters.         

Let’s reclaim what school can be.  Bring back JOY and the rest will follow.  Attendance, educator retention, student learning, and -- yes -- those darn test scores too.     

For more about the power of JOY and how to cultivate it with your team and in your classroom, see:

• Dickson, D. “How I’m Putting the Joy Back in Teaching This Year,” EducationWeek. August 8, 2022.

• Heinze, C. “5 Strategies for Incorporating Joy in the Classroom,” The 74 Million.  March 6, 2023.

• Hough, L. “A Space for Joy,” Harvard GSE Ed Magazine. May 27, 2022.

• Liu, A. “Making Joy a Priority at Work,” Harvard Business Review, July 17, 2019.

• Opitz, M. and Ford, M. (2014). Engaging Minds in the Classroom: The Surprising Power of Joy. ASCD. 978-1-4166-1633-7.

Who Plays, and What to Do When You Don’t Have the Right Players: Part 3 of a Three Part Series

Parts One and Two of this series addressed the principles and practices of high performing teams. This final installment addresses the question of “who” – who you need, how you assess performance (of the team and each member), and what to do when you find you don’t have the right players. 

Who You Need 

Building a team is strategic and disciplined work. Whether you are building a board, an executive team, or a functional team, composition matters.  And composition is the careful curation of mindsets, abilities, and behaviors that empower the team to be greater than any one particular member.  

The first step is to decide what you need in terms of mindsets, abilities, and behaviors. No one person can fulfill all your needs, but there are certain “need to have” attributes for every member that help you build the culture and disposition of the team.  You’ll likely seek evidence of collaboration skills, critical and systems thinking skills, and communication and interpersonal skills that promote productive group work. You’ll seek in each person a particular ethos and values set that mirrors the organizational ethos and honors the contributions of each team member. 

Once you’ve outlined these core needs, you’ll want to seek particular functional or technical skills and expertise that round out the team – most often mapped to the areas of organizational focus and strategic choices that drive the enterprise. Don’t let the functional organization, on paper, drive the composition of your team. You may have a wider collection of senior leaders who represent the core functions and/or business lines, and you will recognize them as such, but your executive team needs to work closely with you to drive enterprise wide priorities. 

For example, you may have multiple programs or divisions in your school or organization. The assumption that these leaders need to be on the executive team can be tested. You may prefer to have one leader who unifies this group and directs them in ways that ensure tight focus on institutional strategy. Similarly, you may lift up a leader, like a director of communications, who also reports to your Chief Operating Officer, to be part of your team because they exhibit both the core capacities and the particular expertise you need.

A note on who’s on the team (or in the room where it happens): as a leader, you walk the challenging line of being clear about roles and responsibilities, while also fostering inclusion, collaboration, transparency, and an authentic sense of agency and purpose in all your leaders and staff. Your executive team shares in this responsibility and together, your actions must attend to these aims.  

A small executive team that works effectively can, at its best, create more space and access for robust vertical and horizontal collaboration within your organization. A CEO or Head of School with strong distributed leadership is naturally in a better position to coach, mentor, and communicate more broadly inside and outside the walls of your organization. So, work with your team to attend to communications that keep everyone in the loop . Ensure transparency and clarity about the decisions that affect your people.  And work hard together to seek involvement and input from the many talented people that make it happen in your organization each day. 

How to Assess  

You’ve done your best work to assemble a great team – or perhaps you are working with what you inherited or have for the time being. In any case, assessment and feedback are essential tools in developing and composing the best team you can build. Too often, effective feedback and assessment are entirely overlooked, or sporadic and informal at best. 

To develop and evaluate a team and its members, you want to ensure frequent reflection and feedback, coupled with more formal assessment.  Talk with your team about how this work is designed – without it, the team can’t improve and you lack sound data to make good people decisions.

