GLP BLOG
How to Identify and Empower Your School's CPO
This is the second part of a blog series focusing on the importance of investing in people for the sustainability of independent schools. Here is the link to part one: People Matter Most: One Solution to Education Disruption!
Identifying people with high potential to lead is challenging in any organization, but it’s the secret to sustaining a strong culture. When we do organizational assessments in schools, we often find that the biggest vulnerabilities relate to the absence of a clear strategy for recruiting, developing and managing your most valuable asset—the people! In every case, we discover where espoused values of the school don’t match practices or operations, often due to gaps or misalignments in the assignment of people to critical roles, which creates a “cultural dissonance” that everyone can feel. But how do you identify the right people for the right roles, and which people are best suited to develop others for a broad range of organizational needs?
People Matter Most: One Solution to Education Disruption!
This is the first part of a blog series focusing on the importance of investing in people for the sustainability of independent schools.
For anyone concerned about the sustainability of independent schools, this headline is hard to ignore:
Four Challenges
This is the last part of a blog series focusing on the skills required for headship in today's changing world. Here are links to part one: The Competent Leader, part two: The Good Communicator, part three: Being the Decider, and part four: The Meeting Culture.
This summer I have written on a variety of issues associated with good headship in schools, particularly but not exclusively independent schools. Part of this project stems from the urging from friends that twenty-four years of heading a school deserve some reflection, but perhaps a larger part comes from discussions with current heads of school and others in the independent school world who are in the thick of school leadership and its many challenges. With roughly a thousand headships turning over in the next five years, it seems essential to develop a body of thought on school leadership that can speak to the practical issues in this significant generational transition.
GLP Summer Reading List 2015
Here it is! GLP’s summer reading list is ready to go--whether at the beach, in your office or snuggled up, we think you’ll find these books are as entertaining as they are inspiring and informative. And all are highly readable. We hope you enjoy these books as much as we did. Please let us know what you think! And if you missed out on our list from last summer, check it out here.
Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within us all - Tom and David Kelley
One Marine Commander’s Insights on Leadership: Implications for School Leaders
My neighbor in South Carolina is Brian W. Foster, a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Marines, responsible for 720 Marines and oversight of a complex air base. Brian has seen combat duty in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as operated within the hierarchy and bureaucracy of Washington, serving our country with courage, intelligence, loyalty and distinction. Last month, after a 21-year career, he officially relinquished his command.
The Meeting Culture: Including and Involving
This is part four of a blog series focusing on the skills required for headship in today's changing world. Here are links to part one: The Competent Leader, part two: The Good Communicator, and part three: Being the Decider.
Beyond the daily realities of working with lots of kinds of people that have individual strengths, weaknesses, and agendas, a leader may find that the hardest thing in the daily work is getting meetings together and running them productively. In schools, where inclusion and involvement are deeply valued, this challenge can be particularly frustrating—and meetings are often the most relied upon solution.
GLP Summer Reading List (Part Two)
A Vision for the Future: Why and How
Here is a link to part one of our summer reading list!
August is here and many of us are finally taking some serious time away to relax and reflect before “back to school” is our reality. It’s a great time to read two books we believe are “musts” for imagining what can be in the new year. Full disclosure: The authors of both books are valued colleagues and friends. Nevertheless, we believe they’ve succeeded in clearly articulating answers to the most essential questions of WHY and HOW for the kinds of changes we need to make if we want to develop healthy and well-prepared students for the 21st century.
Recommended Read: Just Mercy
For Students and Educators:
Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Many of the schools we work with are actively examining how to best address challenging topics around diversity, inclusion, and identity—in their communities and in our society. Recently, questions related to racial inequity and justice have arisen in the national conversation. As educators facilitate these discussions within their schools, they may want to consider Stevenson’s excellent book, Just Mercy. This is a highly readable and accessible text, offering both historic perspective and the basis for meaningful, values-based discussion. We recommend adding it your reading list.
Being the Decider
This is part three of a blog series focusing on the skills required for headship in today's changing world. Here are links to part one: The Competent Leader and part two: The Good Communicator.
(Jim Mooney, the deputy director of a multistate independent school organization, visited me in South Carolina, and we continued our summer conversation on school leadership.)
As we moved from our discussion on effective communication, Jim plunged right in: “The single biggest complaint I hear about headmasters and heads of school concerns the host of issues around making decisions, rolling them out, and moving forward.”
The Good Communicator
This is part two of the blog series focusing on the skills required for headship in today's changing world.
Jim Mooney and I continued our conversation (see the preceding blog) about the challenges of leading and managing independent schools. We discussed the nature of a group of “competencies” important for leadership success. In doing so, Jim and I move from the general issue of competence to the specific traits, skills, and habits associated with good leadership. The first of these is the importance of effective and encompassing communication. Jim pointed out that the subject is essentially endless, “everything ties into communication,” so we needed to keep our discussion focused specifically on effective practices for school heads, not an exploration of the wide world of communication issues and challenges.