This Job is Killing Me

 Have you ever wondered if your job is killing you?  Have you ever had a hard day where your boss/work/customer drove you to such levels of stress that you wondered if the work was actually shortening your hours on this earth?

I spent all last year and this summer denying that I felt death's raspy breath in the quiet, alone moments I spent finishing the paperwork (forms, grades, emails) all the daily crises wouldn't allow me to finish within the work day.  Until reality reared up and smacked me silly with impossibility.  It didn't matter how hard I worked, how efficient I was.  No matter what I did, there would always be more work than I could finish.

So, what does a person do with that?  Ignore it!  Ignorance was the key.  I needed to embrace ignorance.

Check out this link: http://t.co/rL8QNIHqlq

The basic premise: no matter how hard leaders work, how efficiently, how much they delegate, there will always be more work than can be done within a 24 hour period.  Those of us guilty that we took a 4 hour nap from 1 am to 5 am?  Never sleep again, and it won't matter.  THERE'S NOTHING WE CAN DO!  The answer is in what we choose NOT TO DO!

Great article.  Anyone in leadership, I know you have challenged yourself to be more efficient, organized and focused.  You never eat lunch.  You have long forgotten the taste of sleep.  Enough pointless masochism: read the article!  There are things in our work we just need to ignore.

Secondly, I needed to RETHINK stress.  Previously I thought stress was killing me.  But I recently came across a video that postulated it was how I thought about stress that was killing me.  My thoughts and not stress were killing me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU

The YouTube title says it all: How to Make Stress Your Friend

It's really a great video, life changing in fact.  The basic premise?
Stress is good; stress is necessary.  The fact we have learned that stress is bad, causes the common cold, heart attacks and alcoholism (etc.etc.etc.) is actually a LIE.

It isn't stress.  It is what we think of stress.  If we can learn to appreciate stress, well, this is the mind-blow of the video, if we can learn to appreciate stress, all the medical harm DISAPPEARS!

Conclusion 
You're busy people; you're leaders trying to be more efficient, effective and competent.  If all you do is read the highlighted portions of this blog you will know all you need to know: ignore what needs to be ignored AND appreciate stress as a good and necessary part of your job.

And please, go to sleep.  This job isn't killing you.  It is saving you, just as you have promised your profession toward saving others.

Thank you leaders for every thing every day you do to make this world a better place.  We all appreciate you!

Authentic Happiness

I can't fully explain why I put this image here, except that it made me laugh.  I like to see it.  For someone with my sense of (or lack of) humor, I would like to see this every day.  And I would probably laugh at it every day.  Which reminds me of something a mentor of mine share with me a little while ago.

Dan Hickey (The Hickey Group) was listening to me gripe about my day in leadership until he really couldn't take anymore.  "Authentic happiness," he said to me, abruptly interrupting my monologue.  We were sitting at the last known Caribou Coffee in existence.
     "What?"  The barista was steaming some milk to death and distracting me.
     "Go to authentic happiness."
     I looked around.  "Is that a place?"
     "It's a website.  Do a Google search.  The basic problem with leadership is the job controls you.  It will throw crisis after crisis your way, most of which isn't 'fun'.  You need to know what makes you happy."  He took a sip of his coffee and leaned back from the table.
     "But I do . . . "
     "Dan cut me off.  "You think you know, but go to the site.  It's pretty interesting.  Basically it will ask you a series of questions and it will tell you your top strengths, in rank order.  Try the 'Brief Strengths Test'.  Those strengths are places you need to spend more time 'in'.  For instance, humor.  What if one of your top strengths is humor?  You need to daily schedule in something about humor.  Or what if your strength is 1:1 conversations.  Have any today or was it all group presentations?"
     "All group presentation.  I ran professional development all day."  Just thinking of it made me cringe.
     He could tell I didn't consider is a strength.  "With leadership there will always be tasks outside of your comfort range.  Each day will be an experience pinballing from one crisis to another.  You might be able to plan for that, but you can't control that.  What you can do is control what you're doing BETWEEN the crises.  Schedule some happiness time every day.  You need it."
     He took another sip of his coffee.  "So, what makes you happy?"