Informal and ongoing feedback stimulates correction, learning, and growth. It happens in real time, through observation and dialogue. Formal assessment is best accomplished with a thoughtfully designed tool that, in effect, measures that for which you provide informal feedback.  Your team can help you build the tool, and by involving them you explore together what will drive collective performance and foster ownership for an accountability system (designing together also models how they can engage their own teams to do the same). Most good tools include assessments against the core criteria you value for team members and assessments of progress on strategic goals (see the figure below).

You’ve built criteria for team members, and your charter names areas of responsibility and key strategic goals (ideally with measures of success). Build these into your tool and update the tool annually so it works as a dynamic instrument to capture growth and development over time, and more specific performance on organizational goals. Remember to use clearly stated scaled and open-ended queries that assess both the function of the individual and the function of the team as a whole. 

Engage the right people in the process of assessment:  if you limit formal evaluation to your own perspective, you lose valuable insight and perspective on both individual and team performance. Who might have experiences, observations, and insight that help you assess? Consider peers, direct reports, and collaborators when you administer formal assessment.  We prefer to steer away from terms like “360 degree review” which often implies wide scale feedback - sometimes from the whole organization. What we do encourage is that you solicit thoughtful feedback from people who interact directly with members of the team and witness their leadership.  

When You Don’t Have the Right Talent

Sometimes you inherit a team member who just doesn’t want to play by the values and norms you’ve established, and sometimes these folks are toxic to the team. Or, despite your best efforts, you’ve discovered that the person you are coaching is not likely to master the capabilities you need, and while well-liked, frustration within the team is mounting. Maybe you have an open position or an emerging gap and you need to fill it – and until you do everyone is working harder, but not smarter. Know that the team is never static, and you will likely be dealing with one or more of these realities often, if not all the time, in the course of your leadership.

If you have a player that needs to be moved off the team, but you are not sure how or when to do so, the most important thing to ask is:

How is this individual’s performance 

impacting the people who lead us forward? 

In the effort and time it takes to figure out how and when to move on a poor performer, we often lose sight of how that person is impacting others over time – and we delay the hard decision or construct unsustainable workarounds.  Often, leaders underestimate the cost to the team, so if there’s one thing to remember it’s this: 

Preserve optimism and energy in the people who will lead you forward

by acting humanely and decisively on the people who cannot.

If you have attended to feedback and assessment purposefully, your job is made easier. If not, you’ll need to work quickly, with the right support, to either remove or redirect a player in order to protect the morale and focus of your team.   If this person is harming team culture or breeding real frustration, delay is costly, and too often we see leaders who prioritize their concerns for that individual over the needs of the team.  In the end, no one is better off.

Leaders need partners who can help them address these talent issues. Who helps you? Not-for-profit and school organizations often lack in-house strategic human resource leaders to advise them, and if this is you, make sure you have an external resource to guide you.  But remember, the hard part is taking decisive action – once you decide, the tactics will follow. 

Finally, if you have a gap in your team and need to fill it, you may look both within and without your organization for talent. The key here is twofold:

1. Do this with your team: develop a shared understanding of what you need and the profile for the role. Involve your team in the interview process, and agree on decision-making criteria.

2. Be accountable to a timeline: the long, dragged out processes to find the perfect person can really bring your team down.  Find the person most likely to “fit” and “grow” – don’t expect perfect. And have a back up plan (perhaps outsourced or attended to by a junior “interim” team inside your organization).  Know your best alternative to a great hire and implement it early, so that if things don’t pan out in your first efforts, you know what to do in the interim. 

In the end, knowing you have a team and coaching it to success is never-ending work! Teams, like organizations and people, are living organisms that need to continuously learn, evolve and adapt. As a leader, your attention to the health and function of the team is one of your primary responsibilities.  Let us know if we can help!

We Call Ourselves a Team, But...Part 2 of 3: Rowing Together

In part one of this series, I outlined five principles for building a high performing team.  Agreeing on these is the easy part. Becoming a team, and functioning well as a team day in and day out, is hard work. This post outlines some “how to” tips to put these principles into practice!

