"i was really impressed with a recent post in which you talked about your own professional development goals, some of your own challenges, and how you are creating a plan to work on those. i have worked with and observed manyleaders in organizations and it is a rarity to see a leader be so transparent about the parts of themselves they are working to develop in the personal/professional arena. when a leader does this it has a very positive influence on the culture in that it helps model and encourage the behavior for others. and it helps people hold each other accountable in more supportive ways. fabulous."
As you can imagine, this email made me feel great, and it also resonated for me in another way. One of the pieces of feedback I received this summer during the week I spent in Atlanta at the NAIS Fellowship for Aspiring Heads is that I am perceived as too focused on tasks instead of people. This was literally made visible to me through the SymLOG assessment:
The Y-axis represents orientation towards task orientation of established authority, while the X-axis represents values on friendly behavior. The third dimension of this assessment is the size of the diameter of the circle, indicating orientation towards personal dominance and projection. The black circle labeled "YOU" indicates my perception of myself, while the red circle labeled "EFF" indicates my perception of how I could be more effective as a leader. The black circle labeled "ACT" shows the composite perception of the nine people who rated me on this tool, and the red circle labeled "IDL" shows their perception of how an ideal leader would be assessed. And finally, the filled-in red circle labeled "MEP" shows the most effective profile for a leader, as developed from analysis of over 40,000 surveys.
My interpretation of this data (for which I also have the underlying numerical information) (along with that from the three other assessment tools that were part of the experience) was that at this time, in this place, I need to engage in more "friendly behaviors" with the faculty. While there's a social line between faculty and administration, and for good reason, it is less divisive here at TBS than it may be at other schools or institutions. But my reading of this data is slightly more complex than just getting beers with teachers after work (though that is important to do to); the goal that I formulated for myself is to recognize what's going right within the classrooms on a regular basis.
This is a topic that is out in the zeitgeist; for example, a recent blog post on Edutopia hit on it. And because getting positive feedback and appreciation is unfortunately all too rare for most of us, I'm trying to do a few concrete things towards being a better cheerleader. One of them is offering at least one genuine and authentic appreciation to someone on the faculty each day (which I'm tracking on a simple form, noting to whom and for what I give the appreciation). Another is to use "A+B/Q messages" in my feedback to faculty after brief observations; the "A" is a positive compliment about something that I see in the classroom, and the "B/Q" is either an idea of how to grow/expand/improve on that concept, or to ask a question about the activity/concept that will help push forward the teacher's thinking. And a third is publishing an internal division-wide newsletter called Mission Moments, which I share here just for you, loyal blog readers!
By the way, there's an interesting neurological reason that we see and hold negative experiences more than positive ones, related to the evolutionary history of our species and the need for our ancestors to avoid repeating potentially deadly actions. For more on that, check out Brain Rules by John Medina.
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