Recognizing and Celebrating Successes

As a leader, how do you recognize and celebrate the successes of your staff?

In the end, people will forget what you said, forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

As a leader, recognizing and celebrating the successes of your staff can be very motivating.  Kouzes and Posner (2002) speak about encouraging the heart and its significance for people.  As leaders, we often focus on the front-end deliverables related to planning, implementing, resourcing, and managing.  It can be easy to forget about the power and energy that comes from sincere recognition and celebration of actual accomplishments.  Emphasis here is on the word 'sincere'.  If it's not coming from your heart to their hearts, it's meaningless.  People see through insincerity very easily.

In his book Drive (2009), Daniel Pink cautions us that an excess of recognition and celebration can actually de-motivate people.  Staff learn quickly that if there is no 'reward' on the way, the work is either not important or it's not worth doing because recognition won't come on the heels of completion.  When recognition becomes routine, isn't sincere, and doesn't recognize truly worthwhile work, it means nothing.  

For you as a leader, it's a case of knowing your staff and how much recognition and celebration are appropriate.  Here are a few questions to guide your thinking about when and when not to praise.

• How often will it be given?  In what forum?
• Does it always come from you?  Can it also come from colleagues?
• Is it done publicly or privately?
• Is everyone recognized at some point?  Is anyone left out?
• Do people know what merits recognition or does it appear to be arbitrary?  Does recognition come when school/organizational goals are met?
• Are people praised for results, effort, or other reasons?  Why?
• What have your staff told you about what they'd like in terms of praise, recognition, and celebration?
• Is it sincere and honest?

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

Asking Good Questions

Earlier this summer we shared five practices effective leaders use to accomplish extraordinary results.  One of them - "Challenge the Process" - recognizes that leaders today must continuously ask how to get better and improve outcomes.  They ask, "Why are we doing what we are doing?  Why are we doing it this way?  Are there more effective things we can do?" (Kouzes & Posner, 2002).

In today's fast-paced world, leaders can't possibly have all the answers.  They need to use good questions to guide others to get to the "right answers".  Peter Scholtes (1998) identified "seven basic all-purpose questions" leaders must ask:

1. Why?  When you encounter a problem, ask why.  Ask why as many as five times to get to the root cause of the problem. 
2. What is the purpose?  People love to suggest things and often grab onto new ideas to implement in their organizations without making sure there is a match between the organization's needs and their ideas.  Help people clarify the purpose - or desired outcome - as they plan new projects.
3. What will it take to accomplish this?  While it is nice to dream, your job as a leader is to support people to implement their ideas.  This question gets others to think through the methods they will use to put ideas into action.
4. Who cares about this?  Ask this question to make sure you are choosing actions that will matter to the right people.  If the people you serve notice or care about the action, it should have higher payoff for you.
5. What is your premise?  Many suggestions and ideas are made without stating the assumptions or beliefs that are guiding them.  When you ask people to state their premise or assumption, you help them gain greater insight.
6. What data do you have or could you get?  Some suggestions and ideas are based on perceptions and hunches - asking this question pushes people to "ground" their actions in real data.
7. What is the source of your data?  Before you base decisions on data, make sure it is valid and comes from a reliable source. 

Increasingly, a leader's role is to coach colleagues to think through plans, anticipate problems, and get the right things happening.  Questioning and demonstration are the basic tools of a good coach.  Here are some other questions that Scholtes suggests leaders ask when a team is implementing a new project or intervention:

Prior to Starting

• What could realistically go wrong?
• How might that be prevented?
• What should we monitor to see if the problem is occurring?
• How can we be prepared to react if it goes wrong?

During Implementation

• What are you doing?
• Why are you doing it?
• How do you know this is the right thing to do?

After Implementation

• Are we getting what we wanted?
• Are we avoiding what we didn't want?
• Do we need to make adjustments?
• How would we do it differently next time?

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

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

Keeping a Client-centred Focus

Think about a time you felt you didn't get the service you wanted, needed, or deserved.  Perhaps you had taken time off to have someone come fix an appliance, and that person didn't show up and didn't call.  Maybe you had paid a bill but the accounting department kept sending you statements.  Possibly you had made arrangements with your supervisor to take a personal leave day but he or she had forgotten and scheduled you into a meeting. 

Try to remember what you were feeling.  Frustration?  Anger?  Resentment?  Now, think of just the opposite situation.

Think about a time you were treated as a valued customer.  Perhaps the accounting department notified you of an overpayment.  Maybe someone from your clinic called to tell you that the doctor was running late.  Possibly your supervisor stopped by to make sure that you had everything you needed to get the proposal in on time.

