Responsive Management and the Exit Interview

Having an exit interview process within a school is a good practice that allows the school to collect information about school culture and health.  The administrative team and school leadership group need to use the information from these interviews to improve school culture through responsive management.

Exit interviews are seen by existing employees as a sign of an open and positive community and culture. They are perceived as caring and compassionate - a sign that the school is big enough to expose itself to criticism.  They provide an opportunity to 'make peace' with disgruntled community members who might otherwise leave with negative feelings and disparaging ‘word of mouth’ reflections about the school.

Exit interviews strengthen the head’s and curriculum leaders’ understanding and experience of managing staff and the school. Hearing and handling feedback is a powerful  professional development process.  They are positive and necessary for quality and effective people-management by most professional institutes and accrediting bodies concerned with quality management of people, organizations and service.

The feedback and analysis of exit interviews provide pertinent and useful data which can be used to inform staff development needs and training planning processes. Exit interviews also provide valuable information regarding recruitment and the improved inculcation and induction of new community members.

Furthermore, exit interviews provide direct information and data about how to improve staff retention.  Many times the organization is not happy to see people leave no matter the'post-rationalization and sour grapes' reactions of some managers to the departure of good people –if you will -  the ‘ it is what it is’ attitude.  The exit interview can offer an excellent source of comment and an opportunity for management to evaluate the all-important components of succession planning. Good people leave because they are denied opportunity to grow and advance. Wherever this is happening the school needs to know about it and respond proactively.

Every organization has at some point in its history several good people who want to leave because they are not given the opportunity to grow and develop, it can be sensible for school management to delegate responsibility to those who want it and are ready for it. Exit interviews are an excellent catalyst for identifying opportunities for improvement in this integral area of management development and succession.

So overall, exit interviews, and a properly organized, positive exit process greatly improve the chances of successfully obtaining and transferring useful knowledge, contacts, insights, tips and experience, from the departing employee to all those needing to know it, especially successors and replacements. Most departing staff are happy to help if you have the respect and courtesy to ask and provide a suitable method for the knowledge transfer, be it a briefing meeting, a one-to-one meeting between the replacement and the leaver, or during an exit interview.

Sources: NAIS.org
businessballs.com

Crucial Conversations

Schools hoping to make successful change speak openly about anticipated problems, taking on the all-important work of ‘crucial conversations’.  When new ideas and directions are introduced, successful schools effectively talk about concerns and stumbling blocks, thereby creating the social support within the school required for success. The ability to hold a crucial conversation is a key to successful implementation of new ideas and directions. As new ideas and systems are introduced, people have to be able to honestly and openly raise issues and concerns. Their ideas have to be vetted so that the initiative can be adjusted and tailored to specific cultural contexts and unique needs.  And everybody—no matter their background, education, or expertise—needs to be able to speak and be heard. When all the ideas from the group are surfaced, the group experiences synergy, as people build off each other’s input—surfacing the best ideas, making the best decisions.  Group members can then own and act on those decisions with unity and commitment because they’ve been involved from the beginning. In short, when stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run deep, change efforts work best when people know how to engage with one another and have ‘crucial conversations’.

Once the members of the school community have discussed concerns and established plans, they are able to move ahead to implementation.  This invites the consideration of how to respond if members of the group don’t follow new processes or if they violate new protocols, if they are resistant to the new direction or behave in ways that are incongruent with the philosophy behind a change effort and forward momentum.  This is where schools operate more like families and less like businesses.  In business, people more commonly know how to discuss ruptured agreements, dishonored expectations, or just plain bad behavior.  That is, people are skilled enough to speak in the moment and face-to-face about problems. These are crucial confrontations and are vital to successful implementation of new directions and initiatives. To be clear in a crucial conversation people work through their differences of opinion. It’s about disagreeing with each other openly. In a crucial confrontation, members of the group  face broken promises -it’s about working through disappointment. New initiatives will have poor traction if employees are allowed to ignore, resist or violate them without consequences. Therefore, in order for change and forward momentum to succeed, members of the group must know how to confront one another in an effective, direct, and healthy way.  In short, along with engaging in crucial conversations, members of the school community must know how to engage proactively and positively in crucial confrontations.


source: 

Beyond the Fads: How Leaders Drive Change with Results, Ronald N. Ashkenas; Human Side of School Change, Rob Evans

The Pursuit of Happiness

One of the great gifts educators get to take advantage of is a slower pace in the summer with really important personal time for replenishing and renewing energy for the work ahead.  Whether you are a teacher or an administrator or a trustee in a school, summer is a great time to reflect, regroup and reconsider commitment and direction for the work that most engages you. 

