What are you planning to learn this year?

This post is a revised version of the Dec 22/11 post - with a view to the future....

As a leader, what are you planning to learn this year?

Michael Fullan (2008) reminds us that "Learning is the work."  As leaders, we aren't effective if we aren't learning - just as we want our staff members to be learning.  So....what are you planning to learn this year?  What will be your learnings as a leader this year?  You'll likely need to take a bit of time to think about it.  You'll probably have to reflect on what you might want to change. 

In order to identify what your leader learning could be for this new year, you might want to use some of these questions to prompt your thinking:

• What went well last year?
• What didn't go so well last year?
• If I were to do something from last year over again, what might I do differently?
• What would I not change in my leader practices for this year?  Why?
• Of my leader practices, which do I feel are really solid?
• Of my leader practices, which need some attention?
• As a leader, am I accomplishing the things I want to accomplish?  If yes, why?  If no, why not?
• As a leader, what knowledge do I still wish to gain? 
• As a leader, what skills do I still wish to gain?

What did you learn this year?

As a leader, what did you learn this year?

Michael Fullan (2008) reminds us that "Learning is the work."  As leaders, we aren't effective if we aren't learning - just as we want our staff members to be learning.  So....what did you learn this year?  What were your learnings as a leader this year?  You'll likely need to take a bit of time to think about it.  You'll probably have to reflect on what went well and what didn't go so well. 

In order to identify what your leader learning was this year, you might want to use some of these questions to prompt your thinking:

• What went well this year?
• What didn't go so well this year?
• If I were to do things over again, what might I do differently?
• If I were to do things over again, what would I not change?  Why?
• Of my leader practices, which do I feel are really solid?
• Of my leader practices, which need some attention?
• As a leader, am I accomplishing the things I want to accomplish?  If yes, why?  If no, why not?
• As a leader, what knowledge do I still wish to gain? 
• As a leader, what skills do I still wish to gain?

Learning Stance or Performance Stance

As a leader, what is your stance?  Learning? Performance? Boss?

As leaders, we can take any of a number of stances.  Historically, leaders assumed more of a 'boss' stance.  That is, they assumed the role of the person in charge and then gave direction to staff in accordance with what they - and more senior levels of their organizations - believed staff needed to do in order to meet the goals of the school/organization.  Thank goodness the days of leaders assuming the boss stance are rapidly becoming memory.  It's a paradigm of leadership that may have worked at one time but it certainly doesn't address the reality's of today's workplace or the needs of the broader community.

Increasingly, we see leaders assuming one of two other stances.  These are the learning stance or the performance stance.  It's pretty evident by the term used that a performance stance is more about how a leader performs.  It's a lot about appearances and being seen to be doing things.  Leaders in a performance stance are always busy and always doing things.  Are they getting things done?  Likely, in some cases.  But it's more by luck than by design. 

As the nature of the workplace changes and the nature of how the public wishes to interact with schools and organizations, we see a different leader stance emerging.  This is the learning stance.  Leaders in a learning stance position themselves less in a hierarchical position and more along a continuum of responsibility where they - along with all members of staff - are engaged in learning while conducting their daily work.  Think about Peter Senge's 'learning organization' or Michael Fullan's statement that "Learning is the work".  Leaders who flatten the hierarchy, position themselves with staff along a continuum of responsibility, and actively co-learn with all colleagues are the new leaders in the current workplace paradigm.  Shared ownership and responsibility for school/organizational outcomes are the order of the day.  Gone are the egos, the performances, the bluff exteriors, and the hierarchy.

What's your stance?  Think about your own leadership.  Does it speak more to being the boss? Performing? Or learning along with colleagues?  Beginning to shift your stance just might help bring about some of the elusive results you are seeking.

Staying in your Comfort Zone?

As a leader, are you tending to stay in your comfort zone?

In our roles as leaders, there is a certain comfort to be taken from staying in our comfort zones - that is, doing the things that are familiar, routine, manageable, and readily within our range of skills.  However, there is a significant downside to this comfortable territory.  How do you learn?  Michael Fullan (2008) tells us that 'Learning is the Work'.  If we wish to learn, we need to tread into leadership territory that is unfamiliar.  When we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory that demands skills that we have not yet mastered, we put ourselves in a position to learn.  If we always stay with the familiar, we don't need to learn.  For you, what might be new or unfamiliar leadership territory?  What might you try when you are there?  How might you learn when you're there? 

