Five Simple Ideas that Make an Impact
Hiring, retention, and leadership tips for getting through less-than-stellar enrollment results - plus some thoughts about Thriving in a Time of Pluralistic Contention
IDEA ONE
Hiring - Think deeply about what your school is REALLY looking for in a new hire.
Take the time to really figure out the qualifications and past experiences you’re looking for when filling a position. What is your school trying to achieve at the strategic level? What does that particular department or area of the school need to move it forward? We all know that individuals make a difference. Think that through at the very beginning of a hiring process.
Do you need fresh energy? Deep knowledge? A new perspective? Political savvy? Moral authority? Independence? A consensus builder? An introvert with a low key approach? An extrovert who will be the loudest cheerleader anywhere and everywhere? Someone who’s been at a school just like yours? Someone who’s been in a school very different than yours - and different, how?
Don’t just dig up the old job description, change a few superfluous things and away you go.
When you really know what you need, it will inform all the other steps. It won’t magically make the pool richer or have the process move faster, but really zeroing in on what you want will provide more focus in sourcing candidates and ideally lead to the best outcome.
IDEA TWO
Hiring - Check references thoughtfully. Create questions that align with strategic goals.
I’ve said it before, the best reference question I ever received was, Describe ways this candidate will help create and support a faculty culture that puts the student experience at the center. That is a thoughtful question and it pushes towards a specific response that will be helpful in identifying the person who will be the best fit for the role you’re looking to fill.
IDEA THREE
Enrollment is down - Times can be really tough. Don’t stay in panic mode. Get strategic. (This is hard.)
If you’re the leader and things are looking bleak, don’t panic. Panic never helped anyone in a tight situation. Yes, feel the panic. That’s normal and human. It sucks. It’s not the best feeling. Try to get curious about it; that can make it easier to manage. Find someone to talk about it. Your dog is a particularly good confidential and sympathetic audience.
Then get strategic. If you don’t have an institutional plan on the shelf, you and your most trusted teammates need to figure one that leans into strengths, is honest about the market, and finds do-able pivots. This is not the time for lofty but abstract rhetoric. It’s also not the time for large scale change. It’s time to patch the leak and once the worst of the storm is over, get moving on getting board of trustees buy-in on a few overarching strategic priorities.
If you have to make cuts, align them with at least a broad strategy and don’t gut the program. But is this a “crisis-tunity” that can enable a few strategic cuts that might have been hard to make otherwise?
And remember, salary freezes sound good in the moment, but they actually save minimal money in the scheme of things and can lead you down a path where your overall salary scale becomes ineffective really fast. You’ll need to twist a salary scale out of shape to make competitive hires. And if you need to cut positions, if you don’t have positions that are dead wood, when everything calms down you’ll need a path to rehire, so it’s only a temporary gain.
Before making cuts, do the math! As several people have remarked to me recently, you can’t budget cut your way to financial equilibrium. Is the core of the crisis an expense problem - i.e. is there really a lot of extraneous expense to operate the program you promise - or is it a revenue problem? And if it’s a revenue problem, running a school on a skeleton crew will only make that problem worse.
And maybe the most important piece of advice for a school leader looking at a hard time - really try to get to what you don’t know and ask people who do, even if it’s scary. Remember - there is a ton of help out here! And I’m always happy to chat.
IDEA FOUR
Related: Enrollment is down. Once the dust settles, interrogate your strategy - is a tweak adequate or do you need to reinvent?
Get started moving forward but then when the dust settles, consider if major change is really what’s needed. This is a tough one. The vast majority of independent school strategies amount to tweaks and for good reason. Unlike colleges and universities, there are many basic expectations and non-negotiables in delivering a K-12 education. Adding additional learning support is a tweak; retrenching your academic program to center students with learning differences is a reinvention. One is not better than the other but it’s crucial in this environment to be able to tell the difference.
IDEA FIVE
Retention - Make the time to have those evaluation meetings with direct reports and write the letters.
Things are busy and maybe this even needs to wait until after graduation, but one of the most important retention tools is giving people meaningful feedback that demonstrates you are invested in their growth, you value them and they are essential to the school’s success. In ballet, kids all want the ballet teacher to correct them. Corrections are attention and investment. So an empty love fest isn’t meaningful feedback. Coming up with niggling criticisms because you need to feel like you’re “balancing the picture” isn’t helpful either. Take the time to think and engage with your direct reports, be curious about how they see their performance and their challenges and ask how you can support them in increasing their capacity.
BONUS
And - bravo to EE Ford for taking this on!
Thriving in a World of Pluralistic Contention; A Framework for Schools
This is a very thoroughly researched and thoughtful document created by a host of powerful leaders, supported in its creation by the EE Ford Foundation. It’s quite impressive and the intellectual prowess and deep, profound commitment to the future of independent schools that went into the production of this document is honestly awe-inspiring. It has the unmistakable imprimatur of credible authority. It’s important that the EE Ford Foundation is funding such ambitious projects with an aim to have a universal impact.
And yet… and yet…
What I really, really wish is that as an industry, independent schools could take communications as a discipline seriously. While how we say things shouldn’t matter - of course, the concepts, insights and ideas are of paramount importance - I’m left a bit confused about the audience for this document.
From the title on down, it feels as if for the average school person, it’s a lot of work to pull out the pieces that relate to your school’s situation. My take is that in response to a very emotional time with urgent issues and high stakes, the choice was made to go cerebral and logical for understandable reasons.
But I can’t help myself - but I’m not even sure what this means, practically: “...silence by campus leaders on issues of public controversy or current events should not be taken as acquiescence or approval of a position or policy or as insensitivity to the suffering of others but as the necessary means of creating space for the expression of student uncertainty and of views that might otherwise remain unvoiced. As the Kalven Report emphasizes, the presumption against stance-taking derives “not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference … but out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoint.”
“Should not be taken…” - The use of passive voice is curious here. Unfortunately, we just can’t control what our communities project onto an absence of comment. And the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago was produced in 1968, a very different communications (and social) context. It bears repeating - tending to school communities is quite different from tending to university communities.
As I’ve said in two different contexts this week - I’m the skunk at the garden party. I get it. And again, bravo to EE Ford and to John Austin, head of Deerfield Academy and chief author.
Enjoy the weekend!
Julie
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Aspiring Senior Administrators! Come join me for a go-at-your-own pace course on Writing the Personal Statement/Statement of Educational Philosophy this July! Finish the course with a draft or detailed outline of a personal statement you can use in a job search in 24-25.