Leadership requires flexibility, National Affiliates learn
Do you feel that your school district’s goals are constantly stymied and frustrated by events beyond your control?
Then imagine how NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz felt when Apollo 13 radioed back, “Houston, we have a problem.”
The explosion that crippled Apollo 13 doomed NASA’s original goal of landing on the moon. What’s more, as the minutes ticked by, system failures aboard the command module forced Mission Control to scrap plan after plan to save the astronauts.
Lost goals and failed plans -- sound familiar?
The reality is that any organization -- whether NASA or a local school district -- can expect to face a constant barrage of challenges and obstacles to its hopes for the future, David Wallace, an educational leadership consultant with the Sequoyah Group, told participants at the National Affiliate Large District Workshop, one of several events held at National Affiliate NA Central.
Success, therefore, depends on an organization maintaining a “clarity of purpose” that allows it to confront these challenges and obstacles -- and, ultimately, overcome them and achieve its goals.
Kranz’s determination to bring the astronauts home safely proved crucial to NASA in its efforts to recover from the initial crisis. But Mission Control was only able to achieve that goal after much struggle, as plans were developed and replaced as circumstances demanded.
School leaders also need to accept that conditions won’t always work in their favor and that they also must be willing to accept that Plan A might not work, nor Plan B, C, nor even D. “It’s OK to have more than one plan,” Wallace said. “It helps us get solutions.”
Such flexibility requires close attention to what’s happening inside the schools -- and looking beyond the obvious, he said. For example, while improving academic achievement is the ultimate goal, school leaders might find that the key to success lies in something more indirect, such as working on a positive school climate for students and teachers.
A real challenge for school boards is sustaining reform, he said. It’s far easier to develop a plan than to see it through to completion. Too often, school districts put in place “what we think is a good fix to a problem, then people come and go . . . it doesn’t last, the money went away, the superintendent went away.”
The solution to this dilemma, he said, is to train and develop your school leaders, maintain a network of “instructional leaders,” and stay focused on whether initiatives are continuing to work -- or are starting to drift.
“We need to be continually checking what we do, whether you’re in the central office or in a school building or you are on the school board,” Wallace said. “Sustainability in the long term relates to how well a system has taken on board the capability to address problems or challenges or interventions.”
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