Paying Attention to the Inside

(In Order to Attend to the Outside)

 By Gary Gruber 

With gratitude to Peter Senge, who talks often about decentralizing the role of leadership in order to enhance the capacity of all people to work toward healthier human systems, I offer these observations, insights and experiences.

As school leaders, we are acutely aware of trying to meet the needs of multiple constituencies and I often refer to all six - trustees, faculty, students, parents, alumni and the community at large.  We have to learn how to receive, with a measure of appropriate grace and humility, invitations, requests, suggestions, recommendations, ideas, information, bad news, and demands.  The challenge is to attend to the smallest of details while remaining connected to a larger vision, mission and purpose and representing the school as the main spokesperson, cheerleader, sage and guide.  And, we must not let any of the roles we perform go to our head and allow us to think that we know all the answers.  In fact, it's very good if we can ask the right questions and help people clarify their own intentions and goals and be sure that we know our own.

I remarked recently that I found no particular virtue in being busy and that I often marvel at how people seem to measure their effectiveness by how full their calendars are.  What is essential for a leader, according to Senge is "to learn how to manage the precious resource of paying attention."  What he means by that is that before venturing out and engaging all those other people, places and events, the leader needs to venture inside, and listen, to pay attention and be still.   It is here where we will find the resources and possibilities that will enable and empower us to reach out and connect with those others.

When we pay careful attention to our selves, to others, to the legitimate and genuine needs around us, we are in a much better condition and position to challenge and resist the status quo, to take creative and intelligent risks, and to encourage and support others.

This means we must carve out the time and place for that reflection, contemplation and renewal, be it solo or with a group of like-minded folks with similar needs and priorities. When we trust our own personal core beliefs and values, our intuition and senses, and our inner teacher, we can learn how to deepen our connections to what matters most.

We are confronted and confounded by many choices every day, not only for this day or that but for the weeks and months ahead.  Do we pay attention and give time and energy to every hang nail that comes in the door or across our desk?  Do we allow our days, or our lives, to become fragmented by everyone else's concerns, or can we find a way to be in touch with a larger purpose, still attend to the details, and communicate a bigger concern?  Helping others frame their work and give them a larger context could be a great service, not only to them but to those others whom they serve as well.

Living close to the land, we learn a lot about the uniqueness of creation with no two creations the same.  Every stream, forest, tree and bush is unique.  No two trees or branches are the same.  We are expressions of that same source of creation and just as those expressions are essential parts of the eco-system, our nature asks us to show our uniqueness too.  We would not ever think of a tree or a branch as being lost, or even confused, so why should we be any different?  We may forget from time to time or even get lost on occasion but if we remember who we are and what we are about, and from whence we have come, we can find our way back.  We can let go of the "delusion of separateness" so that we can learn to express ourselves in a way that is more connected to our nature.  We must let our own creation find us and in so doing live and work more completely, more congruently.

I can assure you that if we participate in this exercise and examen, besides knowing of our vulnerability and imperfection, we will come to our rightful place in the world and be very much at home with ourselves. For many of us it has been a continual journey of inner exploration and discovery in order to be somewhat useful for outer exploration and discovery.  None of us can know the end from what was begun, thus we have to trust the evolving and unfolding while perhaps nurturing it along the way.  We can only contribute to the extent that we have developed the inner resources to do so.  Therefore it makes such great good sense to find the place, take the time and pay attention to the development of the inner world of being.

Rediscovering the je nais sais quoi

of Character

 By Timothy McIntire 

On any Southwest plane at the back of the cabin in a skinny overhead compartment is a repository for cultural spelunking and occasionally meaningful research.  Most often the magazine bin - if the flight folks have been thoughtful enough to stash any abandoned journals there at all - yields popular-cultural publications with doctored lurid photographs of the former governor of California groping one on his household staff or cars that even our colleagues who make the Wall Street Journal noteworthy compensation lists would lease for a day at best.  To stay au courant with the culture in which our students swim, it seems to me, that no educational leader should pass on reading Us or Cosmopolitan or especially Vanity Fair -- where we catch up with so many of our independent-school families and their schools that is both shocking and delighting.  If it is in the bin then it is something a lot of travelers are reading.

And not.

There are also business and technical journals that are impossibly abstruse to those of us in foreign fields.  Since I fly from Albuquerque (ABQ) which is home to a great national laboratory that specializes in nuclear weapons, it would not be uncommon to ferret out an issue of the Nuclear Weapons Journal.  Recently, however, I found to my delight a journal of psychology that addresses six forms of Character and those clues that help identify them.  Gold. 

To wit:

1. Intelligence
2. Drive
3. Sociability
4. Capacity for Intimacy
5. Happiness
6. Goodness

My work with candidates for headships, presidencies, superintendencies, and principalships surely depends upon measures of knowledge, skills, experience, and behavior, and I have long employed a series of questions that allows for responses that form an actual "soul map" of fascinating people who take on these nearly impossible chief-leadership roles.  Additionally, many searches employ personality inventories that rub up against the old-fashioned interest in character.  For me, old-school is new school and those headmasters and headmistresses who subscribed to some variation of "Character is Fate" which is attributable to Heraclitus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or any good teacher who cares to follow what her or his students become.

In working with you magnificent human-becomings who are drawn to the SFLC seminars, identifying concrete indicators of character proves invaluable to inner-personal work that is requisite to leadership, especially for growth and change.  