Any readers with interesting leadership stories about moving out of your comfort zone into the unfamiliar?  If so, please share through the Comments just below.  

If Learning is the Work...

As a leader, how do you support, encourage, enable learning for your staff? 

Michael Fullan tells us that "Learning is the work".  If this is the case, it has great significance for leaders.  It means that we must be aware of what learning needs to take place and then to determine the best ways to support, encourage, and enable it if we wish to create authentic learning communities.  We may even need to help our staff members understand just what this means in terms of their professional practice.  Indeed, it may also mean that we need to understand and come to terms with this in terms of our own leadership practice. 

According to Fullan (2008), "The secret behind 'learning is the work' lies in our integration of the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we already know) with the new learning required for continuous improvement." 

It's a simple statement but it requires thought about what this means and how it translates into practice in a school or organization.  It assumes that we are focused on continuous improvement in both practice and results.  It also assumes that everyone is 'on board' with this type of thinking.  As a leader, this may involve new thinking and reculturing around professional practice - for your staff and possibly even for you.

I look forward to your comments about Fullan's statement.  


From:  The Six Secrets of Change by Michael Fullan (2008)

Focus and Creativity Matter

If the following is true.....

Leaders in sustained, successful organizations focus on a small number of core priorities, stay on message, and develop others toward the same end, making corrections as new learning occurs (Fullan, 2011).

.......how, as a leader, do you:

• sustain the focus?
• stay on message?
• develop others?
• make corrections as new learning occurs?

What did you learn today?

As a leader, what did you learn today?  Michael Fullan tells us that "Learning is the work".  If this is the case, what did you learn today that improves your practice or makes you a better leader?  If you haven't got an answer for this question today, you may want to think about this tomorrow.  What are you learning through the leadership work that you are doing? 

Paying Attention to Leadership Actions and Traits

Recall a time when you were particularly effective as a leader and bring to mind your actions as well as your personal characteristics or dispositions you exhibited at that time.  As you think of your experiences, it becomes clear that leadership actions and personal traits work hand in hand to support quality leadership.  From such an exercise, people report taking actions such as:

• developing and communication a clear purpose
• holding high expectations for everyone
• anticipating and addressing small problems before they grow into bigger ones
• demonstrating a deep understanding of the work
• developing others
• facilitating change

As they take these actions, leaders are also using personal characteristics that contribute to their success, such as being action oriented, enthusiastic, realistic, risk taking, caring, and committed.  They underscore the importance of having integrity and being a listener and a learner and willing to change minds.  What emerges from this exercise is a composite of actions and traits of effective leadership.  High performance leadership comes from balancing key leadership actions with personal dispositions that strengthen and support leadership results.

Michael Fullan (2001) writes that all of us can become better leaders by focusing on just a few key leadership capacities.  He developed a framework for leadership depicting five capacities for leaders to lead complex change. 

• being guided by a moral purpose
• understanding change processes
• building relationships
• promoting knowledge creation and sharing
• coherence making

Fullan wraps these leadership capacities in three personal characteristics - energy, enthusiasm, and hope - that both build and reinforce the five capacities.  For leaders to achieve high performance they need their actions and dispositions to work in harmony. 


From:  Leading Every Day by Joyce Kaser, Susan Mundry, Katherine E. Stiles, & Susan Loucks-Horsley
Published by: Corwin Press

More on Leadership and Moral Imperative

As a leader, what does moral imperative look like in your leadership?

School leadership is serious business.  It takes a combination of clear personal values, persistence against a lot of odds, emotional intelligence, thick skin, and resilience.  It also takes a knack for focusing on the right things and for problem solving.  We will see plenty of named cases of this in action, but let us realize that the best leaders have strong values and are skilled at strategy.  Attila the Hun and Hitler meet this definition.  Leaders with moral purpose, on the other hand, have a different content - deep commitment to raising the bar and closing the gap for all students. 

Leaders need to support, activate, extract, and galvanize the moral commitment that is in the vast majority of teachers.  Most teachers want to make a difference, and they especially like leaders who help them and their colleagues achieve success in terrible circumstances.  Revealingly, once this process is under way, teachers as a group value leaders who help the hardcore resistant teachers leave.  When this happens, the cohesion of the rest of the staff actually increases (Bryk, Bender, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Linton, 2011).

From:  The Moral Imperative Realized by Michael Fullan

Published by: Corwin Press and OPC (the Ontario Principals' Council)

Sustainable Leadership

As a leader, how are you engaging with the principles of sustainable leadership?