To embark on my path of renewal, I particularly enjoy reading the reflections of wiser, more experienced people than I.  Recently, I revisited the musings of Hugh Prather ( a noted philosopher and writer) in weighing my sense of connectedness and the balance of things in my internal and external spheres of influence.  I have collected a few thoughts for further consideration -at your leisure of course!

I cannot 'make my mark' for all time - those concepts are mutually exclusive. 'Lasting effect' is a self-contradictory term. Meaning does not exist in the future and neither do I. Nothing will have meaning 'ultimately.' Nothing will even mean tomorrow what it did today. Meaning changes with the context. My meaningfulness is here. It is enough that I am of value to someone today. It is enough that I make a difference now   Very seldom will a person give up on himself. S/he continues to have hope because he knows he has the potential for change. S/he tries again - not just to exist, but to bring about those changes in the self that will make life worth living. Yet people are very quick to give up on friends, and family, to declare them hopeless, and to either walk away or do nothing more than resign themselves to a bad situation.

Life has a way of taking unexpected turns - of throwing surprises at us when we least expect them. In many ways, life does bring one down. When unplanned and unexpected events come into our lives, they leave us in a state of pain, grief, doubt, fear and depression. One feels the need for a strong and stable foundation that one can depend on when life's river takes unexpected turns. A simple formula is needed that can keep us grounded on the path and pointed in the right direction - that of flow, let go, forgiveness and happiness. These are simple solutions, and they also are the catalysts in bringing happiness.

For more reflections from Hugh Prather check out:  ‘The Little Book of Letting Go’ or ‘The Key to Happiness’

The Gorilla Story

This story starts with a cage containing five gorillas and a large bunch of bananas hanging above some stairs in the center of the cage. Before long, a gorilla goes to the stairs and starts to climb toward the bananas. As soon as he touches the stairs, all the gorillas are sprayed with cold water. After a while, another gorilla makes an attempt and gets the same result—all the gorillas are sprayed with cold water.
Every time a gorilla attempts to retrieve the bananas, the others are sprayed. Eventually, they quit trying and leave the bananas alone.

One of the original gorillas is removed from the cage and replaced with a new one. The new gorilla sees the bananas and starts to climb the stairs. To his horror, all the other gorillas attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted. Next, the second of the original five gorillas is replaced with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Next the third original gorilla is replaced with a new one. The new one goes for the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four gorillas that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the
beating of the newest gorilla. After the fourth and fifth original gorillas have been replaced, all the gorillas that were sprayed with cold water are gone. Nevertheless, no gorilla will ever again
approach the stairs. Why not?

“Because that’s the way it has always been done.”
Reprinted with permission: aha! Process, Inc. 2004. Olsen, W. & William, A

Why This Story?

Change is irritating. It is confusing, mysterious, unsettling, yet undeniable. It knocks us off balance. It frequently pushes us beyond our comfort zones. We’re compelled to run faster and faster just to keep up. And there’s no end in sight, no resting. Because of the nature of things, we have to abandon what isn’t working. We must create new ways of being in the world and with each other. This is very demanding, energy-consuming work. We find ourselves reacting to changes proposed or demanded by others—parents, businesspeople, legislators, boards of education, et al.—while the real task, it seems to us, is to proactively create our future together. We end up in habitual behaviors that we use to avoid change. The alternative is to react defensively to changes being thrust upon us, thereby creating a future not chosen, into which we stumble, instead of a future we actively help shape.

