Three The Hard Way:
1. Hard truths are perpetual boomerangs.
You can try to dip, dodge, or dive but there is…
2. No escaping ‘em.
Hard truths in education:
- a key function of school is babysitting children. Need somewhere for the kids to be for 8 hours.
- No babysitters. No workforce.
- Don’t nobody want these jobs…aka teaching is one of the least sustainable professions. Parents’ favorite line to teachers tends to be: “I would never do your job”.
- Manufacturing authenticity…the kind that unleashes student genius…8 hours a day, five days a week, and 40 weeks of the year…is not a sustainable ask for even a gifted teacher let alone an average teacher to achieve.
We tried, had some wins and a lot of failure trying to design with some of these problems as creative constraints during the golden time of the pandemic…that period of time when it seemed the bureaucracy was so overwhelmed, folks in power spent more time listening than talking.
I pictured imaginary civic leaders coming together with industry titans to redefine the definition of school/work, the role of parents in both those settings, and begin a new post-Covid age of sustainable work, schooling, and parenting.
It didn’t happen. Maybe it did and failed. I don’t know. What I know is once people stopped dying, the bureaucracy was hungry to return to the game it knew. (I’d love to learn from communities that did build and hold onto radical innovations.)
If I choose to enter the fray in public education again…to get off the sidelines and volunteer to wrestle with those boomerangs…it won’t be in a school building.
It has to be at the ecosystem level, at the level of community…with whoever is convening the priest, the doctor, the employer, the teacher, the parent, the kid and the city council to talk…start from scratch…and try to design a healthy sustainable way of life.
At Empower, we called it Wakanda in Aurora. You need to influence the design and flow of your own resources at the scale of a city or state to achieve what we’re picturing.
3. How do you catch a perpetual boomerang?
You spend your life trying…
OR…
The answer lies with the growing number of educators quitting their jobs….
You get out the field.
#leadership #education #design
The Self-Appointed CEO
3 #LessonsLearned:
1. The most painfully annoying employee to lead is my toxic doppelgänger. A-ghost-of-workplaces-past that embodies my most dysfunctional behaviors in past workplaces.
In our book, we call this person the Self-Appointed-CEO. The CEO no one asked for.
This was me.
I would sign up for a job and spend my time criticizing my leaders and thinking of all the different moves I would make. Youthful arrogance has a purpose in the cycle of the soul’s evolution.
2. Nou wa ne. We reap what we sow. When the Self-Appointed-CEO showed up at Empower and gave everyone a taste of my old medicine, I recognized the fruits of the first seeds I sowed.
I gave him the gift my first Principal (Jennifer Troy) gave me in 2015. She gave me grace and said “maybe you should look into school leadership. The things you care about are what administrators do”.
This forced me to face an uncomfortable truth: I was way too scared to sign up for that job.
3. The Self-Appointed-CEO has a chip on his shoulder. He thinks himself Atlas carrying the world’s burdens on his shoulders. What he’s seeking to heal almost always has nothing to do with the situation at hand. His ego has run amok.
This was me.
What I wanted to feel was power and control. What I was unwilling to do at the time was sign up for the job. We want control without catching any of the flak, the arrows in the back, that the job requires. We want the shortcut.
Got a solution to problems better than your current school/org/company? Good. Go build it. Catch the heat. Welcome the applause and the critiques. Solve the impossible.
By the time, the Self-Appointed-CEO has made the journey of a thousand compromises…the journey required to bring any practical solution to market…life will teach them all the humility they’ll ever need.
You can’t learn the lessons on the sidelines. Get your hands in that dirt.
#leadership