Know Better, Do Better: Neutrality is Your ‘Land of Opportunity’
10 MIN READAuthor: Steven Dahl, M.Ed.
Director of Professional Learning & Content Development
The Center for Educational Effectiveness
Author: Erich Bolz
V.P., Research & District Engagement
The Center for Educational Effectiveness
You may recall in our earlier pieces: The Tired School Improvement Initiatives Won’t Transform your School But This Will, and Minding the Gap Is Where It’s At, we discussed how a policy-driven overreliance on student achievement data and structural implementation (any other flavor-of-the-month alphabet soup initiatives) has not led to national student achievement results we had hoped for. We also surfaced a major obstacle to school transformation is that leaders are expected to be culture builders while receiving miniscule amounts of preparation for that aspect of their role in pre-service administration coursework. Combined, leaders gravitate toward the inertia of the systems that employ them, and voila (!), status quo here we go.
Moreover, we offered a laser-like focus on organizational development as the potential fix or antidote to the misguided work we do as school leaders. We left you all wondering what to do next given most school and system leaders buy into the issues raised in the first two blogs.
Why Nuetrality Is Actually a Villian
In Minding the Gap is Where It’s At we spelled out the nature of the “I vs. They Gap” which is essential to any readiness to benefit analysis. Leaders who skip past this point of inflection increase the likelihood of an implementation being only partially successful – at best. An additional factor we recommend understanding and addressing is something which is easy to regard as fluffy and safe, but we feel poses an existential threat to every leader.
Remember the Stay Puft Marshmallows character in the iconic comedy Ghostbusters (1984)? After the Ghostbusters battle Gozer (a Sumerian god) into retreat, the now disembodied villain demands that the Ghostbusters think of a new entity for Gozer to embody that will then destroy the world. While the other Ghostbusters think of nothing in an effort to foil Gozer’s demand, Dan Akroyd’s character, Ray Stantz, admits to thinking of the most harmless being possible for Gozer to indwell – the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Brilliant, right? Ray explains this thinking: “It just popped in there. I tried to think of the most harmless thing…something that could never destroy us.”
We won’t spoil it for you if our reader hasn’t seen this iconic masterpiece, but the parallel to our work as leaders is profound. Neutrality left unaddressed can grow to a size that is unhealthy and can do great harm to your effectiveness as a leader. While it may appear to be a ‘harmless thing’ it can reach peak levels and cause destruction of your organization’s culture. Like Ray Stantz, leaders tend to think of neutrality as something harmless or to be addressed later when all the fires are put out. Unfortunately, later never seems to arrive because the fires keep coming.
Who You Gonna Call?
Leaders reaching out to CEE are surprised to learn that “neutrality”, that soft, fluffy aggregation of “Meh?”, is actually a lurking threat. How big of a threat? CEE’s solutions and data visualizations are one of the top reasons leaders call us. They want to neutralize all threats to a healthy organizational culture, but simply aren’t sure who to call to do that.
Measured through a 5-point Likert scale, CEE is able to visualize the level of neutrality in your school and district. While some level of neutrality (e.g. 15-20%) can be expected with a robust sample size, we are very uncomfortable when we see levels reaching 25-50%, and beyond. There are 3 reasons to prioritize the development of strategies to directly address neutrality’s affect on your organization:
Neutrality reflects staff, student, or family lack of clarity. If perceptions were clearer, the % of neutrality would be lower and the amount of positive perceptions would likely be higher.
Neutrality %’s can be moved to more positive perceptions over time as trust is built.
Neutrality %’s are vulnerable to move quickly to more negative perceptions if a crisis or setback arises.
Leaders at both the school and district levels focus their efforts on many important responsibilities. Check a leader’s calendar and the more substantive, long-term goal items are sure to be found on their calendar across the year. You would also notice there are no “emergencies” scheduled on their calendar.
The problem with neutrality is that it requires intentionality to address over time. Strategies to address it need to find their way onto your calendar. High levels of neutrality don’t feel like an “emergency.” Left unattended, they covertly and indirectly sabotage collective efficacy, consensus, and agreements. Left undetected, it can appear like support when in reality a leader has a much smaller percentage of strongly positive consensus.
At CEE, we call this the ‘Land of Opportunity’ for leaders. To make the data actionable, leaders identify specific themes to address through direct engagement with staff. As you will soon learn, sometimes the ‘best answers’ are arrived at by asking the ‘best questions.’
Leading through Collective Learning
The concept of management through surfacing authentic themes at the workplace has been around since the 1940’s when David Packard coined the phrase, “management by walking around.” So how does this operationalize in education? We think the authorities on the subject are Chuck Salina, and Suzann Girtz, Professors at Gonzaga University who share this field-tested approach in their book, Powerless to Powerful, Leadership for School Change and their companion book packed with practical strategies, Transforming Schools Through Systems Change.
Their Powerless to Powerful (P2P) framework is illuminated by three pillars, depicted below as it appeared in ASCD’s (2017) article describing the transformation results created by this approach, A Turnaround Success Story.
If your school or district is like most, you have a skewed view of these pillars that over-emphasizes Academic Press to the neglect of Social Supports and Relational Trust. Worse, your school or district’s relational trust levels have turned from neutral to negative, making it almost impossible to gain traction on Academic Press and Social Support initiatives.
