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In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
What Binds Us Together – And Must Be Our Focus
These are times of stress and uncertainty. Opinions and perspectives about what should be done abound. Some people want students to be in school full time while others point to the risk of virus transmission among students and staff. Some people argue for high standards while others urge flexibility and compromise until the pandemic passes. These and a myriad of other issues are worthy, but solutions that are responsive and sustainable will not emerge from pressure and conflict alone.
If we hope to find the most useful and responsive solutions, we need to start by reminding ourselves of what binds us together. By recognizing and drawing on the important foundational elements of our work, we often can find answers to our most vexing questions. By focusing on what binds us together, we can build our confidence and exercise the judgement needed to find our best strategies and generate needed outcomes. Let’s consider four of the ties that we can rely on and leverage during difficult times.
The most fundamental to what binds us together is a common purpose. Now is a good time to revisit and reflect on what our work together is intended to accomplish. Understanding the role and contribution of our work for learners, the community, and society can provide a shared context and focus. Agreement on shared purpose can open avenues for rich, robust discussion about how to best to accomplish our purpose without rupturing relationships and pushing us apart. Disagreement in this context can stimulate creativity and support productive disagreement.
We are also bound together by community. For the work of schools to succeed, we need to do more than occupy common space. Foundational to community is a belief that each person deserves to be valued, respected, supported and have a path to success. Communities survive and thrive through interdependence. Each person, each team, and each staff member has a role to play and contributions to make. When communities are built around common purpose creativity can thrive, disagreements can surface, and consensus can be built within a safe and healthy space.
We are also bound together through the service we provide. Education is service in support of the common good. Schools are one of the few crucial institutions in society with this mission. The presence of schools within communities represents an investment in the future. The work we do with learners, colleagues, and members of the community allows us to be part of something greater than ourselves.
Further, we are bound together by hope. Each day and year gives us the opportunity to start anew. We share a focus on preparing children and young people for a happy and successful future. Each day we engage in work that will make a difference for students long after they leave us. Hope can be the energy that sustains us through difficult and trying times like these.
These foundational elements can help us find our way through conflict without sacrificing relationships. They can open doors to new ideas and opportunities without abandoning what sustains us and makes our work worth doing.
Alternatively, disagreements and other forms of conflict without a context of what binds us together can become destructive and bring harm to teams, organizations, and the people who are part of them. If all we share are the issues on which we disagree, arguments often become personal and conflicts become “zero sum,” where someone’s winning means someone else must lose. Little good can come from this approach.
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
What Is Your AQ and Why Does It Matter?
Remember Blockbuster? This company had such a big share of the market we thought it could never go out of business—and yet it did. It was their inability to change course and adapt to and compete with emerging technologies that caused them to be left behind. In truth, there is a lesson there for all of us: People, like businesses and all professional organizations, must embrace change to remain relevant to those they serve. In fact, how well we adapt to change will determine how far we will go.
AQ, or Adaptability Quotient, is a person’s ability to adapt to a fast-changing environment. It is the third leg of the success-predicting stool made up of IQ, EQ, and now AQ. And it may just be the most important of the three. The relevance for us as educators right now couldn’t be more important.
If there was one thing the pandemic has taught us it is the importance of being able to adjust and to do so quickly. Within a week in March of last year, teachers went from teaching in person in their classrooms to teaching online from their computers at home. Few were ready to do so, nor could they even fathom the multitude of challenges they would face teaching from a remote setting. It was, and still is, an emotional maelstrom for both teachers, students, and parents. Those who haven’t been able to adapt remained adrift and are miserable. Those who accepted the inevitable and learned how to navigate the new environment are prevailing, achieving, and learning new skills they will bring into a more normalized environment when it returns. The lesson is clear: Adapt or become obsolete. Adapt or be left behind and left ineffective.
So how do we assess our AQ and what are important strategies for improving it?
First, we need to ask ourselves, “In what areas are we feeling most out of our comfort zone and what are our emotions when we enter these arenas?” Do we push back and refuse to learn and change? Do we spin in a state of resentment because we are being forced to change? Or, do we take a pause, and then take the necessary steps to embrace the change we are confronted with, trying to see the possibilities and the opportunities it presents? In truth, the latter is the only productive stance. The world will not wait for us while we moan and groan, it will move by us quickly.
Second, we can accept the inevitable quickly and start to adapt to it quickly. The longer we wait—refusing to accept what life is presenting us, the harder it will be to find success. Once we accept the conditions we find ourselves in, we can begin to use them to our advantage.
Third, we can sharpen our ability to determine what is relevant and learn to discard what is no longer relevant. Not every change we are confronted with is an important or critical one. Likewise, many of the things we used to think were critical simply are not. In order to make room for the new we need to be able and willing to get rid of those things we are stubbornly holding on to that are bogging us down. These are not often easy things to pinpoint, but we need to be open to them when they are pointed out to us.
Fourth, we can learn to read early signals that we are going to have to adapt and anticipate how soon and exactly how we are going to need to change. It does no good to simply bury our heads in the sand and hope that the change we see on the horizon won’t happen. How much better is it to make friends with the anticipated change and prepare ourselves and our students for it.
Fifth, we can become active “unlearners.” In other words, we can prompt ourselves to challenge what we think we already know, as well as our learned biases, when we are presented with new information. It would be a shame to hold on to the narrow biases we were taught in our youth as we try to navigate a world that has moved passed them.
Sixth, we can become active explorers and tap our natural curiosity to seek what we think might be around the corner. We can also remain dissatisfied with our current teaching practices—even seeking better and more engaging ways to work with young people as we adapt to change, and even because of it.
In truth, the ability to adapt is a key survival skill that we all must embrace, as well as teach to students. It involves maintaining an open mind—even when the mind wants to reject what it is learning. It requires maintaining an open heart, even when one’s feelings get hurt and are dismissed. And it requires developing the will to continuously improve rather than stay in place or regress. If we can do these things and teach our students to do the same, we can look forward to a rich, exciting, and rewarding future in which we are active contributors and not dinosaurs.
In Your Corner, Thinking Frames
In Your Corner, Thinking Frames
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Thinking Frames
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Share your story and the tips you have for getting through this challenging time. It can remind a fellow school leader of something they forgot, or your example can make a difficult task much easier and allow them to get more done in less time. We may publish your comments.
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Biases can be destructive, but they are not inevitable—and we are not helpless to them.
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