Click on the image to the right, go to the website, create a free account and see:

Fine, don't think my panda riding a plastic, yellow horse is funny?  Try this:

Praise Worthy Praise

So, why is it that our defining moments of learning are typically negative?  Tripping in front of the whole school bus, asking a stupid question the entire class laughs about, being humiliated by a coach or teacher or parent or boss in front of a rapt audience?

I do tend to obsess about this conundrum.  As a coach, my players seemed to need negativity in order to change behaviors; in other words, they never seemed to respond to positive feedback.  Unless I was roaring epithets from the sideline like a lunatic they made the same mistakes one (long) game after another.  To get positive results I felt like I needed to be a monster.  I mean, it seems like too many of the people who learn and achieve the most have AWFUL upbringings.  Einstein, Oprah, Hemingway.  I got pretty good at a sport, for instance, and I attribute it to a horrible coach.  He pulled me in front of the whole team and roasted me.  I vowed to never let that happen again!  (Shoot, just re-lived the pre-teen moment a little there.)

No matter how many times being nice seemed useless, I can't believe that being evil to children is the way to produce great learning.

Which should explain my delight when I came across a Carol Dweck video (thank you Kate Murray!).  The basic premise?  How we, the educator, interact with our learners matters greatly.  Carol quickly explained why my players didn't grow.  But it wasn't because I was giving 'positive' praise.  Actually, they weren't growing because my praise was, well, BAD.  (Again, perhaps they grew when I scared the hormones out of them, but I hated myself.)  Going nutshell here, according to Carol Dweck, good praise focuses on effort and process.  Ineffective praise focuses on right vs. wrong, whether I'm being nice or screaming.

Carol's findings are staggering.  When students are praised for correctness, they get worse over time and avoid taking risks: they become pleasers. Even more significantly, they become LESS correct over time.  Conversely, when students are praised for effort and perseverance, they tend to take more risks, try harder tasks and ultimately are MORE accurate, more correct.  Well, color me a praiser!

http://youtu.be/NWv1VdDeoRY
(Ok, odds are you skipped past the video.  DON'T.  Watch the video.  It does a far better job than I do.)

I watched this video and felt immediately changed.  Learning takes time; students grows subtly.  As I hugged my daughter and for the first time praised how hard she worked in the swimming pool versus how proper her form was, I didn't care if I was right or wrong.  I am not sure if there were visible results in her performance.  I loved how big her smile was.

And the next day?  She crushed her 100 meter lap time . . . for 50 meters.  Then she mistimed her breath and swallowed 1/2 the pool.  As she came up to me coughing and hacking, I didn't mention once how silly it was to breath water.  Nope, 'great effort kid.  Great effort.'

Seeking Conflict

 So, driving home last week my new blog post reached out through the radio and slapped me in the brain--GM.  The great general, the GM, the goliath fires staff concerning the ignition switch cover up.  And I couldn't help myself from wondering: did they fire the right people, and how did they know?  

The whole situation brings to mind a really short, powerful book: The Thin Book of Naming Elephants.  It's basic premise is the Challenger disaster happened because the system punished employees who asked difficult, unpleasant (and likely untimely) questions.  I mean, it would be AWKWARD to halt the national launch countdown during live streaming.  And yet, there were people within the organization who said they should.  The same was true with GM. There were people who knew, and what they knew would have saved lives. Why weren't they heard?

If the first premise of the book is that all organizations need to ask unpleasant questions concerning their process, procedures and products, then the second is that all organizations have within themselves the staff who know the right questions and when prompted can provide solutions.
So, the first key to avoiding the 'GM Condition'is to ask the right questions in order to build a healthier organization.

The second key to avoiding the 'GM Condition' concerns an article from the Harvard Business Review concerning conflict, blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/conflict-strategies-for-nice-people. It's basic premise?  Conflict is necessary for innovation.  It suggests conflict as a tool for catalyzing creativity and recommends that if leaders truly want to be appreciated, to be seen as 'nice', then they need to SEEK conflict appropriately.  Since this is clearly counterintuitive, it also covered why most organizations avoid conflict. 