But first a note to you, the leader: You model the way, deciding when to direct, when to coach, and when to step back and let others lead without you. Ideally, if your team is thriving, times to direct are minimized, and times to coach or simply stand back are maximized. But you are responsible for insisting on the conditions to make this happen.  So let’s assume the one place where you will surely be authoritative is in explaining and then ensuring fidelity to the principles. From there, there are a range of ways in which you can participate, coach, and simply stand back as the team learns, collaborates, and “plays” to win!

Principle 1: Collective performance must trump individual performance in order to make progress. 

As a leader, you want to establish this idea off the bat. But you’ll need feedback and suggestions from team members about what this looks like in action. Lots of dialogue in the early days of teaming can go a long way. Work with your team to explore why you can accomplish more if you function as a team - and how that differs from being merely a group of leaders. Once you've established why collective performance matters most, you can identify the conditions needed to ensure this can happen. It might start with questions like:

• How do we want to feel as a team?

• What do we need to know as a team?

• What do we want to be able to do together?

• How will we assess and measure our progress? 

• What do you need from me, your leader, to make this happen? (this is an important question and encouraging your team to offer you honest feedback - and receiving it with gratitude - is essential)

As you explore these questions, you’ll likely name the behaviors, practices, and mindsets that either encourage or inhibit collaboration towards collective performance. 

The next step is to establish norms. Norms are agreements about how you will work together as a team, and they name the mindsets and behaviors that drive teaming. Norms we’ve heard teams create include “assume positive intent”, “share the air”, and “hard on content, soft on people.”  Your team will craft its own -- and team members will be creative and thoughtful.

Once you can agree on norms, you’ll also want to talk about methods to course correct when someone steps out of the norms – make it fun, non-punitive and easy to implement. Many teams have a code word or signal when someone strays – and use it with joy!

Creating a shared commitment to collective performance and then establishing the conditions for success is step one. 

Principle 2: Teams thrive when each member has a valued role with clear, shared purpose. 

A team charter is a useful tool for making your team’s purpose explicit – and mapping individual roles against the goals you pursue together.  You’ve established conditions and ground rules but now you need to determine what you are trying to accomplish and how each of you will contribute to the overarching goals. We encourage teams to draft a charter that includes a statement of mission, a delineation of roles and responsibilities, and priority goals or areas of focus. The charter should recognize and address every member of the team – speaking to them through the lens of their collective performance.  

Once the team has established its charter, each team member has a clear sense of what matters most – and how their role as an enterprise wide leader is paramount. But they still have functional domains, and the crafting of a charter models an exercise they can do with their own teams – this is how leaders knit together the work up, down, and across the organization.

We have a helpful toolkit for building a team charter. Let us know if you’d like to use it!

Principle 3: Trust is the foundation, but you can’t win the game without shared understanding of strategy. 

Trust is a core condition for success -- one that must be built and nurtured over time -- so attend to practices that build confidence both in you as the leader and among the team. Trust doesn’t develop through ropes courses, clever team building games, and fun social events. Sure, these things can help, but the real work is in building confidence through consistent experience, and working together to understand and pursue the strategic aims of the organization.

As a leader, first explore with your team what practices (for meetings, communications, collaboration, etc.) help build confidence in your ability to achieve your goals. Remember, you’ve identified behaviors that hinder or encourage great teaming – so design your practices to meet those needs and ensure all team members feel valued and clear with respect to their roles. 

Teams are not afraid to experiment with new practices – so talk about how they work. Are they advancing you towards your goals? Are they modeling collaboration and shared purpose? Recalibrate often, and as a leader, know when you need to work with a particular team member who may not be fulfilling their potential.  

What are practices? Think meetings, agendas, schedules, project management systems, and organizational structures like committees designed to make work happen. These practices are not meant to be static – but they often slowly cement themselves into organizational life. Model the way for agility in your organization by trying new ways of working to stimulate progress.  