Hargreaves and Fink (2006) lay out a radical agenda for shaping the capacity of school systems to engage in continuous improvement.  Their seven principles of sustainability in concert focus on sustainable leadership as the solution:

1. Depth (sustainable leadership matters)
2. Length (sustainable leadership lasts)
3. Breadth (sustainable leadership spreads)
4. Justice (sustainable leadership does no harm to and actively improves the surrounding environment)
5. Diversity (sustainable leadership promotes cohesive diversity)
6. Resourcefulness (sustainable leadership develops and does not deplete internal and human resources)
7. Conservation (sustainable leadership honours and learns from the best of the past to create an even better future: pp.19-20)

From:  Turnaround Leadership by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass and OPC

The Six Secrets of Change

As a leader, do you know the six secrets of change and do you know how to use them?

The Six Secrets of Change


1. Love your employees - The key is in enabling employees to learn continuously and to find meaning in their work and in their relationship to coworkers and to the company as a whole.

2. Connect peers with purpose - ...foster continuous and purposeful peer interaction. ... The job of leaders is to provide good direction while pursuing its implementation through purposeful peer interaction and learning in relation to results. 

3. Capacity building prevails - Capacity building entails leaders investing in the development of individual and collaborative efficacy...

4. Learning is the work - ...there is far too much going to workshops, taking short courses, and the like, and far too little learning while doing the work.  Learning external to the job can represent a useful input, but if it is not in balance and in concert with learning in the setting in which you work, the learning will end up being superficial. 

5. Transparency rules - By transparency I mean clear and continuous displays of results, and clear and continuous access to practice (what is being done to get the results).

6. Systems learn - Systems learn on a continuous basis.  The synergistic result of the previous five secrets is tantamount to a system that learns from itself. 


From:  The Six Secrets of Change by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass

Moral Imperative of School Leadership

As a leader, what is your commitment to the moral imperative of school leadership?

Waiting for Superman captures the moral imperative writ large, and writ deep.   But in my view, this is not the moral imperative if only a handful of disadvantaged kids get a chance.  The first two-thirds of the film is as brilliant as it is alarming.  Unfortunately, the last third relies on moral outrage as its sole strategy and fails to identify any way out other than to say we need more schools with passionate leaders and teachers.  Of course we do.  But moral purpose, even deeply felt, is not a strategy.  We need moral purpose actualized, and on a very large scale.  The latter is the essence of this book. 

Moral Imperative As Strategy

So the question is not just how deep is your moral imperative, but equally, what is your strategy to enact it.  Just as moral imperative is not a strategy, neither is being "right." .....but let's establish some basics here for making the moral imperative a strategy. 

1. Make a personal commitment
2. Build relationships
3. Focus on implementation
4. Develop the collaborative
5. Connect to the outside
6. Be relentless (and divert distracters)

From:  The Moral Imperative Realized by Michael Fullan

Published by: Corwin Press and OPC (the Ontario Principals' Council)

The Change Process

As a leader, how do you understand the change process?  What is your comfort level with complexity?

...it is essential for leaders to understand the change process.  Moral purpose without an understanding of change will lead to moral martyrdom.  Moreover, leaders who combine a commitment to moral purpose with a healthy respect for the complexities of the change process not only will be more successful but will also unearth deeper moral purpose.  Understanding the change process is exceedingly elusive.  Management books contain reams of advice, but the advice is often contradictory, general, and at the end of the day confusing and nonactionable.  ...six guidelines that provide leaders with concrete and novel ways of thinking about the process of change:

1. the goal is not to innovate the most
2. it is not enough to have the best ideas
3. appreciate early difficulties of trying something new - what I call the implementation dip
4. redefine resistance as a potential positive force
5. reculturing is the name of the game
6. never a checklist, always complexity

From: Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass

Starting Point for Improvement - Part 2

As a leader, how do you determine what is important when determing your starting points for improvement?

In another study of four successful high-poverty districts, Snipes, Doolittle, and Herlihy (2002) found that these districts in comparison with other districts

1. Focused on achievement, standards, and instructional practice
2. Created concrete accountability systems in relation to results
3. Focused on lowest-performing schools
4. Adopted districtwide professional development and support for consistent implementation
5. Drove reform into the classrooms by defining the role for central offices of guiding, supporting, and improving instruction at the building level
6. Committed themselves to data-driven decision making and instruction
7. Started the reform at the elementary level
8. Provided intensive instruction in reading and math to middle and high schools students

From: Leadership & Sustainability by Michael Fullan
Published by: Corwin Press & OPC (Ontario Principals' Council)

Starting Point for Improvement - Part 1

As a leader, how do you establish your starting point for improvement?

