Has anyone in your leadership team taken up their post in the last two years?
Up to half of them will be deemed to have failed within the first two years on the job.
We could argue about what we mean by ‘failure’. But if people perceive you to have failed, then your definition of what that means doesn’t really matter any more.
So what makes some people more likely to make it through the first two years of leading?
A large part of it is to do with their ability to focus on a target and inspire everyone, or nearly everyone, to see the same target as them and do the work to hit it.
Moving from fog to focus is the singular most important success criteria for some of the most successful people, organisations and schools:
John Kotter, arguably the greatest change agent of his time, writes in Our Iceberg is Melting! about the importance of having a singular ‘sense of urgency’ around which to build a guiding team. And nearly half of his process dedicated to communicating, making things stick and not letting up.
Mellody Hobson, Chairperson of Starbucks, believes the first two steps before you can move any team to action are to i) understand the problem and ii) hold yourself radically accountable. That means acknowledging that you must own the problem that’s there to be solved, before you think of having a plan. Strategy is not wilful thinking or dreaming. It’s focussing on what you can control.
Sir Michael Barber is former advisor to Tony Blair’s Government on education, and responsible for major improvements in achievement in education systems around the world. He believes you have to start with Bold Ambition, Myopic Focus and then reinforce your communication with Consistent Clarity. Consistent clarity means it has to be communicated frequently, which means it can’t take a presentation, email string or a lengthy report.
David Hieatt, my mentor and owner of the world’s best jeans company, emblazons his factory walls with the phrase “Do One Thing Well. It’s Enough.”. Steve Jobs said the same thing. So did Plato. Take your pick. If Steve Jobs can steal from Plato, then anyone can.
There are many schools who focus on doing one thing well, and they’re world famous for it. Gordonstoun’s Expeditionary Learning, Eton’s oracy, Avenues’ interdisciplinary learning, Raffles’ Institution’s traditions… there are scores of them.
But over the past 14 years, my colleagues and I have struggled with landing this simple message: focus benefits everyone.
It has been like Sisyphus pushing his stone up to the top of the hill, only to let it roll all the way back down.
Most schools feel the need to have multiple pillars, top-down initiatives that involve a sort of alignment where everyone does everything.
But that’s not what alignment is.
Alignment is everyone doing different things towards to the same singular goal.
On closer inspection, many of the jobs-to-be-done in those strategic pillars shouldn’t be in a bold strategy at all. They should be well rehearsed, automatic routines. When you look at schools who perform amongst the best in the world, they do so thanks to doing a ton of stuff automatically, routinely well. And then they have room for one more thing.
The schools who struggle to see the logic of having a singular focus have a problem because they’re not doing all those core things routinely. The business-as-usual they want to have isn’t happening automatically, not yet.
So it’s impossible to focus on a new ‘big idea’, because so many smaller ideas need tuning first.
Focus does not mean you’re going to stop doing a lot of things overnight. But when traditional school leadership and strategic plans put almost equal emphasis on everything at the same time it becomes overwhelming.
And, of course, middle leaders are the key lynchpins in all of this. Unless department heads, grade level leaders and coordinators understand the skills of leadership, over and above what they’re asked to manage, then they’re always going to feel underused, their potential untapped.