In a Turnaround Success Story, readers learn how a high school with 95% free and reduced-price lunch in the bottom 5 percent of its state’s graduation rates rose from a 49% graduation rate to 85% in only 4 years. At the center of “the how” to restoring relational trust and making the school’s transformation possible is one must-have strategy: One-on One Conversations.
Making Perceptual Data Actionable – One Relationship at a Time
At CEE, we believe our Staff, Student, and Family surveys provide the key data points a leader can convert to a 1:1 question. Using the Powerless to Powerful conceptual framework, you can use them to implement a highly transparent and effective process that will be used to surface themes of neutrality, areas for greater clarity, and document existing strengths of the school from the perspective of staff. The following list of steps is a truncated summary to give you a way to compare your current practice to the transformative P2P approach:
Step 1: Implement Regular One-on-One Conversations
Assign leadership team members to conduct regular, intentional one-on-one conversations with each staff member.
Develop a common set of questions to guide these conversations, such as "What are we doing well as a school?" and "What should we do differently?" and “If you were in charge, what is one schoolwide change you’d make to be more successful in your teaching?”
Listen deeply to understand each staff member's needs, perspectives, and suggestions for improvement.
Step 2: Analyze and Act on Feedback
Collect and analyze perceptual data from one-on-one conversations to understand teachers' concerns and needs.
Use this data to inform the leadership action plan, focusing on the issues raised by teachers.
Pay special attention to disenfranchised staff members, seeking common ground and incorporating their insights.
And though it should go without saying, the importance of follow-through entailed in Step 3 cannot be overstated:
Step 3: Address Specific Areas of Concern
Implement targeted interventions based on feedback, such as peer tutoring and after-school support to boost academic achievement.
Establish solutions that help students feel connected to the school (Social Supports) and not only on Academic Achievement.
Address student ‘behavioral issues’ by creating initiatives that make space for resilience building and alternative processes such as restorative practices in lieu of punitive discipline.
To ensure that you are building relational trust through a quality process, and not as a one-off or an event, build in regularly scheduled time on your calendar to continue to build relational trust and surface areas warranting action:
Step 4: Maintain Ongoing Communication and Support:
Continue one-on-one conversations as a regular practice, using bi-weekly leadership meetings to develop new questions and stay focused.
Use these conversations to assess the effectiveness of implemented support systems and make necessary adjustments.
Ensure staff members feel heard, valued, and connected to the school’s mission through consistent communication.
For leaders who recognize this approach is markedly different than their current practice, listening to CEE’s Outliers in Education podcast featuring Chuck Salinas and Suzann Girtz will be time well spent: School Improvement Under Any Conditions.
Mindsets Over Mandates
Dr. CK Bray in his brilliant appearance on CEE’s Outliers in Education podcast titled Brain Optimization for Educators makes the point shared when leaders take the time to ask authentic 1:1 questions, staff members feel heard. Our brains are literally wired for social connection, so any “Mandate by Memo” approach is working directly against neuroscience (and common sense). Feeling heard creates a sense of personal empowerment and translates into, you guessed it, staff motivated to go the extra mile. You might think of it as less “Meh?” (ambivalence) and more “Yeah!”
As we stated in our last piece, changing the culture means changing mindsets. Mindsets are not changed through mandates, rather, they are changed when a leader conveys a sense of vulnerability and seeks to understand their organization’s point of pain through inquiry. It is well within reach of any school leader to shift the culture of an entire school or district. It takes daily discipline and perseverance to transform a school’s culture, but it doesn’t have to take a long time.
If you are thinking, there must be more to this approach than simply crafting a good 1:1 question and managing by walking around, you are correct. Tune in next time for our last piece when we share the process start to finish which manifests in an iterative plan, do, study, act (PDSA) cycle of inquiry. We know the call to lead using the discipline of organizational development converges with the how of iterative PDSA cycles of inquiry, so you, too, can put it all together and begin to change your system’s culture for the better.
Deep change starts with this approach!
Follow this blog series to learn more about the following key notions
Culture is king and the school leader is the curator
Maintaining and improving culture is a daily practice, and coaching helps
Overinvestment in structure will not overcome a challenging culture
Culture eats strategy and structure for breakfast
Burnout in education has never been higher. Culture can be both an indicator and antidote for burnout
Measuring culture, focusing on empathy, not hiding from vulnerability, and being a people-focused leader are all key
Asking for help from an executive coach, fostering high functioning Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and using the power of 1:1 inquiry to start short cycle improvement initiatives are steps for anyone wanting to grow themselves and their schools
Naming and measuring toxic school culture will help to address it
Turning culture data into short-cycle improvement initiatives will help to implement changes
To learn more about how The Center for Educational Effectiveness can assist you in measuring culture, and more importantly become your guide on the side in making cultural changes, please visit: https://www.effectiveness.org/products-services.
If this article has challenged your thinking and you would like to discuss further, please connect with us. Click here to schedule a conversation.
Stay informed and inspired with content tailored to your work—tune in to the Outliers in Education podcast today! Outliers in Education podcast.
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