This caused me to draw the two readings together. A healthy organization needs to create conflict and to invite critical questioning, which also creates conflict.  And right there my heart began racing: questioning and conflict eats time for breakfast.  There are days where I drive to work praying for a 'quiet' day.  Can't the messes I cleaned up yesterday stay cleaned up?  Ah, if only. And yet, when pressed, I define my essential job description as: conflict.  I deal daily in conflict.  I actually just said that to a friend the other day.

'Hey, what do you do as an assistant principal?''
'Um, conflict.  I do conflict all day long every day.'
'Ug.  Sounds awful.'

Yes, but what if we substitute terms in for conflict?  According to this article by dealing in conflict I deal with innovation.  How much more invigorating to say I deal in innovation daily.  I use conflict to seek novel solutions to ancient problems.  Oh, that sounds good.  I like that.

'Hey, what do you do as an assistant principal?''
"I deal in innovation daily.  I use conflict to seek novel solutions to ancient problems.'
'You're kidding.  I mean, you work in a school, right?'
'Yes I do.'

'This' is PD Set Free

How did your work day begin today?  With nervousness and doughnuts, anticipation and planning, conversation and laughter?  Sharing?  Listening?  Wondering?  Did your leader say, 'This is your home.  We are a family.  Today let's support one another, and if someone has an epic fail (laughter), well, we'll pick you up and, heck, this is North.  I don't even know what epic fail looks like.  Let's give this a try.'

This 'this' was teachers sharing their action research from the year at one suburban Detroit high school (Grosse Pointe North), teachers developing and running PD for one another: teachers teaching teachers.  And the thing is, we gave the 'this' a try.  Every teacher in the building, and counselors and support staff, ran professional development this morning.  And their peers attended.  What did it look like?  It looked like listening, wondering, conversation, risk-taking, laughter.  It looked like a professional learning family.

It was also, however, different.  We didn't bring in a keynote, or hire out consultants.  We didn't go as a group to a conference.  We actually created an internal mini-conference at the cost of donut holes, coffee and other snacks.  We planned essentially for a year and every single attendee also was a presenter.

People have been asking, 'how did it go?'  That's a bit tougher to discern than what it looked like.  That's a request for a tangible result, a survey, some data.  If we have a standard of achieving the correct answer and clearly indicating improved student results over the last year, I can't say.  I know the classrooms will be better for it, but give me a little time to develop the assessment please!  The thing is, those are old standards and we're trying to solve new problems using innovative solutions.  New problems demand new assessments and ultimately new standards.  The 'this' is new PD, teachers not as codifiers and transmitters of the sacred code but as creators, innovators, researchers and developers.  Think about that--the teacher of today is not the one who knows the golden answer; it is the one who knows how to ask the perfect question.

I have a knew standard of rubrics I would like to introduce, though, that give some great data about today, rubrics focusing on: questioning; sharing; creativity; risk-taking; communication.  If you have a chance, check out Intel's teacher tools: https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/   They're one example of the rethinking standards going on today.  For instance, here's a selection from a creativity rubric:

I can explain why my project is high quality by using the language of the field to compare its features and components to exemplary products.

This one is crazier:

By immersing myself in the field in which I am creating, I have developed my own sense of what quality is in my work, and I trust it, even when others may not appreciate it.

What?  Seriously?  That's just short of school-room anarchy--students determining their own sense of quality, despite the possibility others may not appreciate it?  When I calm down a little, and re-read the standard carefully, there's a balance of content knowledge (immersion in the field) and critical thinking (develop a sense . . . despite the opinions of others).  And that seems right.  Actually it seems timeless; it seems like what we've always been trying to do in education.

Haven't we always wanted to develop literate individuals with the ability to think freely, deeply?  Today was the latest evolution of the movement.  So, having a little time to think it over, 'this' was good.  It was a very good day.  On rubrics demanding creation, original thought, questioning, communication and application it was an A+.  Also, like any good conference I've ever attended, as an attendee I feel challenged, excited, hopeful and joyful.

But because we also made this conference together, I feel something more than I've ever felt before from a conference.  I feel like I remembered something: learning is free and sets us free.  It brings and gives joy.  It is always wonderful and best when shared with family.

Well done North, and thank you for a good day.