Often, as teams explore what’s in the way, they find an audit or assessment of systems and practices can help to redesign ways of working that support talent!

Principle 4: Players need to train, and teams need to practice. 

Practices are supporting structures. But practicing as a team is where the learning and development happens. As the “leader as coach” your job is to create space for the team to 1) practice without you on the field and 2) reflect on their performance. As a coach, you’ll do this with them as a collective and as individuals.  So, take out your charter, look at your goals, and ask them to talk about it. 

• How were we going to get there? 

• What’s our strategy to make this happen? 

• How did we do? 

• What needs to change? 

• What do you need from each other? From me? 

Real time feedback and a next cycle of practice develops the team.

Each team member also needs attention, and has particular strengths to leverage and weaknesses to manage.  As a coach, how can you help that performer grow – and support them with targeted skill building? How can peer coaching and collaboration target skills and leverage strengths? 

As a leader/coach, nurture your players’ success by ensuring each individual not only understands their role in advancing the work of the team, but also by aligning their personal  goals, feedback and assessment to maximize their contribution to the team’s performance.

 We help teams and the team members from the get-go to develop and utilize coaching skills - we think it's the single best skill every leader has to unleash potential within themselves and with their colleagues and direct reports. Build a coaching culture and your practice will be a lot more effective. 

Principle 5: High functioning teams model the way and shape culture.  

When you draft your team charter, don’t forget that this principle is at the core of your mission. Your overarching job is not to accomplish the goals, it's to build and cultivate an organization of talented people who together can do the job. That’s why coaching skills are so important to develop in your leaders. 

As a regular part of reflection with the team and with your team members ask: 

• How are you developing your peers and your people? 

• How are you modeling for them the work we do as collaborators? 

• What practices are you spreading and scaling in your functional work to help build the culture we need in our organization? 

Finally, assess yourselves both as a team and against this critical element of purpose. If you don’t measure it, you’ll lose sight of it. Systems for assessment and evaluation need evidence based approaches to help you make progress. And don’t assess once a year. Make this a regular part of your work - with informal check-ins and formal efforts to solicit feedback - from your team and from other members of the organization. Return to the questions we offer at the top of this blog as an entry point for predictive reflection.

A word on formal assessment: Measurement is hard – and establishing leading and lagging indicators for performance can be confusing. But a leadership team that doesn't hold itself accountable to how it develops talent across the organization is a team that is working at a fraction of its potential.  

In Part three of this series we will dive deeper into assessment of team and team member performance --  how to measure, and what to do when you just don’t have the talent you need on your leadership team!

We call ourselves a team, but…? Part 1 of 3

Summer is often a time to reflect on one’s leadership - and if you lead a team, you may well be thinking about its effectiveness.  Leaders share with us their concerns about their teams, and often hope that a summer retreat or a workshop will help unlock potential and improve performance. We hear things like:

“Everyone is congenial but we don’t collaborate well outside of the room”

“We just can’t seem to get off first base - we are so mired in the day to day”

“My team has weak spots - we are not all A players”

“I’m in the middle of everything - how can I get out and get my team to lead?”

“My team needs therapy”

The instinct to retreat in order to plan, build shared focus, and strengthen the team is a good one. We all need time and space away from the day to day to reflect, connect, think strategically, and improve performance. But it’s not enough. Effective teams need a clear understanding of what it means to be a team, and what they must achieve collectively. It’s sustained work and it means developing new mindsets, abilities and behaviors.

Before diagnosing problems and offering solutions on team dynamics, we start by asking leaders: 

How do you know you have a team? 

What does a high functioning team look like to you? 

What do you do when you meet together? How do you work?