Here's a flavor of what I mean:

1.Intelligence           

• Speed and capacity to process information & deal with complexity
• Conscious, controlled, deliberate, abstract thinking
• Spontaneous mental dexterity acquiring information automatically
• Humor

2. Drive

• Surgency, Passion, Work, Perseverence, Optimism
• Healthy Self Assessment
• Conscientiousness: prepared & organized
• Control of impulses

3. Friendship

• Capacity for Reciprocity
• Kindness & Assertiveness
• Endurance & Loyalty   
• Having at least one good friend  

4.Intimacy

• Source of Balance
• Ability to Trust & Listen & Predict
• Reveal Vulnerability & Assess Friendships
• Make a Commitment & Regulate Distress

5. Happiness

• Having a sense of purpose & feeling useful
• A byproduct of working toward meaningful goals
• Challenges & Risks
• Growth

6. Goodness

• Empathy
• Willing to help others
• Modeling & modeling upon others
• Moral Reasoning as distinct from Moral Behavior

Just to keep it simple - because we've all encountered following a psychological strand only to discover we should thread it through a philosophical needle  -- personal assessment or candidate assessment can be accomplished by understanding the six elements of Character and discovering evidence in the four domains listed.  I hope you will try it personally and professionally. 

One disappointing note about mining the Southwest Magazine Storage Bin: never once - and not for want of looking - have I found a single drink coupon!  I guess my Intelligence, Drive, Friendship, Intimacy, Happiness, and Goodness will depend upon more authentic inducement.

Why Every School Leader Should Watch Glee

By Carla Silver

Television shows set in schools have been around nearly as long as TV itself, starting in 1952 with Mr. Peepers and Our Miss Brooks, the latter of which actually began as a radio program. In recent decades, Welcome Back Kotter and Boston Public depicted life in gritty urban schools, while shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and My So-Called Life, illustrated the tortured existence of the privileged suburban high school student. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer - well, Buffy was in a category all its own.

Like the courtroom and the emergency room, school has been a routine backdrop of prime time series from drama to comedy to musical. This prevalence is likely due to the fact that we all have the shared experience of attending school;  we all have endured the angst of teenage years; and school has often carried with it formative friendships and teacher-student relationships.

Enter Glee in 2010 - in all of its glory and splendor, complete with dazzling dance numbers and polished vocal arrangements. What started as a mockery of high school Glee clubs and Broadway musicals, has become a phenomenon - complete with Emmy and Golden Globe awards and a live touring show. Whether or not Glee will rise above all other school-based television shows of prime-time past has yet to be determined. Regardless, every school leader should tune in to Glee, and here are a few reasons why:

1. Few television shows have so openly dealt with the complex issues of modern adolescents with the winning combination of honesty and humor. Bullying, GLBT issues, social isolation, teen pregnancy, homelessness, juvenile delinquency, body image, physical disabilities - Glee tackles them all and somehow, through grossly exaggerating and stereotyping these issues normalizes them. The love triangle between the flamboyantly gay Kurt and his understated prep-school boyfriend, Blaine, and the closeted football player has taken huge risks, paved new roads for gay characters on television and has opened up a dialogue about what it takes to be an openly gay or closeted teenager. Artie, a wheel-chair bound student, rises above his disability in his dancing and singing (and playing Dance Dance Revolution with his hands), as well as in his relationship with his cheerleader girlfriend, Brittany.

2. An underlying message of almost every Glee episode is the importance of standing up for what you believe and being yourself, despite the likely outcome of a cherry slushy in the face. Throughout the two seasons, the lead characters demonstrate bravery and commitment to personal values at the risk of becoming social pariahs (a fate worse than death in the life of most high school students). Even Finn, the popular high school quarterback, who has everything to lose and little to gain by joining Glee Club, follows his inner compass (even if it takes a vision of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich for him to recognize what is right.) Students and teachers demonstrate leadership at the highest level, and as a result, create positive change within the school (or at least within the Glee Club itself) and even within the culture of prime time television.

3. The adult characters in the show, especially the teachers are inherently flawed and yet redeemable. Whether it is Sue Sylvester, the sinister coach of the Cheerios Cheerleading Squad, WIll Schuster, Director of the Glee Club, determined to restore Glee Club to the halcyon days of his youth, or the relatively incompetent Principal Figgins, each adult character has a surprisingly human side to him or her. Just when you think Coach Sue can't get any more devious and unscrupulous, she demonstrates unparalleled warmth and affection towards her developmentally delayed sister.  Principal Figgins is wildly out of touch with student life (referring to the singer Ke$ha as "Key-Dollar Sign-Ha"!) and committed to fairness almost to a fault, and yet he is never afraid to face his faculty members and confronts them when they make mistakes (usually with winning lines like this one:  "Will, you wouldn't even know if your Glee Club was using your office to breed rabbit for pets or for food. You know why? You're too busy chasing tail and loading your hair with enormous amounts of product. I mean today it just looks like you put lard in it.") And Will, despite his willingness to do almost anything, regardless of ethics, to ensure Glee Club makes it to nationals, cares deeply about every member of his choir, and has created a safe haven for the freaks, geeks, criminals and outcasts of William McKinley High.

4. Finally, if for no other reason, you should watch Glee because all of your students watch it (or want to watch it). And even if they don't watch, they can sing all the songs from the show. 

You have three months to catch up on this show - and summer is the perfect time to escape in this musical fantasy.  Glee is not perfect, but it is relevant, and you will be too if you tune in. And that may be the best reason of all to watch.