Purposeful Leadership

You lead or you complain, but you can't do both

I served as Board chair during the second year of this term.  During that time I tried to bring calm  board proceeding by utilizing the tools of governance and management.  

Our long-time board consultant quit after a very contentious board retreat in 2023.  Her statement to me was she would not take money from a board unwilling to do the work.  Also, her reputation was a concerned becuase if you have the most contentious board members refusing to do the work, why stay around?  

The board had decided to give mediation a try.  We made our way all the way through the discovery/data gathering part of the process and received the report.  The report gave concrete mediated excises to improve trust and communitions.  I continued to support the process but when three board members decided to quit the process we were done. I believe the cost was near $30,000 and we walked away because some quit. 

The board then moved into the "complaint" phase where board members made formal complaints against other board members.  Of course this required an investigation and another $25,000 price tag.  

I told our lawyer that I could bring complaints against fellow board members and I too had experienced middle school behaivor from some board members that were really more insulting than grounded in anything legal.  I will never forget his words of advice:

"You can lead or you can complain, but you can't do both."

This statement has guided my leadership on this board since that day.  

Building trust through infrastructure takes purposeful leadership. Everyone talks about the lack of trust, but defining what creates trust and how to measure it is a conversation our board and the community avoids.  Accountability cannot be demanded without definition.  Those who demand more accountability without an explanation of what that means or look like seem to only want to grind on an issue and not look for solution.    

Let's have the conversation about how to create trust in the Robbinsdale School District. 

The only way our school district will change into a district that is high-achieving, resilient and sustainable for all is through an intentional framework of built-in quality measures that secure accountability and transparency. Building intentional framework and supports around finance, and other departments within the school district show proof and grow trust.  

As an intentional leader, I look for experts and seek their advice.  If the issue is truly a lack of accountability and transparency let's look for those solutions.  I believe the work of the Malcolm Baldrige Foundation is a great place to start and I am happy to report that components from the Baldrige for Excellence in Education quality initiative is being implemented by Dr. Staloch and her team.  If you don't know who he is, please do a quick Google search.  I was fortunate that during my years in corporate I worked with leaders who embraced a Baldrige framework of excellence and accountability, it was one of the best educations I received in corporate.  

Trust in our district will grow as operational data is shown to be trustworthy. Operational measurements are embedded and measured as part of the program itself. Numbers must be meaningful for them to tell the successes so quality measurements and program implementation go hand in hand.  

The following was written collaboratively with AI to provide background information about excellence and the role played by a Baldrige Framework and how it is influencing our district.  

The Malcolm Baldrige Model is an example of tools used in business and governance decision making and organizational management.  The district's new CIP (Continuous Improvement Program) implemented by Dr. Staloch is based in the work done by the Baldrige Foundation. It begins to build a framework of accountability.   

"The Baldrige Excellence Framework is a proven systems approach developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to help organizations improve performance, build resilience, and reach strategic goals. It provides non-prescriptive criteria across leadership, strategy, customers, and operations to evaluate processes and results. 

Not just for the business community, there is a quality section for education. The true power of Baldrige for education is its focus on the systems level. 

Jeffrey Lucas, former Deputy Director of BPEP (Baldrige Performance Excellence Program), makes the argument that many of the performance measurement systems used in education focus on student achievement data to the exclusion of measuring things that could truly innovate education to the betterment of students. 

“While the improvement of student learning must remain at the core of what education systems are about, achievement data alone are not sufficient to drive the types of performance improvements required and do not acknowledge that schools and districts are in fact complex systems.”

The importance of this thinking becomes apparent when one examines the experience of Baldrige Award winning school systems. Schools, administrators, and teachers are balancing multiple, often competing factors, that leave schools with inadequate resources, teachers with not enough time, and students with difficulty focusing on learning. As a systems-level tool, Baldrige help school systems align their processes and smooth over many of those seemlying conflicting factors

Seven Core Categories 

• Leadership: Guides organizational vision, governance, and ethical behavior.

• Strategy: Develops and deploys strategic and action plans.

• Customers (students): Focuses on engagement, satisfaction, and market loyalty.

• Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management: Manages and analyzes data to drive decisions.

• Students: Builds an inclusive, engaged, and thriving environment for Students.

• Operations: Designs, manages, and improves key work processes and resilience.

• Results: Examines performance outcomes in financial, operational, and customer (student) domains. 

Core Values and Foundations

• Systems Perspective: Manages all parts of the organization as a unified whole.

• Agility and Resilience: Adapts quickly to changing environments and market conditions (example, dropping enrollment).

• Management by Fact: Uses data and performance metrics to guide choices.

• Societal Contributions: Emphasizes ethics, transparency, and sustainability. 

End of AI collaboration.

Quality, transparency and accountability drives the new administration and is being imbedded into processes.  This is what builds a quality organization. The new CIP (Continuous Improvment Program) is a set of standards taken from the Baldrige programs of excellence for educatioin. In the short time it has been implemented I can see results. Although there is not much time behind the new numbers, the structure is in place and we are showing improvments.  

With quality controls in place, we can trust the achievement and operational data informations, we can make better decisions that solve issues, promote excellence and expose issues before they are devistating problems.  

Implementing a model of excellence is a huge step in the direction of accountability and transparency to help move us forward. Building trust through process happens with intentional leadership.

Trust has a starting point. 

Dr. Staloch shared with me that she knew from her research our situation was bad, she just didn’t know it was this bad. I knew, as did many members of the district and the community, the lack of control from the top began as early as the 1990’s and included more than just finance.

I trust the information provided to the Board by Dr. Staloch. I can connect dots and track the improvements over time. The reports make sense and are part of a larger system of reporting. 

The “silo” form of management is gone.  Dr. Staloch knows she is the orchestra conductor and is motivated to make great music with the other talented people sitting in her orchestral hall.  What would you think of an orchestra if only the cellos sounded great and the rest off key?  

Dr. Staloch implemented CIPs.  Each building is engaged in creating and monitoring a Continuous Improvement Plan (CIP).  I did not know that prior leaders did not use CIP so they are new to our district.  I was very suprised and disapointed to learn prior to Dr. Staloch hiring, our district had no mechanisms for quality built into the structure of the district.  It is a well used tool in organizations of all types and sizes.  

The CIP format is from the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Foundation For Education. The CIP's are used to create reports used by building leadership to track and improve.  The Board receives reports and informatioin regarding improvements.  

It is a demanding yet refreshing tool of management and replaces time wasted on second guesing and micromanagement. 

Quality systems require "all hands on deck".  Everyone must be engaged and involved to create and implement.  In the end, an employee training manual should be part of the work, operational documents and training build compliance and trust.  

During one of the planning phases of the Reimage Plan, architect, engineer and educator collaborated on the--+ design of space and student need. Almost everyone in the executive cabinet started their careers in the classroom so their knowledge of need is genuine and student centered.  Collaborations and consultations, that is the working model of the futue.  I have seen this incorporated into classroom culture, where students work in groups to learn together. It is amazing and to mee appears highly productive.  

Successful leadership is intentional, for the intentional leader,  quality, accountability and transparency are not optional. My leadership is intentional and grounded in proven tenents of leadership and governance to create and maintain organizational excellence.  

An intentional quality framework is a basis of intentional success and requires intentional leadership. I am an intentional leader.