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May 2002

Leadership:  First Who...Then What

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy.  We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats - and then they figured out where to drive it.  The old adage, "People are your most important asset" turns out to be wrong.  People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

Jim Collins  Good To Great 2001

April 2002

What's in a name?

Dale Dauten, in his syndicated column, writes about Coldstone Creamery President  Doug Ducey.  Ducey, states that "the current management fad is for managers to call themselves 'coaches,' but this merely perpetuates the myth that a manager's job is to tell people what to do.  That's why 'negotiator' would be a better job description."   

The article includes a great story about Ducey's career at Procter and Gamble...

        "...It was a foregone conclusion, everything was in place to let him go. 

        I went to meet with him, and tryting to act like I was a manager, saying all the stuff

        Tell me what's going on.  What do you need?'

That's when he confided in me.  he'd been afraid to admit that since a medical leave he'd been have trouble with the technical detail.  He'd lost part of the information he used to have.  In other words, he needed retraining.  So we got it for him, and he went beack to being successful, and he finished his career with P & G.

Aren't they more interested in what we do?

Dale Dauten (King Features Syndicate) www.dauten.com

March 2002

The good-to-great leaders spent essentially

 no energy trying to "create alignment," "motivate the troops,"

or "manage change."  Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation and

change largely take care of themselves.  Alignment principally follows from results and momentum,

not the other way around.

Excerpt from:  Jim Collins, Good To Great 2001

February 2002

Good is the enemy of great.

and that is their main problem.

Jim Collins, Good to Great Harper Collins, 2001

January 2002

A Coach, Not a Dictator

Deming talks more about leadership than any of the other experts, although they all agree that leadership is critical.  Describing a leader, Deming says that "he understands how the work of this group fits into the aims of the company, its constancy of purpose..... He tries to create for everybody, interest, challenge and joy in work..... He teaches them cooperation, he works by cooperation.  He tries to optimize the education, skills and abilities of everyone - helps them to improve.  He's coach and counsel, not judge.  Judging people doesn't help them." Deming says that there are three sources of power a leader can use: the formal power of his position, the power of his knowledge, and the power of his personality.  A successful leader, he says, "develops knowledge and personality" so that people come to him for help and advice.  He uses formal power of position sparingly and only because "this source of power enables him to change the system, equipment, material, methods, to reduce variation in output." Formal power, therefore is only used to order fundamental changes.

3.       What are the business, educational and/or professional implications of Deming's concept of leadership and power?

Excerpt from:  Dobbyns & Mason: Quality or Else

December 2001

John Wooden, legendary basketball coach at UCLA..........

ESPN:  You've often described yourself as a teacher. What do you most enjoy about teaching?

Wooden: Watching youngsters improve. If I didn't see improvement in my youngsters from the beginning of the year to the end, I thought, I'm to blame, because I'm the teacher. When I had players that didn't improve to the degree I thought they should, I felt responsible and it bothered me.

  Two players came as close to realizing their full potential as any two I ever had. One was Conrad Burke (1956-1958) and the other was Doug McIntosh (1964-1966). As freshmen, I didn't think either one of them would play a minute for us on the varsity. The very next year Doug McIntosh played about 30 minutes in the national championship game against Duke. He didn't have the physical ability that many had, but he became a starter the next year. Conrad Burke was a starter for two years -- at one time I thought he would never play any meaningful minutes for us. Neither of them were very good jumpers, but they were good rebounders because they assumed every shot would be missed, and they got their hands up and tried to get the ball, instead of assuming somebody else was going to get it. They weren't good shooters, but they had high shooting percentages, because they didn't take bad shots.

ESPN:  What is the key to being a good teacher?

Wooden: Patience. No two cases are identical, but the teacher must always have patience. And you have to listen to those under your supervision. I think anyone in a position of supervision, if they're not listening to those under them; they're not going to get good results. The supervisor must make sure that all of those under his supervision understand they're working with him, not for him. I think if you work for someone, you punch the clock in and out and that's it. If you're working with someone, you want to do more than that.

