New Year; New Opportunity

The great thing about being a leader today is that, no matter what has happened in the past, you get do overs! I know that some very well intentioned people have said there are no do overs in life; well I think they are all wrong. If there are no do overs, then we would all be failures and no progress would ever be made! There are thousands of great stories of failure leading to success and I’d love to hear them all.

Our company, Culture By Choice, has seen amazing transformations of company cultures and we want to tell those stories. We are certain that there are hundreds of other stories that also need to be told. We want to provide a platform for telling those stories. If you’d like to participate in this project, let me know and we will schedule an interview. We’re calling these stories CABS Stories; Culture and Business Success Stories.

I want to start this project by telling a non-business story that I personally participated in. It began in 1990 when I was offered a job as assistant principal in what was considered to be a very good high school. Like every school, it was not without its problems. My job was to help improve the culture of that school. How to accomplish that was not agreed upon by the teachers and getting everyone to buy into a common purpose was not going to be easy. By the time we truly started making the type of progress we were hoping to see, a lot of changes had taken place.

One of the most important changes we made was not a physical change but a mental one. How we thought about our role as educators needed to change. Instead of thinking about ourselves as teachers and administrators, we needed to think of ourselves as guides, facilitators, coaches, and mentors. These weren’t separate roles for separate people, these were roles that each of us had to carry out. It wasn’t easy making the transition. In fact, some people who began the journey with us decided it wasn’t for them and they made the choice of finding a school with a more traditional view of what a teacher’s role was. These people were not always the people we might have hoped would move on, but as it turned out, their decision was for the best.

The traditional teacher role was that of purveyor of knowledge and scorekeeper of comprehension. We were asking teachers and administrators to become learning guides, facilitators of understanding, implementation coaches, and positive behavior mentors. This new role was hard work on four levels. Not many educators were willing to work so hard for the money they were paid and the flack they were sure to take. The ones that stayed with us and implemented this new style were rewarded, however, not with money and accolades but with the love of kids and achievements that were truly beyond our expectations. Before we started this journey we were dealing with a dropout rate of just below 7%, not terrible for 1990 but definitely not acceptable for what everyone considered to be an excellent school. In 1996 our dropout rate was below 3% which is one of the best in the country. Before we started our journey we were receiving 18 serious discipline referrals every day. In 1996 our discipline referral rate had dropped to fewer than .5 per day. And it wasn’t just the behavior that improved, academic performance dramatically improved. Teachers were amazed with how much better their students were doing. State test scores were the highest they had ever been. What we had learned was a simple lesson. Our kids didn’t care how much we knew until they knew how much we cared.

Culture in schools is totally about how we treat one another. It’s not about control, it’s about caring. When we try to make kids into what we think they should be, instead of what they are meant to be, nobody wins. Everyone loses! The lessons of my years as a building administrator have helped form my next 30 years! We can apply those lessons to every aspect of our lives. Let’s all stop controlling and start living better lives. Together, we can make the world a better place for everyone.

Creating cultures that promote growth and development is hard work. But any organization can do it. Making the effort is hard but not impossible. It always involves thinking beyond oneself. What gets in our way is our bias about how things ought to be. When we can remove our egos from the formula, we open the realm of possibilities to our world. My opportunity to become a piece of this transformation made such a profound difference in my life and I have to believe it made a difference in the lives of many, many others as well.