More and more leaders are finding it essential to adopt a client-centred focus.  Take education as an example.  The ultimate customers are the students and the community.  In the old paradigm, if students did not have basic skills in reading and math, it was their fault.  After all, they had the opportunity to learn, didn't they?  If that situation occurs now, schools are more inclined to look at their own systems to determine what else can be done to ensure that the students reach the learning goals.  Their core mission is to teach students, not just 'deliver' lessons. 

Students, their parents, and the community are external customers but there are also internal customers - the colleagues with whom you work.  It is important to maintain a client-centred focus with them also.  Having a client-centred focus means always thinking about how you can provide great service and making sure that people receive value. 

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

Developing Your Culture

What is the culture of your organization?

Darryl Connor (1993) defines cultures as "the beliefs, behaviours, and assumptions of an organization [that] serve as a guide to what are considered appropriate or inappropriate actions" for individuals and groups to engage in.  Culture operates at two levels: 1) overly, as apparent in policies and procedures and 2) covertly, reflected in "the way things are done".

Culture in an organization usually evolves over time.  The personalities of the leaders often determine the beliefs, behaviours, and assumptions that eventually become firmly established, although they may not be especially visible.  This results in what Connor (1993) calls a default culture.

It is much less common for leaders to consciously and deliberately establish the type of organizational culture that serves their needs.  As a result, new leaders often inherit a culture that doesn't support changes they want to make in the organization.  And they find out quickly that a non-supportive culture can be very inhospitable to a change initiative. 

If you are a leader of a new organization or project, you have the opportunity to build the type of culture you believe works best.  If you take over an existing entity, you have the harder task of assessing and changing the culture - a difficult but not impossible task. 

Regardless of which position you are in, here are some things to consider about your culture:

• Are the values and principles explicit so that everyone understands what is valued?
• What is the trust level in the organization?  Do people at different levels trust one another?  What do you do to make it safe for people to take risks and trust one another?
• Are people valued as individuals, or are they thought of primarily as assets or resources?
• Are people's hands, heads, and hearts wanted - or just their hands?
• Is the atmosphere informal and comfortable, or is it formal and tense?
• Are people treated equitably, or is there evidence of preferential treatment?
• Is the environment positive, with people encouraged and recognized, or is it negative, with little or no recognition and a lot of blaming?
• Does the organization freely share information, or is the flow of information tightly controlled?
• Is learning from mistakes valued, or are people more likely to be fired, blamed, or reprimanded for errors or failure?
• Is learning valued, or is it seen as a deterrent to getting the work done?
• Is the organization committed to continuous improvement, or does it change only when there is a major problem? 

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

Building a Shared Vision

Vision.  What is your reaction to this word?

Is it negative?  Perhaps you have been involved in vision-building activities that never really made a difference in how your organization functioned or in your results.  Perhaps your organization, like many others, failed to live by its vision once it was created.

Effective leaders engage people throughout the organization in building commitment toward the shared vision that becomes the guiding force for all action.  A great example of this is schools that have established a vision of an unyielding commitment to ensure that all students meet local standards.  The vision drives all behaviours and informs all of the school's operations, structures, and allocation of resources.  Another example is schools that envision themselves as providing the best quality instruction, without exception.  Again, the vision shapes what the staff does, including making sure every teacher is supported to learn and carry out best practice and use ongoing analysis of data and results to find out what is working and what needs to be changed. 

Many organizations have vision and mission statements.  Most visions, however, are not shared visions.  They are imposed on others by the head of the organization or a group of people at the top.  These visions are not effective long term because they "command compliance - not commitment" (Senge, 1990).  A shared vision is different.  A shared vision incorporates individual visions, engenders commitment, and focuses energy.  As Senge (1990) says, "When people truly share a vision, they are connected, bound together by a common aspiration.  Shared visions derive their power from a common caring".

Kouzes and Posner (2002) suggest that leaders inspire people to come to a shared vision that is appropriate for them based on carefully considering how future trends will affect them and what reputable people are predicting about their business in the next 10 years.  As leaders, you must look at this future and help to build a shared vision based on that.  Schools that have visions based on old trends and data from prior decades are going to be locked in the past. 

Don't confuse vision and mission.  Vision is knowing where you want to be or what you want to become.  It includes tangibles, as well as intangibles, such as virtues and the culture you that you want to surround you.  Mission is your reason for being and the work you pursue to realize your vision.  Your mission guides your actions to achieve what you envision for yourself and your organization. 


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

Change as a Process

Change is a process, not an event.

                                    - Gene Hall & Shirley Hord

What is the difference between an event and a process?  An event is a one-time occurrence.  It happens, and it is over and done with.  In contrast, a process is ongoing.  It takes place over time and evolves.

How do people treat change as a one-time event?  The following are some typical illustrations:

• Send out a memo saying that from this point on, this is how things will be done.
• Invest in a new program and expect that people will automatically be able to use it.
• Send people off for training and expect them to immediately behave differently.
• Enact a new policy or practice and then announce it to the staff.
• Offer people professional development with the expectation that they will successfully help others.
• Involve only a small number of people in making the change instead of a more broadly based group of stakeholders.
• Expect to see immediate results from a change initiative. 