John Wooden's new book with Andrew Hill, "Be Quick -- But Don't Hurry," was released last month by Simon & Schuster.

November 2001

  Education and Business deal with the same issues!      

Owners Identify Time-Wasters

Business owners face constant dilemmas dealing with employees. Managers and owners say they spend too

much time disciplining and dealing with personnel and ranked that problem as their most unproductive task,

according to a survey conducted last year by  George S. May International Company,  the Park Ridge, III.-

based management consulting firm.

Survey results show that the 11 most unproductive tasks are:

1. Disciplining and dealing with personnel

2. Correcting others mistakes

3. Doing work others should accomplish

4. Teaching others what they already should know

----

 

Dealing with auditors and/or regulatory agencies 

Breaks

    Phone calls

     Meetings

     Waiting for information

     Reading mail and reports

     Unnecessary conversations  

Since the first four issues deal with workers, managers should consider better training, says the consulting firm.

If managers provide proper and constant follow­-up training, the biggest time-wasters could become business-builders.  

October 2001

In his seminars, Jim Rohn, a speaker and success philosopher, asks the question, "How big will a tree grow?"  The answer is that a tree will grow as big as it can.  It will put down as many roots as it can; it will grow as many branches as it can; it will put out as many leaves as it can; and it will produce as much fruit as it can.  In fact, everything in nature grows to its maximum potential.  That is, everything except people.  Why?  Because only people have the ability to choose.  Sadly, they can  choose to be less that they have the ability to be.  However, there is great news in this powerful truth.  If people  have the ability to choose to be less than they can be, they also have the ability to choose to be all they can be. 

From:  Winget, Larry.  The Simple Way to Success  www.larrywinget.com

September 2001

Demystifying Results with Examples of Excellence

Not all parents and children know what quality work looks like or understand the criteria for it, because few schools provide repre­sentative, intelligible examples of what they expect students to strive for (Wiggins 1994b). And finding out the nature of assignments children are given, such as their number, length, and kind-or how many books children are expected to read-is surprisingly difficult for parents. Parents not only want better information about what their children are learning, they want more of it (Jaeger, Gorney, and Johnson 1994). We have underestimated this interest. As our econ­omy becomes increasingly knowledge based, look for this attention to increase.

The emerging interest in exemplary student work or anchor papers is especially fortunate. Such examples of excellence clearly exhibit what we want from students. Models and exemplary samples of student work are themselves goals: the clear, concrete expression of the results we wish children to achieve. When accompanied by descriptive rubrics, exemplary student work defines achievement goals in meaningful form.

We should begin displaying, publishing, and referring to models of achievement within and between every area of study. Wiggins (1994a) thinks that posting models or exemplars in schools creates an atmosphere that promotes improvement almost by itself, without administrative coercion. Seeing what children have actually done extends our sense of student potential and defies the limits we might put on children.

Schmoker, Mike Results:  The Key to School Improvement  ASCD 191996.

1. Do the learners and their parent (s) know what your class and/or school standards and expectations are?

2. Do they know the difference between competence and quality work ?

August 2001

Consequences are usually imposed, which is the primary reason why they are perceived negatively and why they do not change the way a person wants to behave.

From:  Discipline Without Stress, Punishments or Rewards    Piper Press, 2001   Marvin Marshall   www.DisciplineWithoutStress.com

July 2001

Yogi Berra on Managing...........

A baseball manager is like a CEO.  To get results, you treat people the way you'd want to be treated.  If I had a problem with a player, I'd talk it over with him in private - I'd never embarrass him.  Being a manager is a high-pressure situation, there's a load of responsibility, plus there's not a lot of job security.  So control what you can control.  In any big job, you're always second-guessed and probably get blamed more than you should.

1. What parallels can you draw to education?
2. How does this compare to your leadership/managing beliefs?
3. What are the business applications?