The Problems with Trailblazing

I was at a Panera the other day and noticed a RW Emerson quote: ‘Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail’.  Often that quote will inspire me, and as education pushes administrators to be instructional leaders I can see how this idea is catchy.  But today, for some reason the quote simply reminded me of the lessons my father taught me about respecting the wilderness.

My father was a forester.  In the way that superintendents manage a school district he managed a forest, the Caribou National Forest (now combined with the Targhee), about 1 million acres.   He had a company car (lime green) and a company horse (Red).  He had leadership meetings, QLD meetings and company retreats.  The really cool part was the retreat probably entailed white water rafting or horseback rides into the back country.  On one trip, I volunteered to help clear the timber wreckage from a high mountain tornado. We had to ride in as horses were the only vehicle that could navigate the terrain.  

 Gray's Range, Caribou NF
retrieved from www.forwolves.org

 Adventurous in spirit, I would spur my horse off the trail to check out sights and sometimes simply to show how maverick I was.  My father watched quietly from the narrow trail.  When I came back from one spectacular foray through a meadow of breathtaking wildflowers, he stopped me.  “Son, that’s not a good idea.  The trail is here for a reason.  My rangers have laid this trail to avoid problems and to avoid animal habitats.“  Honestly, he would say 'habitats' like that in casual conversation.  “If your horse steps in a gopher hole, it will break his leg.  If you wander into a mother moose, you will be in trouble.  Either way, you just killed a lot of protected flowers.  Stay on the path.”  And with that he moved forward so I could fall in line behind him.  Over time and many trips he taught me that avalanches often happen when people who don’t understand the mountain wander from approved areas, that rock climbers, the good ones, follow established routes so they don’t destroy the rock face, and that every person who carves their name on a tree is scarring nature for all those who will come after them. 

Emerson’s words don’t resonate with my father.  Instead of inspiration he sees soil erosion and dangerous emergency rescues of fools who have wandered off a safe path.  Furthermore, according to Emerson, no one is allowed to follow the trail anyone else left.  Even if it is an amazing trail.  Ultimately, if everyone is heading off where there is no path and leaving trails, the entire world will be one really wide dirt road. In education there is so much pressure to blaze a trail, start a new program, be the first to figure out a new technology.  If we heed RW Emerson, there is little collaboration and certainly no ability to follow an amazing innovation someone else created. 

Why?

I had the blessing of being the head of a district initiative for the past two years, an initiative which no one wanted anything to do with.  Well, not quite no one, but truth be told, I and my job had a hard sell from day one.  Which is why Simon Sinek in his TEDx talk ‘Start with Why’ resonated for me.  I think a part of leadership is helping an organization see the path for the future; however, few leaders are really successful in achieving ‘buy-in’.  This is what Simon studied: why do a few entrepreneurs/companies achieve greatness while many others do not?

Did you know the Wright brothers were not the first to 1. study flight 2. achieve flight?  The crazy thing is they are recognized as the first.  Why?  How about tablets?  Microsoft was well ahead of Apple in developing those.  And yet Apple owns the market.  Or Tivo?  I have a DVR.  It's not as good as Tivo, and it also isn't a Tivo.  Which is also crazy since Tivo invented the DVR but has been a failure in 'selling' it.

Simon Sinek studied this phenomenon and 'coded' the rationale.  The failure is in selling the what and  how.  Entrepreneurs succeed when they sell the why, or what they believe in as opposed to what they do or how they do it.  

In the video Simon outlines what he calls the "Golden Circle".  His point is unsuccessful sales start with the what and/or the how.  For instance, 'we build excellent tablets'.  That is what the organization does.  Simon discovered that when entrepreneurs start with why, or what they believe, those entrepreneurs are successful.  

They start with why and then move through the how and the what.  His contention?  "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it".

I wondered if this would work as a mission template:  'We believe (why) _______ .  How we do this is _____.  What we do is ______.  Would this at least be inspirational?  

Well, here's my attempt:

We (those wonderful people I work with) believe education; the ability to read, write and think; is a fundamental human need and right.  How we deliver this fundamental right is provide public education to all students regardless of income, race or ability.  What we do is work to develop the best instructional methods possible to deliver the ability to read, write and think to all learners.  

And we do this every day; we do it for all students; we do it together.

Hmmm . . . I like this Simon Sinek guy.