In many cases, what leaders actually have is a leadership group -- a collection of direct reports with functional areas of responsibility, each of whom seeks direction and feedback from their leader.  We call this the “hub and spoke model” wherein the leader is the epicenter of the work, and most of the important decisions and direction happen in one on one meetings. The group meets regularly, largely to share information and do some short term blocking and tackling -- day to day technical work that requires coordination.  In this model it’s easy to focus on individual performers and performance and the issues of the day - and that becomes the mandate for success.

Does this sound like your team? If so, you may not actually be a team….yet. 

Allow us to offer a few guiding principles to get you started so you can practice and evolve together this fall:

Collective performance must trump individual performance in order to make progress. Set enterprise-wide goals that are primary measures of achievement and know that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Leaders value both the collective, and the unique roles of each member.

Teams thrive when each member has a valued role with clear, shared purpose. Define the team’s purpose and mandate, and identify why each member is there and what they contribute.

Trust is the foundation, but you can’t win the game without shared understanding of strategy. Trust is a core condition for success, so attend to practices that build confidence. But don’t do it in a vacuum -- do it as part of the work to understand and pursue the strategic aims of the organization.

Players need to train, and teams need to practice. Being a team is sustained, never ending work. Players need to develop their skills, and the team needs to work together and develop its capacity so it can “play” within and across the organization to achieve the goals they’ve set. The playing field, the competition, and the conditions are ever changing -- and the team needs to be both responsive and proactive in order to win. 

High functioning teams model the way and shape culture.  The best teams know one of their greatest responsibilities is to spread and scale the right mindsets, skills and behaviors throughout the organization. This takes time. Make sure your team’s purpose explicitly addresses this goal and measures enterprise wide impact. 

With these principles at the core, what next? How do you bring these principles to life? How do you start teaming? What if you don’t have the players you need?  Stay tuned: Parts Two and Three are forthcoming!

It's all okay–ChatGPT is NOT the end of writing assignments

By Cara Gallagher and the GLP Team

We’ve heard from lots of school teachers and division directors that the evolution of ChatGPT – an Artificial Intelligence-based platform that can automatically generate original content about any prompt or essay topic it’s given – is causing English and History departments to hit the panic button. In an article from The Atlantic written by English teacher Daniel Herman, the technology is a gamechanger for educators and schools. “This would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.” 

The implications of this technology are indeed significant for schools and universities where competition for college admissions led to a cottage industry of essay tutors and coaches, leading many to wonder for years how fair the process is. Perhaps ChatGPT will help level the playing field for socio-economically disadvantaged students. Mr. Herman, the teacher in the Atlantic article, asked it to write him a “sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford.” The results impressed him and would be certain to catch the attention of admissions officers at Stanford. 

So what are schools going to do if students can write an essay with ChatGPT in a matter of minutes? Initial reactions include banning the use of the website or making it almost impossible to use by requiring students to write essays by hand in-class or making every assessment oral, as this article from the New York Times discusses. Rushing to ban or create rules when the tech is already out there and in the hands of–and probably being used by–students seems futile. We also can’t help but wonder whether these reactions are pedagogically sound and good for learners. Plus they raise questions that could result in bigger problems -- are these alternatives equitable, especially for students with disabilities or those who qualify for extra time? 

No doubt, ChatGPT is disrupting education, but it’s also provoking a much-needed dialogue about an excellent question Herman posed in the article: “The question isn’t ‘How will we get around this?’ but rather ‘Is this still worth doing?’” 

The creation of ChatGPT feels like a point of inflection similar to when the calculator was mass produced. No doubt teachers believed that students who didn’t learn how to do long-division would never reach a standard of math that was widely accepted as critical to learning. And yet, the calculator proved to be an opportunity to push the limits of what was possible for teachers to teach and teenagers to learn in secondary school. ChatGPT may be a stand-in for the modern calculator, but the fact is students still need to learn how to think critically, build an argument, evaluate sources, and communicate a thesis or point of view.

What if ChatGPT isn’t a platform to ban but a teaching tool used to engage students?

