A State Leadership Academy

The Need

Why establish a new state Leadership Academy for training education

leaders? If we are honest, and that is the only way to identify real problems
so that they can be solved, we recognize that improved leadership skills are
vital to improved performance of our education system. In Educating School
Leaders, Arthur Levine summarized the problem well when he said, “Our
nation faces the challenge of retooling current principals and
superintendents while preparing a new generation of school leaders to take
their places.” Of course, in his report based on a study of every degree
granting education school leadership program in the country he concluded
that there weren’t any in the whole nation that could be considered
exceptional in a positive sense. He stated they were in a “race to the
bottom” reducing admission and graduation standards while at the same
time shortening the time required to get a masters or doctorate to compete
for students looking for the “paper” and not the education that might help
them do a better job. He said the programs “conferred masters on those
who display anything but mastery and doctorates in name only.”

So, the current system is the main reason that education leaders are
unprepared to lead change and can only maintain the status quo at best.
While there are always exceptions they did not learn how to do it better in
the education school leadership programs. A renowned expert in
management, Henry Mintzberg in his HBR article, The Manager’s Job: folklore
and fact, says “Our management schools have done an admirable job of
training the organization’s specialists . . . accountant . . . marketing
researcher . . . But for the most part they have not trained managers.
Management schools will begin the serious training of managers when skill
training takes a serious place next to cognitive learning . . . cognitive
learning no more makes a manager than it does a swimmer. The latter will
drown the first time he jumps into the water if his coach never takes him out
of the lecture hall, gets him wet, and gives him feedback on his
performance.” He since has written a book about the problem, Managers
Not MBAs.

How Should the Academy be Structured?

From what Levine and Mintzberg said and also my own long successful
experience as a change leader it seems obvious that two things must be
included in the structure if the Leadership Academy is to succeed in its
retooling mission. First, the training element must include the skill set

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needed to be an effective change leader. I have thought about my own

experience in detail and have written a list of skills and a training manual to
go with it that I know were required in my experience leading “they said it
couldn’t be done” changes. It will be appended to this proposal. However,
that will not be enough by itself. As Mintzberg reminds us, cognitive learning
unperfected through practice is not enough. This is especially true in the
current education environment where role models do not exist with the new
skills we need if the leaders are to be more effective. If you have a
leadership structure populated by people who have been taught the proper
skill set to be able to lead change AND have people who are using those
skills in their day to day work you have a great “incubator” for preparing
those interested in pursuing the management path. That should be the
result we strive for in implementing a leadership academy.

Therefore, a second and more important issue in the successful

implementation of any new leadership training must include the ability to
coach the trainees while using the new skills so that they will become a
habit. This recognizes that the old saying that “Knowledge is Power” is
incorrect. “Applied Knowledge is Power.” Providing seat time in classes to
teach the most powerful techniques imaginable will be a waste of time if the
trainees don’t have a coach at their side when they return to work to help
them use the new techniques in a way where they know that the coach will
keep them from making too many “rookie mistakes.” Reforming the
management techniques in the current education system will require
intestinal fortitude in those leading the charge. Until the newly trained get
some experience they would be prone to back away from the new skills the
first time they get bashed for deviating from the “way we’ve always done it.”
A good coach can get them past those first problem events successfully.

Considering the above dual requirements, the academy would best be set up
to take the training to the districts. The training would be done on site. It
would require using weekends to minimize the leadership team’s absence
during normal work days. A way to “jumpstart” the process would be to
have a “boot camp” session over a long weekend (3 full days) for the top
management team; superintendent, asst supe for instruction if principals
report there and best principals for a max of ten folks. This would be an
intimate setting which would result in instilling intellectual honesty,
assessing skill needs, training in key areas addressing those needs and using
group activities as a team building process. Then the trainer(s) would stay
on site during the following week(s) doing the coaching by floating among
the first group(s) trained. They would also continue offering blocks of

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cognitive skills to complete the initial list of skills required.

This will be very hard work for the trainers and will require people who have
change leadership experience and the training/coaching experience to make
it happen correctly. The first trainers will have to come from outside
education as the insiders do not have the experience or skills in change
leadership to be effective. It would be helpful to have the person with
outside experience get some initiation into the behavioral norms, standard
operating procedures of our education system before starting the process
with new trainees. A sensible approach would be to take promising
candidates with education experience and pair them up with lead, outside
trainers who have appropriate experience and skill levels. In that way you
could begin to leverage the numbers of trainers available to address more
and more districts over time. Also, the best students/graduates of the
program would be a resource for coaching as follow-on groups are trained
over time within each district. Some after appropriate experience would be
able to share the training and coaching load. That is why in picking the
group to be trained first, it is important to select those deemed to have the
best chance for success to provide the resources needed to support the
training in the follow-on training groups.

While this would require significant travel costs and some compensation in
salaries for the much longer than normal work hours of the training teams it
also recognizes that there would be no need for a fancy training facility
where people would travel to receive the training. In fact, the overall system
expenses would be far lower with the “take the training to them” model
since there would be far fewer trainers traveling compared to bringing in the
greater numbers of trainees to a central location.

In Conclusion

I realize that the above structure comments are probably not what you have
been thinking about for a state Leadership Academy. I can assure you,
though, that if you want to really make a difference in education leadership
effectiveness it is the only way you can do it. While that statement may
seem overly strong to you, I have long and successful experience leading
change. Leading productive change is perhaps the most difficult task any
leader can face. If the academy is to have positive impact it must be
approached with great rigor. As Peter Drucker, the famed management
consultant said, “Whenever anything important happens it is because
of a monomaniac with a mission.” That is the sort of commitment you
will need from the leader of the academy to make it successful.

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 A State Leadership Academy
Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds
against them. They make the impossible happen. Robert Jarvik

I have written training material and lesson plans for the skills in the attached
list of skills below. I have taught this material many times and have
developed many successful managers. It gives a real sense of satisfaction to
see organizations that were foundering right themselves and attain new
competence and importantly, higher morale and self-esteem based on truly
improved performance.

Contact

Paul Richardson

719-598-2100

Pwrgo2@msn.com

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