Let Go or Be Dragged

"By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning."   ~Lao Tzu~

This past weekend I was in a little shop where I saw this expression on a magnet:  “Let Go or Be Dragged.”  It really hit home for me as I am in transition (or stated most optimistically, “between opportunities.”)  I was intrigued by the idea because I think I often struggle to let go.  Typically, I am self-critical about this tendency, viewing it as a character flaw.  Given my recent experiences while serving for a year as an interim head in a school enveloped by flux and unbidden change – where I absorbed a lot of peoples’ pain, served as the focal point for change, and weathered the ups and downs of a year spent leading transition, I was attracted to the idea of letting go and not getting dragged across rough terrain.  Furthermore, I am certain that one’s difficulty in relinquishing a given situation increases incrementally with one’s investment in that situation (in my case, my personal and professional investment in this particular school, its progress and its community).  So now, on the other side of a challenging and, I might say, tumultuous year, to truly let go, I think I am compelled to celebrate my strength and commitment to my work this past year and to honor myself for giving so thoroughly to this important endeavor.

We live in a world where things come easily and quickly. Many of us feel entitled to happiness as we value and seek it for ourselves and our children.  We are enamored of the idea of success, but we don’t love the long process of becoming successful. Determined and focused persistence or prolonged hard work is less attractive.  But persistence is a central facet of good growth.  Ideally, it is the excitement of reaching our aims by sticking with them that keeps us engaged and motivated.  Endless ideas about new goals we can achieve, if not matched by progress toward them, ultimately offer hollow feelings.  In other words, feeling invested and excited about what (and how) we achieve is more important than the first blush of new aims imagined.  So many boards leading schools succumb in the face of this critical dichotomy.  True growth stems not from generating new ideas but from the progress toward and achievement of well-conceived and enduring ones.

If we explicitly embrace and affirm the value of persistence we can be realistic and pragmatic in our thinking and expect obstacles and prepare for them.  In this way we connect persistent effort with performance.  If we identify problems, understand and define them, and then come up with a strategy for a solution, we can better meet life’s challenges.  The focus is on effort, feedback, and trying again; experimenting with, reflecting on, and learning from this process will lead to achievement. As we practice the process of defining a problem and all of its parts, generating and sifting through ideas, and determining a plan of action, we build confidence and resilience.  Perhaps in this way, transition becomes more about bequeathing than relinquishing.

In the face of all of this, there is little room for lacking energy, being uncooperative, or becoming lackadaisical in attitude or spirit.  With consistency and determination – long after the endeavor is exciting and fun, energizing and inspiring – you perform. Anyone who has led a school in transition, righting it and handing it intact and ready for forward momentum to its next leader, knows the value of this kind of resilience. You tap into your own determination. How much will you try despite being dispirited, frustrated, scared, and frequently countered on seemingly every level? Belief in the fundamental value of effort and determination despite difficulty is a successful strategy for life, and one benefits greatly through the persistence and determination to work hard and to earn, with blood, sweat, and tears, one’s aims.

"You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice that you are holding it. Admit your 'weaknesses' and watch them morph into your greatest strengths."  Neale Walsch

I Have Something to Say

At the closing event for school this year, a parent graciously extended a compliment to me on a correspondence I disseminated to mark the end of the year and the transition to next year.  The parent indicated that I was a good writer and that I must love to write.  I reflected back that I actually was a shy writer and did not think of myself as skilled in that area.  This came as a bit of a surprise to the parent. As the dust settled on a busy day of people and events, I revisited our exchange and realized that for me, writing is about feeling compelled to speak, not about the art of writing.  I write because there are things I want to say.  I want to share the truth as I know it, my experience, my story, my lessons learned and shared in a spirit of connecting and resonating with a larger sense of community. I am motivated by an intense desire to share what I feel about the world of education and the people around me.

As I consider the myriad of people - students, teachers, colleagues and parents - who share their journey with me, I am reminded that being present to each other gives witness to our shared reality.  Sometimes, especially when someone reluctantly shares something critical that they think I might not want to hear, I am grateful for the gift of awareness that can only come in such moments.  On occasion as a school leader, I speak a truth that propels people into catching up with their own reality – an equally valuable gift of awareness among constituents in a school.

In the meantime, I grow, I learn, I seek and I say what that means to me and listen to what the same means to others in their lives.  One of my mantras is “learn - create - share,” and my aim is to help communities of learners to share in information more efficiently and effectively.  Blogging for me is about exploring how to use multiple modes of communication and how to become a wiser, simpler communicator.  And in the process of reflecting prior to writing on the blog, I often learn about myself and about the situations of which I am a part, even as I garner a clearer understanding and vision of the particular emotion, momentum, or practice about which I am writing.  So for me, writing is a process for reflection and expression.  Along the way, I trust that there may be something of value for others  in what I have to say.

