McMillan’s Blog – Every Student, Every Day

I just returned from spending a weekend at Lake Powell with my family.  It was a wonderful weekend of water skiing, relaxing on the houseboat, and fishing.  Another great part of the weekend is that I had a great opportunity to get some reading in.  Here is a summary of the book that I read.  I would love to know your thoughts.

The Six Secrets of Change

What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive

By Michael Fullan

The six secrets are, in themselves, unremarkable. They all need to work together to ensure success.

1. Loving and investing in your employees in relation to high quality purpose is the bedrock of success
   1. You must focus on your customers (parents and students) along with your employees. All people involved in any organization have to be equally treated with respect – principals, teachers, students and parents. It is the total culture that counts – everybody needs to feel proud of what is being achieved. Developing an inspiring purpose that all can rally around is vital; enthusiasm is contagious.
   2. You need to help them find meaning, increase skill development and personal satisfaction in making contributions that simultaneously fulfill their own goals and the goals of the organization.
   3. “The quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” Systems that put the learner first create in teachers fatigue and a lack of appreciation.
   4. Create an environment where staff members enjoy it here, are excited to come to work, and are a valuable part of the creative effort. We will create an organizational morale that will be the envy of others.
2. Connect peers with purpose
   1. You must allow for continuous and purposeful peer interaction where quality experiences and results are central to the work.
   2. This can only happen when: the larger values of the organization and those of the individuals mesh; when information about effective practices are widely and openly shared; and when monitoring is in place to detect and address ineffective practice while consolidating effective ones.
   3. Focus and tighten requirements but also allow your staff to feel empowered. Trust the process and people in it once you establish the right conditions and set the process in motion.
   4. Good people working with other good people get even better.
   5. Replace “bad” competition (you fail, I win) with “good” competition (how do we all get better, but I still want to improve as much as I can). With purposeful peer interaction, people band together to outperform themselves relative to their own past performance.
   6. Change of thinking from “my classroom” to “our school.”
   7. Working in teams is better than ‘managing down’. Positive peer interaction, sharing ideas through collaborative team work, provides the necessary social and intellectual ‘glue’ to develop ‘professional learning communities’
3. Capacity building prevails
   1. Capacity building concerns competencies and motivation. People high on capacity are committed to getting important things done and are collectively and continually learning.
   2. Individuals and groups are high in capacity if they possess and continue to develop knowledge and skills, if they attract and use resources (time, ideas, expertise, money) wisely and if they are committed to putting in the energy to get important things done collectively and continuously (ever learning.)
   3. As a leader invest in capacity building while suspending short term judgment. People do not function well (at least not for very long) when they are scared or angry. Fear and distrust prevents acting on knowledge. Problems get solved when people believe that they will not get punished for taking risks. Fear causes a focus on short term goals can cause people to cut corners and manipulate figures. Helping people develop capacity by being non judgmental is the key. If you don’t learn from failure, you fail to learn. Forgive and remember. Let pressure do its work through the interaction of positive peers and the interactions of the six secrets
   4. Hire and cultivate talented people. Start with good people who possess the capacity to be exceptional employees. Leaders need to ask, ‘what would attract good people to work here’?
4. Learning is the work
   1. Integration of the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we already know) with the new learning required for continuous improvement. In other words, nail down the common practices that work so that you get consistent results; at the same time, you are freeing up energy for working on innovative practices that get even greater results.
   2. The challenge is to strike a balance between consistency and innovation/creativity.
   3. We need to be “all over” the practices that are known to make a difference. Depth of understanding makes a huge difference. Successes are recognized and challenges addressed.
   4. There is a need to: identify critical knowledge; to ensure all are educated in doing the right thing; and verify learning and success – forever
   5. Each and every teacher needs to be learning how to improve every day in the setting that they actually work (observations). People learn in the specific context in which the work is being done. Conferences and outside trainings are superficial at best. Learning comes from observation of others, coaching, and learning through reflective action.
5. Transparency Rules
   1. Assessing, communicating and acting on data pertaining to the what, how and outcomes of change efforts.
   2. Transparency is measuring what has been agreed by all as important. ‘Measurements’ should be guides to direct behavior and not so powerful and not substitutes for judgment and wisdom.
   3. Information overloads breeds confusion and clutter, not clarity.
   4. Using data to pressure and punish causes people to look only after themselves and go for short term results at the expense of more important goals. Transparency of measurement helps all involved develop ‘trust’ in the organization if it is a positive pressure for improvement. Everyone needs to be held accountable to putting into action what is agreed by all.
   5. Respect your extended network by challenging them and helping them to improve. Use date to look at problems and solve them together without threat of punishment.
6. Systems Learn
   1. Secrets 1-5 should be in place no matter who the individual leader is.
   2. Leaders should accept the concept of probabilistic decision making and to consider the complexity of different factors that are likely to act and interact. Even the best decisions are probabilistic and run the risk of failure, but the failure wouldn’t necessarily make the decision wrong.
   3. Leaders need to convey confidence about the future even though they are not fully certain. Stated differently, they can be confident that they have taken in to account all possibilities and have made the right choice under the circumstances, even though something may go wrong.
   4. Maintain an attitude of wisdom and a healthy does of modesty. Leaders need confidence ‘in advance of the battle’ and advice to followers is not to put blind faith in leaders. Leaders need to take action and then learn from experience. They need to visualize the whole while working on individual part. They need to look for patterns and relationships always searching for better solutions; valuing both mastery and originality.

Fullan’s advice is to capitalize on the synergy provided by the six secrets. By employing all the secrets accountability is inbuilt. A powerful quote about wisdom required for leadership, from Fullan’s book is,’ the ability to act with knowledge, while doubting what you know’.

‘Leaders who thrive and survive are people who know that they don’t know – are crucial to enabling others’. Finding the balance between guidance and listening, between directing and learning, are the roles of future leaders. Leadership is about creating an atmosphere where people constantly learn; it is about energizing other people to make good decisions and to learn from them; it is about releasing the positive energy that exists naturally within people. It is ‘about improving the lot of people around us’.

Leadership is creating the conditions for other to find happiness through being involved a worthwhile purpose.

As Fullan concludes his book, ‘go for it!’