One school in the Netherlands is using it to teach undergrads and grad students about original content and misinformation. A teacher at the school gave her students a debate-style assignment. Groups of students first designed and presented three of their own arguments and two counter arguments to the class without the assistance of ChatGPT. Next they fed the same assignment to ChatGPT and compared the chatbot’s answer with their own unique responses. According to the teacher, the students were amazed by how fast and eruditely the bot produced a response—until they read it with a closer eye. The response got certain facts wrong. It also attributed work to the wrong authors. The students quickly learned that, although it helped them see their original ideas and arguments in a new way, it had the potential to result in misinformation and poor scores had they relied exclusively on the bot to write their response.

Some alternative ways in which teachers use the technology in their classrooms include this article from an author who shows students the benefits of observing and studying writing in action. It could save educators time and allow them to cover more content by generating instructional texts to use for discussion on the elements of good writing. Another teacher asked her students to create outlines for a writing assignment using ChatGPT. Once they reviewed and assessed the quality of the outlines, they were asked to close their laptops and write an essay by hand. Instead of taking hours to write a quiz, one teacher used ChatGPT to generate a quiz for him. And there’s even a blog written by a teacher listing ways to use the technology in the classroom.

This feels like a “teachable moment” for educators and schools in which productive and timely solutions can be designed, in partnership with students, so that online tools can be used in ways that uphold the highest standards as well as school policies on academic honesty and acceptable use. Education Reimagined offers several ideas about ways to use technology to enhance learning experiences:

One Student at a Time/Personalization: Leverage the tool to differentiate students’ learning experiences. Have them develop personalized learning plans that enhance their strengths, while also exploring interests and curiosities. Learning targets can be pre-determined, tracked, assessed, and modified as needed by learners. They can also analyze their own learning data and design support systems/strategies for their growth areas. In other words, the learner is the curriculum, and learning is driven by agency, choice, and empowerment. 

Relationships: In a time where ChatGPT is pushing the boundaries of academic integrity, relationships could be a deterrent for learners not to engage in such activities. Inversely, when educators know their students well, they can easily identify inauthentic student work and approach it with a focus on accountability, care, and growth. The common denominator here is the strength and authenticity of relationships. 

Real World Learning: One of the most effective ways of supporting learners to develop critical skills like learning how to write and communicate on their own is through authentic real-world experiences. Transformative learning experiences can be had through internships, externships, apprenticeships, community service, service learning, leaving-to-learn expeditions, dual enrollment, and more. 

Competency-Based Education: Instead of content standards, a system that allows learners to apply what they know through new forms and situational contexts is needed—one where academic, industry, and social-emotional skills provide a learning framework for learners to curate, moderate, and evaluate their learning. Learning is measured by demonstrations of mastery versus hours spent in a classroom. This system is anchored in placing students at the center of their learning. 

Authentic Assessments: Deeper learning is not only about the acquisition of new knowledge but also in its application. Authentic assessments should align with student interest, challenge students to create something new, be multi-dimensional/interdisciplinary, extend beyond the school, have real-world implications, connect to experts in the field/topic, and be evaluated by different audiences. Learners’ work must be deeply personal, have a real impact on the world, and offer intentional opportunities for reflection. The focus is not only on the product but also on the process of learning and how they will take what they learned and apply it to their future learning experiences. 

This technology is going to pose serious challenges to those schools and educators who revere traditional methods of teaching; where writing is iterative, linear, and teacher-centered. Conversations about writing policies and the use of ChatGPT by students will spark necessary dialogues in schools about the purpose of and need to teach writing in a time when a platform can do it for you. 

We hope these discussions will push schools to leverage technology like ChatGPT and use it as an opportunity to assess what really matters – how to think critically, evaluate information, conduct research,  multiple and conflicting viewpoints at once, and  defend an opinion in fair and flexible ways beyond assigning the typical 5-page paper. 

We’ll continue to follow this unfolding conversation and update you. And we encourage you to share any interesting pieces with us!