From: Berra, Yogi.   When you come to the fork in the road, TAKE IT!  New York: Hyperion Press, 2001.

1. They don't appreciate the benefits of having a written plan.
2. They sense it will take a tremendous amount of time to prepare a plan and they feel they will get more done by taking action.
3. They don't know how!
4. They don't make planning a priority, and they keep putting it off as something they are going to get to.

The lead-manager teacher in the School for Quality Learning creates a learning environment that corresponds to the knowledge-based worldview.  Following are the features of that environment.

1. It affords diversity, novelty, and openness to stimulate curiosity and exploration.
2. It provides options both within and beyond the classroom and school, and it most certainly involves new players in the education of the learner as the truth that learning occurs everywhere, not just "in school," is recognized.
3. It is learner-centered, featuring personalized experimental and experiential learning opportunities.
4. It stimulates teamwork, flexibility and problem-solving.
5. It frees and/or teaches learners to think creatively, critically and evaluatively.
6. It increase accountability for everyone and engages all in the decision-making process.
7. It promotes cooperation, social conscience and group interaction.
8. It encourages risk taking and stresses the use of skills necessary to adapt to and bring about change.

Excerpt from:  Crawford, Bodine & Hoglund  The School for Quality Learning: Managing the School and Classroom the Deming Way.  Urbana, IL: Research Press, 1993. 

Better Teaching, Higher Scores

If you wanted to be sure to do well on your annual physical, would you practice the physical in advance? Or would you eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep? Grant Wiggins used this analogy to help his audience think through issues related to teaching and test scores. Wiggins is president of Re: Learning by Design and co-creator of ASCD's Understanding by Design program.

"To practice the physical gets it backwards, he said. "I should practice being healthy, and then the physical will take care of itself." Similarly, he argued, educators should use good teaching practices and let state tests take care of themselves.

"The teachers who say, 'I'd like to teach for understanding, but I have to cover the content' don't even have research on their side," Wiggins said, because research does not support the notion that covering content maximizes test scores. "There's no research to support the claim by teachers that [doing] that will optimize memory, recall, or retention," he said.

The physical is an indicator of health or its absence, Wiggins said. Similarly, a state test is an indicator of students' intellectual health. "The state comes in and does an intellectual physical once a year, just like your doctor," he noted. "A physical is a quick-and-dirty operation. Does that mean it's wrong or invalid? No."

Grant Wiggins - This is a short excerpt from Education Update, Association of  Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA  January 2001, page 4.

Public Relations for Educators?

How do we combat the negative press that education regularly receives?
One method is for each school to commit to creating one positive article per month. 
While this may seem to increase the normal workload, there are ways to share the load. If one teacher per month writes a letter to the editor and/or a features editor, it would mean, in a normal size school, a commitment for each teacher to write once every three years or more. 

• What would you like the public to know?
• What and/or how you teach.
• Examples of a student’ quality work, etc.
• Examples of your classes’ quality work, etc.
• Examples of a teacher’ quality work. 

Bob Hoglund

Student Tutors / Helpers 

Dr. Glasser emphasizes the importance of students helping other students learn 
by tutoring or directly working on the same assignments. A teacher that agrees 
with Dr. Glasser, has had some of the better students complain about working with their 
peers that are slower or unmotivated. She asked me for suggestions. 

Here are ten suggestions for the teacher facing the situation described above.

1. Be sure to thank the student each day that help is given. 

2. Emphasize the skills that will help them in future employment.

3. Write a short thank you note to the student.

4. Write a formal thank you letter that can be saved as a reference.

5. Offer to write a letter of recommendation for the student (college or job).

6. Call the students parent and express your appreciation/thanks for the students help. 

7. Take the student to lunch or have lunch in the classroom with them.

8. Allow other responsibilities that are commensurate with the effort given. (The helper may be able to read / write on a different topic than others)

9. Allow the student to earn extra credit for helping others. 

10. Continue to focus on a team effort in class.

Bob Hoglund