Are You Shaping a Winning Culture?
By: Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO Vivify Performance
Are you shaping a winning organizational culture for your district, if you’re measuring school climate?
School climate, which became an accountability indicator under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), is often conflated with culture. While each are two (very) different words with different meanings, both “climate” and “culture” are believed to be linked to learning.
School Climate: Often thought of as “how a school feels”
School Culture: Often thought of as “the way things work around here.”
One belief I’ve centered Vivify Performance around is that how a school feels (a school’s climate) is a function of how things work (a school’s culture), and how things work is a function of how employees and students behave. Employees’ and students’ behaviors reflect a district’s values and bring these values to life.
Shifting the Focus from Climate to Culture
Climate surveys are used to measure students’, employees’ and parents’ perceptions of school life along six categories and thirteen dimensions. But one’s perceptions are limited by their frame of mind and how they feel about their school experience on the day the survey is taken. And most significantly, measuring school climate overlooks human behavior, which is foundational to how work and learning is accomplished in any organization.
With the emphasis on school climate, few educational leaders pay much attention to shaping their district’s culture. And, while I’ve seen this far too often, I can see why some overlook the need to shape their culture. Would a leader under pressure to eliminate persistent problems and move the needle on learning to pay attention to something she is not measured by? The short answer: She won’t. But, my research shows that she should assume responsibility for culture shaping and be measured on the health of her district’s culture because dysfunctional, unhealthy behaviors among employees and students are linked to many of the problems educational leaders face from high student discipline and suspension rates to high teacher turnover and uneven student learning and performance.
Building District-Wide Behavior Standards
“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting. If they want different results, we must change the way we do things.” - Tom Northrup, Five Hidden Mistakes CEOs Make
To make culture shaping a priority, leaders must take intentional steps to define the behaviors they desire and that they and their team are willing to be accountable. Students misbehave and under-perform and teachers leave.
Students don’t simply misbehave because their parents are bad parents, but to see what they’ll get away with. They are also influenced by the behaviors of their peers and the employees they encounter at school. Sure, a teacher in one classroom might provide behavior guidelines, but the same students can go to another classroom (in the same school or district) with a completely different set of standards or none at all.
Having shared districtwide behaviors that define how kids and employees are expected to behave enables learning and informs decision-making. This level of specificity means there are “guardrails” to guide and warn people when they’re close to getting off track. These “rules of the road” remove ambiguity around what behavior is expected. And employees and students’ adherence to shared behaviors can be measured to determine what needs honing and what can be celebrated. This is all apart of shaping “the way things work” around your district a.k.a. your district’s culture.
In his book Learn or Die, Edward Hess argues that learning behaviors and mindsets are essential to transforming organizations into learning organizations. Modeling these behaviors begins at the top. For more on this top-down impact, read my blog “Superintendents Must Step Up & Show ‘The Best’,” and contact me today to get on your way to driving your district’s learning and performance.