Boards: Goal setting is an obligation and an opportunity for dialogue!

By Georgy Ann Peluchiwski

Fall for leaders, like students, is often a time of mixed emotions: renewal, excitement and trepidation. New and seasoned leaders spend summers reflecting and making plans for the coming year. They return with high expectations and optimism, energizing their teams and engaging their boards in the work ahead. With the lingering shadow of COVID, workplace, political and social tensions, the stakes feel higher than ever for leaders as they attend to the needs of students, clients, and communities they serve.

For boards and leaders, the fall ritual of coming back together often includes the annual (and sometimes dreaded) goal setting exercise. Unfortunately, we hear from schools and organizations when early excitement and hopes that “this year will be different” turn to disappointment and frustration. So what is going on?

For schools in particular, my hypothesis is that the mounting pressures on boards and leaders are creating unintended consequences for this process, and that without well constructed and agreed upon practices, miscommunication and misunderstandings result. In the whirlwind of “back to school,” the pressure to establish goals incentivizes “getting it done.”  However, slowing down to create healthy practices can turn goal setting into a platform for deeper dialogue, learning, and exploration of “the work that matters most.”

Here are a few examples of the types of questions we hear from leaders: “What does my board really want from me? I got a whole list of things written for me that are not reflective of the depth of work I need to do to make it happen. Why aren’t they talking to me about my goals? How will they evaluate my success? Why do they meet without me to discuss my goals and performance? How will they offer me feedback? What does this mean for my continued employment and compensation?” 

When we hear from boards, they too voice frustrations, such as “Why can't our leader develop good, measurable goals? How will we hold our leader accountable? We received goals, but we need metrics or a dashboard! What should we be asking/telling them to do anyway? Without metrics how can we measure progress? Who is responsible for drafting the goals? Running the evaluation? Who should weigh in?”  

Boards today are in a tough place simultaneously being told that they need to hold leadership accountable, that they are to stay out of operations, AND that they are “partners” in the work. Layer onto that increasing and often divergent perspectives and pressures from stakeholders, employees, parents, faculty, and students. The work of governance and leadership has never been more complex or more important.

Bowing to the pressure, boards can easily find themselves defaulting to drafting long lists of goals to present to their leaders and passionately advocating for discrete measurements such as program or school enrollment, fundraising, and for schools, college (or high school) placement. These are essential outcomes, but leaders have to do a lot to make these happen. The conversations seem to miss a step, and leaders can feel frustrated and misunderstood.

Historically, boards in their quest for “metrics” default quickly to easily observable and quantifiable measures like the ones I list above. The essential problem is that these are all “lagging indicators” of success. For example, by the time enrollment or fundraising decline, you are likely years away from the underlying problem and the corrections required to impact trends. You have likely overlooked the real drivers of success: a relevant and valuable mission and value proposition, and a client/student experience that is delivered with excellence and consistency.

I read with interest the recent article from RG175’s Tom Olverson, “I Hate Head of School Annual Goals: Here’s Why” as it spoke directly to the challenges outlined above and advocated for a multi-year approach – very sound advice.  I also appreciated his guidance for any leader as they navigate this process. 

Reflecting on this piece, I was left thinking about what messages we at GLP might offer to boards as most essential to avoiding the scenarios above. We offer six tips for boards and leaders looking for guidance:

1. Start by talking to each other. Sounds simple, but this is often the step we see skipped or bungled. Enter the goal setting process in a spirit of partnership and collaboration. Talk less and listen more. Goal setting should be a joint endeavor with the leader. Boards should not “present” goals to the leader, nor should leaders be drafting in a vacuum and “presenting” to the board.  Begin with a dialogue about what your shared priorities are, how that will inform the work of leadership, AND the work of governance. Boards should also be asking their leaders what they need and expect and should hold themselves accountable for delivering.