Nearly all of the success stories involve improvements in literacy and numeracy at the elementary level, with some closing of the gap between high- and low-performing schools.  The findings are consistent across many studies.  Togneri and Anderson's (2003) study of success in five high-poverty districts identified six strategies for improvement.  These districts

1. Acknowledged publicly poor performance and sought solutions (building the will for reform)
2. Focused intensively on improving instruction and achievement
3. Built a systemwide framework and infrastructure to support instruction
4. Redefined and redistributed leadership at all levels of the district
5. Made professional development relevant and useful
6. Recognized there were no quick fixes

From: Leadership & Sustainability by Michael Fullan
Published by: Corwin Press & OPC (Ontario Principals' Council)

Capacity Building

As a leader, how do you build the necessary capacity in your staff to meet the demands of the work that needs to be done?

Two key principles should permeate your capacity-building work:

1. Minimize blame and focus on improvement.  If people fear blame, there will be less transparency and less insight into the root causes of problems, which will inhibit capacity-building.  Instead, build a culture in which struggles or challenges are viewed as opportunities to learn and further improve delivery.  It is important to communicate that people are being judged in order to strengthen performance and not for the sake of laying blame.  In practice, a culture of no blame needs to exist alongside a culture of taking responsibility, so plain speaking and honesty will be crucial.  As Michael Fullan (2008) explains in his book The Six Secrets of Change, "This doesn't mean that you avoid identifying things as effective or ineffective.  Rather it means that you do not do so pejoratively."

2. Create a culture of continuous learning.  To truly sustain the capacity to implement change, all system actors responsible for delivery must be constantly going through the cycle of acting, reflecting, making adjustments, and trying again, each time refocusing their efforts on the actions that are found to be most effective.  In this culture, all contributors to delivery are constantly increasing their effectiveness.  As Michael Fullan (2008) put it, "Learning on the job, day after day, is the work".

From: Deliverology 101 by Michael Barber
Published by: Corwin Press, EDI - U.S. Education Delivery Institute, OPC - Ontario Principals' Council

Learning for Leaders

As a leader, do you continue to learn?  If so, are you learning 'in context'?

Learning in Context

...learning in context over time is essential.  Let us be precise here  because aspects of this lesson are counterintuitive.  Attempting to recruit and reward good people is helpful to organizational performance, but it is not the main point.  Providing a good deal of training is useful, but that too is a limited strategy.  ...  Learning in the setting where you work, or learning in context, is the learning with the greatest payoff because it is more specific (customized to the situation) and because it is social (involves the group).  Learning in context is developing leadership and improving the organization as you go. Such learning changes the individual and the context simultaneously. ... Opportunities to learn through study groups, action research, and the sharing of experiences in support groups create real supports for principals so that the complicated and difficult problems of instructional leadership can be addressed. 

From:  Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass

Understanding the Change Process

As a leader, do you need to manage change?  If so, how do you approach it?

Understanding the change process is less about innovation and more about innovativeness.  It is less about strategy and more about strategizing.  And it is rocket science, not least because we are inundated with complex, unclear, and often contradictory advice. ... The goal is to develop a greater feel for leading complex change, to develop a mind-set and action that are constantly cultivated and refined.  There are no shortcuts.

Understanding the Change Process

• The goal is not to innovate the most.
• It is not enough to have the best ideas.
• Appreciate the implementation dip.
• Redefine resistance.
• Reculturing is the name of the game.
• Never a checklist, always complexity.

To find out more.........

From: Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass

Leading In A Culture of Change

As a leader, how do you manage change for those whom you lead?

"Change is a double-edged sword.  Its relentless pace these days runs us off our feet.  Yet when things are unsettled, we can find new ways to move ahead and to create breakthroughs not possible in stagnant societies.  If you ask people to brainstorm words to describe change, they come up with a mixture of negative and positive terms.  On the one side, fear, anxiety, loss, danger, panic; on the other, exhilaration, risk-taking, excitement, improvements, energizing.  For better or worse, change arouses emotions, and when emotions intensify, leadership is key. 

From:  Leading In A Culture of Change by Michael Fullan
(Published by: Jossey-Bass)