Is your district culture an asset or a liability? How to tell the difference.
By: Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO Vivify Performance
It’s harder than ever to provide high-quality learning environments in the United States. Our education landscape is wracked by widening income inequality, unconscionable cuts to education spending by state and local governments, reductions in students’ ability to concentrate, brought on by their exploding use of digital media, and a myriad of other factors that make teaching and learning more challenging than they’ve been in the past.
In this difficult environment, educators need to use every strategy at their disposal to create school districts in which faculty, staff and administrators love to work, and students are successful in learning. That’s why education leaders must be deliberate and pro-active about one of the most powerful strategies of all—the culture of their school districts.
Organizational culture, “the way things work around here,” is best defined as the collective habits and behaviors of individuals and teams in an organization. Every organization, including school districts, has a culture. The questions are whether the culture of your school district develops by accident, or by your deliberate design, and whether your culture is an asset or a liability.
In their book, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, Deal and Kennedy identified a link between culture and performance. Their findings are consistent with research by others who found culture to have a direct effect on strategy. Kotler and Collins in their books, “Corporate Culture and Performance and “Good to Great” respectively, argue that organizations with long-term success have winning cultures – and those cultures are made up of leaders and teams with a definable set of winning behaviors.
8 Signs Your District Culture is an Asset:
1. Leaders at all levels coach and develop employees and students to be their best and model the behaviors they expect teammates to emulate.
2. Implementing change is easier and faster because your employees are aligned around purpose and trust each other.
3. Prospective employees want to work for and parents want their kids to attend school in your district.
4. Employees and students are highly engaged because they are treated with respect and are developed to be their best.
5. Employees are celebrated and recognized for the contributions they make.
6. Healthy employee to employee, employee to student, and student to student relationships create a powerful energy across a school and district through team interactions.
7. Parents are engaged at high levels because they are treated with respect and have a consistent, positive experiences that leads them to become “brand ambassadors” for your school district.
8. Your culture is celebrated as the “hero,” and your district’s brand is respected and valued by your community.
Right click and save this photo for your convenience, and contact us to put these points into action!
If your school district’s culture isn’t yet the asset it could be, it’s not too late. Recognizing it isn’t is the first step in addressing it. Superintendents can take deliberate steps to begin to grow their culture into an asset:
Making Culture an Asset
1. Engage senior leaders, including school board members and principals in conversations about how their district culture matters to their ability to achieve their purpose.
2. Embrace your role as your district’s chief culture officer; culture shaping is a key leadership responsibility.
3. If you don’t already, consider viewing your people as an asset to be developed and encouraged to be their best and not a liability.
4. Embrace the idea that your success is directly related to the effectiveness of the individuals and teams in your district.
At the root of less than hoped for learning and performance are failed strategies or change processes that got “chewed up” by unhealthy human issues happening on the behavioral side of the district that are often invisible to us and therefore overlooked. A culture that’s an asset helps you get your people to perform at their best more often, and to be at the top of their game. A healthy, high-performance culture can be the difference between a district that enables continuous learning and sustained performance and one that doesn’t.
Does your district operate seamlessly as a “well-oiled machine”? Do your people -- employees and students -- find fulfillment in learning and working together there? If you can’t give a definitive answer to these questions, let’s connect to shift your culture and fuel your district with more energy and cohesion.