2. Define the process. This includes outlining the roles, responsibilities, and timelines for setting goals – best developed together with your leader.  If the process is clear, well defined, and well communicated, it allows the focus to be on the quality of the dialogue and reduces anxiety on all sides. Thus, high functioning boards have structures, and practices to support a healthy goal setting and evaluation process.

3. What is good for the goose…! Boards also benefit from goals, feedback, and assessment. Goals setting and evaluation processes are as essential for boards as they are for leaders and the key to continuous improvement.   

4. Ground your work in mission and strategy. Use your strategic plan, vision, mission, and values to agree to shared enterprise wide priorities. Then carefully delineate what the work of the board will be to support the work of leadership  and what work the board needs to attend to itself in order to ensure institutional progress. 

5. Measure activities that drive performance - and the success you envision! Once you have an understanding of your priorities and who will do what, consider what evidence you will seek to demonstrate progress, and how it will be measured and communicated. Know the difference between leading and lagging indicators and set realistic timeframes. Take the time to listen and learn from your leader. Ask: “what do they see as drivers or leading indicators of progress towards success?” Consider that the most valuable “metrics” might be qualitative, but can be measured or tracked.  

6. Create and sustain frequent feedback loops. Consider that informal, ongoing, and “formative” feedback is just as valuable, if not more, than a formal year-end evaluation or “summative” assessment. Be sure you are attending to both in an intentional way. This is the surest way to build a trusting and enduring partnership that drives institutional success.

We would love to hear your thoughts! Let us know what we missed, or what you would like to hear more about. 

To be or not to be…a trustee? That is the question!

By Stephanie Rogen

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a trustee is NOT. I like to affirm and encourage strengths, so this feels like an odd orientation. But I realize by defining what a trustee is NOT, I can more easily convey what a trustee IS – and perhaps help boards and individual trustees avoid serious dysfunction and realize their full potential. I’m keeping this short and sweet, and welcome comments, insights, and questions that expand my understanding and challenge me in this conversation!

Trustees are NOT Volunteers:  Yes, you are unpaid. Yes, you likely engage with the passion and dedication for the mission that a volunteer offers. But, you are no longer a volunteer in the way you may have been as a parent association officer, an event chair, or a committee participant. 

• Trustees ARE Unpaid Professional Talent: While you may offer yourself as a volunteer in particular contexts, in the boardroom you are an unpaid governance professional with professional expertise and professional responsibility for the institution. 

Trustees are NOT Representatives or Delegates:  Whether you are publicly elected, or nominated within a private school or not for profit board process, once you accept the role you immediately take on enterprise-wide responsibility. You are NOT a representative for a certain population or stakeholder group (like an elected congressman), nor are you on the Board to defend or protect particular interests. 

• Trustees ARE Guardians of the Enterprise, its Mission, and its Core Values: Trustees defend the institution’s interests, holding in the balance both the economic and social welfare of the organization and its members. Trustees play a long game and consider the needs of future generations as they deliver on relevance and value in the present. This can be lonely work, especially if you serve as a trustee or board member within a tight community where you enjoy strong personal and social connections.

Trustees are NOT Investigators: It can be very tempting to pursue deeper research into a reported problem, a troubling anecdote, or a concern voiced to you by an employee or community member.  This is NOT your job. Report the issue to your leader and to your board leadership –  but save the fact finding for a more intentional, board/leadership driven process. Anything else puts you at risk for violating your duty of care, your duty of loyalty, and your role as “Guardian of the Enterprise.”

• Trustees ARE Pattern Detectors and Dilemma Mediators:  When concerns arise about organizational performance, culture, or talent, trustees can ask good questions. Are we seeing a pattern? What do we know, and what do we NOT know? How can we work with leadership to understand and resolve a problem, if it exists? How do we message and support predictability, consistency, and responsibility within our community? And how do we help our leaders reconcile tensions and address dilemmas where we must tolerate losses and trade-offs together? This is the work of the Board.

What did I miss? What else would you offer as a “NOT” for defining the role of a trustee?