Friday, November 13, 2009

Partners in education? Wait & See

One of the two most prominent findings this fall, from the superintendent search firm Hazard, Young & Associates, was the identification of the severely fractured relationships in our district. Yet, no semi-finalist candidate identified at Wednesday night’s special Board of Education meeting—when they had the opportunity in professional biographies written in their own words—listed collaboration any place among their professional histories of “significant accomplishments.”

Leadership is clearly about accomplishing something and taking responsibility for your work, but leaders know that real partnerships are not only critical to creating great work, partnerships are essential to sustaining that great work, too. Otherwise you're just a manager directing people to do things. Are we supposed to believe that these candidates did what they did alone? Or are we to believe they did it by telling workers, parents and community what do do, how to do it and when it needed to be done?

The absence of any evidence, again that they had the opportunity to list in their own words, that they value a collaborative environment that brought them the success they were proud to list has me eager to listen as carefully as possible to their public interviews this weekend.

This weekend will offer one more chance for each of them, in their own words, to offer even a modicum of evidence that any of them expect to find value in the 6,000 employees and community of over a quarter million people that one of them may be poised to inherit.

Or we call a do-over.

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