When people treat change as an event, it is doomed to fail.  Unless the change is one of minimal consequence, it simply won't happen.  What is different when people see change as a process?  They do the following:

• Involve the people affected by the change in planning for and leading the change.
• Account for the impact of change on the people involved.
• Know that any significant change takes time and plan accordingly.
• Employ professional development over time to ensure that people acquire the right knowledge and skills to implement the change.
• Set realistic expectations for implementation.
• Build a culture of support for the change that avoids blaming people for past mistakes.
• Apply a monitoring procedure to track key benchmark events.

Viewing change as a process increases the likelihood of obtaining desired results.


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

Balancing Leadership and Management

What is leadership and what is management?

Both are very important in organizational life and shouldn't be confused. 

Leadership is doing the right thing; management is doing things right.  Managers direct the hacking of a new path through the jungle; leaders make sure that they are in the right jungle.

One of the major contributions that a leader can make is to always be able to distinguish between these two important functions.  We often become so focused on the day-to-day realities of what we do that we lose sight of whether we are doing the right thing.

Leaders often have to ask the hard questions: Are we getting the best results possible?  Where can we improve?  Who is not learning and what can we do about it?  Are there ethical issues involved?  What knowlwedge and skills do our staff need, and how will they get them?  Will the proposed staff development give us what we need?  Is our strategic planning effective?  These queries will help you challenge the status quo that is often accepted without question.

Think about the leadership role you play and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why are you doing what you are doing?
2. What data do you have to show that you are addressing the right problems and doing the right work?
3. How are you spending your time? What percentage of your day is spent on managing tasks?  What percentage of your day is focused on setting the course, engaging with others and providing leadership?
4. Are you sure you are "doing the right things" before you set up procedures to "do things right"?

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

Leading For Results

Current leaders can learn so much from the leaders that have come before us.  We all benefit from knowing what has worked for other leaders and getting insights into the question, "If you can only use a few leadership practices, what is likely to have the greatest results?"  For example, what leaders do in schools can have a significant impact (positive or negative) on student learning.  In a meta-analysis of 30 years of research on leadership, Waters, Marzano, and McNulty (2002) identified 21 leadership practices that enhance student achievement.  Savvy leaders actively seek to use these practices:

1. Building culture by fostering shared beliefs and a sense of community and cooperation.
2. Maintaining order by establishing a set of operating procedures and routines.
3. Protecting teachers from distractions that will take away from their teaching time or focus.
4. Providing resources such as professional development and materials to support staff to do their jobs.
5. Directly involving themselves in the design and implementation of curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices.
6. Establishing clear goals and keeping the focus on meeting them.
7. Being knowledgeable about curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices.
8. Having quality interactions with staff and students and being visible.
9. Recognizing and rewarding individual accomplishments.
10. Communicating effectively with staff and students.
11. Reaching out to stakeholders and being a strong advocate for the school.
12. Seeking input and involving staff in decisions and policy making.
13. Recognizing school accomplishments and acknowledging failures.
14. Building strong relationships with staff.
15. Being change agents willing to challenge the status quo.
16. Providing leadership and inspiration for new and challenging innovations.
17. Taking action based on strong ideals and beliefs about education.
18. Monitoring and evaluating effects on student learning.
19. Adapting leadership style to the situation and being tolerant of dissent.
20. Knowing the school context and using your understanding of people and situations in your context to solve problems.
21. Ensuring that staff have opportunities for intellectual stimulation around the work of teaching and learning. 

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

School Leadership and Power

As a leader, what type of power do you exercise: coercive, utility, or legitimate?

Power can be defined as having great influence and control over others.  Leaders gains it through positional authority and/or by earning respect and developing a following.  Regardless of how leaders gain power, they must use it appropriately and morally.  If they fall in love with the idea of power, they may end up taking actions that are in the interest of retaining their power, not in meeting their mission.

Stephen Covey (1990) identified three different types of power used by leaders.  When a leader uses coercive power, follower follow because they are afraid.  They will either be punished in some way or lose something if they fail to do what the leader wants.  For example, too often we see education leaders use accountability for student learning as a threat instead of as an opportunity to work together to solve problems.  When a leader relies on utility power, followers follow because of the benefits they will receive if they comply.  This model sees the leader-follower relationship as transactional - they follower will do something for some reward (for example, paycheck, bonus, or recognition).  This type of power is the most commonly used in organizations.  The third type of power - legitimate power - is focused on building commitment and trust.  Followers follow because they believe in the leaders, trust them, and want to achieve the same purpose.  This is the type of power that is the strongest and most effective.


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