On a recent flight from Bangkok, Thailand, to San Jose, Costa Rica, I began reading Stephen King’s On Writing. I needed to get a grip on something more substantial than the latest Hollywood blockbuster in-flight movie. Changing jobs after eight years has that kind of effect on me. King’s book proved to be funny, irreverent, and elegantly written. Nothing unusual there; this is, after all, Stephen King. Part memoir and part handbook for the practicing writers, On Writing is an engaging read even if you are not yourself interested in becoming a writer, which I am, or particularly interested in Stephen King novels, which, I confess, I am not. In it, King serves up a banquet of tantalising thoughts about what makes those who practice the craft of writing successful. Now, as it happens, I’d been thinking about what it takes to practice my own craft well. I’m a school principal. So I found King’s observations on his craft appealing. In particular, I found one of King’s metaphors particularly apt for the thoughts I was having about moving to a new job. The metaphor? A toolbox.
Let’s face it, a school leader is either a builder or a maintenance man, often both, and in either role he needs to carry a good set of tools. A leader without an adequate set of tools is like a carpenter working without his toolbox. Over the past few months, as I prepared to transition from one job to another, I’d been mentally taking an inventory of my personal stash of leadership tools trying to imagine which of them I might be called to use in my new position. I do not mean to suggest in what follows that the tools I describe in this article are the only equipment a school leader needs. I’d need to write a set of encyclopedias to record all of those. I mean only to suggest that if these tools are not among the everyday equipment the leader carries with him to his job, he needs to acquire them. To build an educational vision, to repair a damaged one, or to construct the scaffolding necessary to a support a school’s mission a leader must have at least these tools, and must learn to use them well. So, having said that, let me lift the lid of the toolbox and reveal what should be there.
The ability to listen is as basic a tool for a school leader as a saw or a hammer is for a carpenter. Any leader who has not trained himself to listen, not just to hear, is in for trouble, and trouble will not be long in coming. Most of us fancy ourselves good listeners, but we may be deceiving ourselves. If we embrace, as many people do, the two most problematic assumptions about listening we’ll need to work on our listening skills. The first assumption is that listening is a natural everyday exercise and is easy. Wrong! For while hearing is natural and easy for all but the hearing impaired, listening is an acquired skill that many have yet to acquire. Someone who is really listening pays attention to what is being said and how it is being said, and even to what is not being said, but is implied. How many people listening to CNN broadcasts about the war with Iraq heard commentators talking about weapons of mass destruction and ‘smart’ bombs and caught the implication that these ‘smart’ bombs weren’t to be considered in the same category as weapons of mass destruction? How many questioned the idea that bombs can be smart?
A second problematic assumption is that as a listener we must always be prepared to respond to what we have heard. Wrong again! This assumption interferes with our ability to listen when we become [as often happens] absorbed in crafting our response before the speaker is finished what he has to say. While it is important to acknowledge what we have heard, it is even more important to listen to what someone is saying without anticipating how we will respond. Nowhere was the truth of this advice more bluntly brought to light than in my own home with one of my own children. I arrived home one day to find one of my sons fulminating about a bill the dentist’s office had sent him for a missed appointment. This particular son is a redhead and any one who is old enough to have seen a Maureen O’Hara movie understands that the fulminations of redheads can be impressive. I listened for a while, or rather thought I was listening, to my son rail on about the injustice of it all. Finally, calling up my most diplomatic counselling skills I began explaining to him that he was in this case paying for the dentist’s time not his service since he had failed to cancel the appointment and chose to be a ‘no show’. I was well into my dissertation on the economics of a service provider’s time when my son interrupted me. ‘Dad, I don’t need your advice on this. I know I was wrong. I know what I did was stupid. I just want to get out my frustration’. Until then I had been hearing what my son had saying but not listening to him. There is a reason God gave us two ears and only one mouth. It should be obvious which of these He anticipated we should have to use more often. There are many good articles and books on the subject of listening so I will not belabor my point here. What is important is that every school leader recognise that listening is one of the most essential tools he can put into his toolbox. This is an everyday tool that a leader must keep sharpened and on the top level of the toolbox.
The next tool should be on the top level of every school leader’s toolbox as well. It is the tool of reflection. Every leader must cultivate the ability to reflect upon what he is doing, why he is doing it and if it is what he should be doing.