The Courage to Lose Sight of the Shore

I was reading the other day and came across a reflection on transition that really resonated with me.  This is that time of year in schools where lots of different constituents in a school embrace lots of diverse transitions:   students moving ahead to the next level, students moving on to a new school because they have concluded their studies or because of a life change, colleagues moving on to take new jobs and pursuing new opportunities, colleagues taking time off owing to a life change.  In some cases these are warmly embraced moments and in some cases these are sad and difficult moments.  In all of these cases we need to find the courage to continue the journey, the courage to enter into transition whether it is welcomed or not.

About 17 years ago, I completed an Outward Bound survival course on Hurricane Island in Maine.  It was one of my brilliant notions that my son, then  13, and I would live this high adventure together and that through the experience, he would find new ways of approaching an important transition in adolescence –  separation from his only parent.  As it turned out that was a less important outcome for us than many other wonderful discoveries we made on our journey.

Pivotal to the whole learning experience was facing our fears.  Fears for the self and fears for the other. Letting go and self-reliance became a theme that seemed to permeate every piece of the survival course.  One such moment looms larger than the rest.  Some fifty feet off the ground on a trapeze wire I was holding a rope with one hand and needed to travel on the wire 25 feet by letting go of one rope and reaching for the next one.  Of course, there were gaps between these ropes that made it necessary to let go entirely of the first rope to actually be able to reach and grasp the second one and so on.  The gaps were incrementally larger as you travelled the trapeze wire.  If it is true that nothing comes to the intellect that was not first experienced through the senses, I was on sensory overload!

Intellectually, I came to think of risk taking differently. I began to understand better the importance of letting go and hurtling into life’s voids.  I perceived that facing my fear and moving through it was empowering and liberating and actually made me more alive, more present – stronger.

The Parable of the Trapeze

Turning the Fear of Transformation into the Transformation of Fear

 

Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I'm either hanging on to a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments in my life, I'm hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.

Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I'm in control of my life. I know most of the right questions and even some of the answers.

But every once in a while as I'm merrily (or even not-so-merrily) swinging along, I look out ahead of me into the distance and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It's empty and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to get me. In my heart of hearts I know that, for me to grow, I must release my grip on this present, well-known bar and move to the new one.

Each time it happens to me I hope (no, I pray) that I won't have to let go of my old bar completely before I grab the new one. But in my knowing place, I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar and, for some moment in time, I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar.

Each time, I am filled with terror. It doesn't matter that in all my previous hurtles across the void of unknowing I have always made it. I am each time afraid that I will miss, that I will be crushed on unseen rocks in the bottomless chasm between bars. I do it anyway. Perhaps this is the essence of what the mystics call the faith experience. No guarantees, no net, no insurance policy, but you do it anyway because somehow to keep hanging on to that old bar is no longer on the list of alternatives. So, for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark void of "the past is gone, the future is not yet here."

It's called "transition." I have come to believe that this transition is the only place that real change occurs. I mean real change, not the pseudo-change that only lasts until the next time my old buttons get punched.

I have noticed that, in our culture, this transition zone is looked upon as a "no-thing," a no-place between places. Sure, the old trapeze bar was real, and that new one coming towards me, I hope that's real, too. But the void in between? Is that just a scary, confusing, disorienting nowhere that must be gotten through as fast and as unconsciously as possible?

NO! What a wasted opportunity that would be. I have a sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing and the bars are illusions we dream up to avoid the void where the real change, the real growth, occurs for us. Whether or not my hunch is true, it remains that the transition zones in our lives are incredibly rich places. They should be honored, even savored. Yes, with all the pain and fear and feelings of being out of control that can (but not necessarily) accompany transitions, they are still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives.

We cannot discover new oceans unless we have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Anonymous        

So, transformation of fear may have nothing to do with making fear go away, but rather with giving ourselves permission to "hang out" in the transition between trapezes. Transforming our need to grab that new bar, any bar, is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where change really happens. It can be terrifying. It can also be enlightening in the true sense of the word. Hurtling through the void, we just may learn how to fly.

by D. Parry