If a school leader does not set aside time for reflection and does not take steps to preserve that time, he will find himself responding only to the urgency of each moment with little control over where that urgency is leading him and the school. I am not suggesting here that any school leader can ignore the urgent demands of the job. If he does that, he will find himself at the head of the unemployment line rather than at the helm of a school. On the other hand, if a leader responds only to the urgency of each moment, he will eventually lose touch with the educational aims of the school - or at least forfeit the time to address them. Everything is urgent to at least someone in the school community. A leader must be able to distinguish between the urgent and the important, even if others cannot. There must be a time, wrote Thomas Merton, when a man who makes plans stops and asks himself do those plans have any meaning? This is the school leader’s time for reflection and he can ill-afford to have this tool lost or stolen
Which brings us to the next tool - focus. That time for reflection I just spoke of is necessary to keep this tool within reach and serviceable. Without a clear focus a school may be an industrious place but, as Thoreau pointed out, ants are industrious.
What is important is what we are industrious about. This is where focus comes in. Focus is the bench vice that keeps the school and its people anchored in the grip of what they should be doing. Focus refuses to allow us to separate from the substantial even when we are pushed and pulled hither and yon by forces that would have us do other things – or worse everything. Focus guarantees that the mission of the school won’t be buried under an avalanche of other demands: budgets, school lunch programs, school board meetings, public relations campaigns, school building projects and on and on and on. When a school loses its focus, it is like a ship sailing about in a thick fog without navigating equipment or navigational charts. Just as those on board a ship expect their captain to have all the equipment to keep it on course, people in the school community expect the school leader to be the custodian of the focus tool that will keep them on course. That is why the time for reflection I mentioned above is so important. A leader uses his reflection time to consult the charts, check the navigational equipment and keep the school on course.
Finally, there is one last tool that I must include before I close the lid on the toolbox for now – the planning tool. It does not matter here what we call the planning tool: strategic planning, action planning or whatever other smarmy name we chose to give it. The point is that school leaders need to know not only how to plan but also how to teach other school personnel to plan and to follow the plan.
Most leaders know at least the basics of how to plan and have templates for doing it. That is not the problem. The challenge lies not so much in acquiring this tool but in learning how to use it. Many school plans are so ambitious that they have no chance of success. Groaning with the weight of multiple initiatives and unrealistic timelines, they are prescriptions for failure and disappointment. Such plans seldom account for what is working in the school, and for what existing foundations a new plan can be built upon. While they may identify the resources that will be needed to accomplish the goals, they seldom do an assessment of whether or not such resources will be available in the amount that will be required. Take time, for instance. Time, like fossil fuels, is one of our most precious resources and one whose reserves we can easily deplete. Most school plans grossly underestimate the amount of time school personnel [teachers in particular] have to devote to them. In addition, the architects of many school plans fail to ask themselves if the people who must implement their plans are emotionally as well as intellectually ready to implement them, and if they are not how much time and what resources will be needed to get them ready. When the planning tool is used like this, or, more accurately, misused like this, the resulting plan may be visionary, especially if by visionary we mean unrealistic, but it will also be unachievable. Learning to use the planning tool requires that one learn not just what to put into a plan, but what to keep out of it. Remember that celebrated but seldom practiced activity that we architects of change call ‘selective abandonment’? It is a very functional and fitting planning instrument. We need to bring it back and use it. As a matter of fact let’s put it into our toolbox, and on the top shelf.
When we use the planning tool the way it is meant to be used we take into consideration what teachers and administrators can practically accomplish at this stage of the school’s development given the resources available to us. If we do not, the plan we fashion will be nothing more than messianic daydreaming. The planning tool is a very sophisticated tool and can cause great damage unless those who use it have gained experience with it and know how to use it well.
School leaders seldom know from day to day which tools they will be called upon to use, so I recommend to you Stephen King’s Uncle Oren’s advice on the subject of being prepared for anything. When young Stevie asked his uncle why he lugged a big heavy toolbox out of garage to repair a screen, when all he needed was a screwdriver, Uncle Oren replied:
‘Yeah, but Stevie, I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged’.
That’s good advice for school leaders, as well as carpenters.
Discuss presentationABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Mike Connolly has been an educator in the United States and in four different international schools on three continents.