Vision Casting For High Performance School Culture: Do's & Don'ts For Leaders

"Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast" Peter Drucker

With Alistair Kerr and Lisa MacDermott

Whilst all school leaders know Peter Drucker’s famous quote: “Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast” and understand the importance of culture as the secret sauce of High Performance in Schools, many school leaders still struggle with understanding the differences between effective and ineffective strategies to engage staff on the journey.

School Culture: The Secret Sauce of High Performance Schools

Over recent months I have been privileged to have a number of coaching conversations with school leaders preparing for their annual staff retreats and team building days. The number one priority that all the leaders I had spoken to was best summed up by the statement: “I want to get all my staff to buy-in to us building a world-class school culture this year”.

What a fantastic top priority for school leaders to be focused on! Indeed we know the research is clear on the role of school culture as key predictor of student outcomes (ie., Hattie, 2003). We also know that when teachers are highly motivated, confident and ‘buy-in’ to school culture there is a significant positive effect on student outcomes, whilst low motivation and low confidence in teachers leads to lower student outcomes (ie., Capara et al., 2006). We know this relationship occurs across schools regardless of size, location or resources – thus I congratulate these school leaders on being focused on the right priority among all the important agendas they face.

Engaging Staff in School Vision: Being Right vs. Doing Right

However, “being right” and “doing right” are not necessarily the same thing. After hearing about each school leaders top priorities and congratulating them on their planned focus on vision and school culture, each of my coaching conversations naturally shifted towards the strategies they were planning to use with their staff. The myriad of different strategies proposed by all the school leaders I spoke to seemed to hover around two central themes. The first group of engagement strategies could be summarised as “Reaching For The Stars” and would have to be the most common way leaders engage with staff to strive for excellence. Unfortunately, the majority of the time, it is also far less effective then another approach which I refer to as “Looking Back From The Future” – Let me explain….

Reaching For The Stars: From Here Forwards to Ideal State

Reaching for the stars refers to the engagement strategy of getting staff excited and enthusiastic about improving school culture by realising the limitations of the current status quo, seeing a glorious future, and being energised to take action. This approach is pretty straight forward to facilitate as the group leader simply needs to organise some basic relevant information about best practice, have current performance data ready to show and then speak in a charismatic and enthusiastic manner. Statements such as “Today we are not where we need to be but together we can get there!!!!”… “What’s stopping us from being a world class school (and what are we going to do about it)?”… all exemplify the reaching for the stars approach.

Once some sort of charismatic, positive challenge is issued to the staff they then spend time in various discussions, workshop activites and breakouts – ultimately to commit to some positive actions that may or may not be included in subsequent strategy documents and cycles of accountability. However the follow-up behaviour of staff after these sessions is, at best, a mix of positive or negative responses or at worst the beginning of a toxic iceberg which sets in play a passive aggressive reverse takeover of the school culture – Why?

Well, when you think about it, this approach begins by first confronting staff with the idea (no matter how politely) that they are not good enough. Nobody likes another person telling them they are not good enough – and, as every coach knows, the most powerful way to get someone to change is to guide them to self-realisation (as opposed to simply telling them directly). Then the ‘gap’ between ideal and real is shown which, for most people suggests a ‘big leap’ forward is needed as opposed to ‘small steps’ which upsets people who already feel tired and stretched in their current work. Once this DOUBLE NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE has occurred people simply withdraw. This withdrawal from participation may be polite with a fake interest shown or a openly frustrated and hostile response. This withdrawal pattern, once it occurs, sabotages any subsequent steps gain positive commitment to genuine change .

Looking Back From The Future: From The Ideal State Backwards

“Looking Back From The Future” refers to the engagement strategy of getting staff to look at an ideal state (be it imagining their own school, several years from now, winning awards and receiving accolades OR looking at a clearly defined example best practice model and highlighting current similarities). Then staff discuss their own views about the POSITIVE CONNECTIONS between current state and ideal state. Finally after a thorough discussion of positive connections between current and ideal state, staff are finally asked to assess any areas of difference and open up the conversation to where they may be able to make changes to better align towards the ideal state.

This approach is harder to facilitate as it begins with a very clear look into the future ideal state (that everyone can understand and have general agreement on), followed by a focused discussion on current successes (making sure negative discussions are avoided) and lastly a conversation on possible improvement steps (making sure they are kept simple, small and connected to end goals – that are linked to changing ‘real’ current behaviours and practices).

This approach, if facilitated well, is a much more powerful, positive and motivating approach than “Reaching For The Stars”. It begins with the assumption of success and continues with a positive focus until all staff have been able to ‘buy-in’ to genuine positives and strengths about the current culture (no matter how big or small) and only moves to the identification of improvement once TWO POSITIVE conversations have occurred first. Given the positive nature of the strategy as a first step, the likelihood of open and honest discussion and genuine commitment to change (driven by ideas from the staff themselves) is extremely high as is the likely speed of success thereafter!

Vision Casting: Bringing It All Together

It is true that ‘Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast’ in all organisations – especially schools. School leaders must make culture a core priority in building High Performance Schools.

Once culture is fairly and squarely among the key issues at the top of the transformation agenda make sure your engagement strategies with staff actually empower and enable transformation rather than inadvertently block positive change.

Don't fall into the trap of getting already exhausted and tired staff trying to ‘reach for stars’ and trying to get them fired up to make great leaps forwards as this typically leads to greater frustration and exhaustion and only minimal improvement at best.

Instead remember that the journey to world class school culture is about small steps not great leaps. So take people into their already positive and successful future and celebrate what they are already doing to fulfill this destiny before asking them to examine the next small steps that need to be taken to realise the full and complete vision of future success!

How do you engage your staff in building world class school culture? Have you used the ‘Reaching For The Stars’ and ‘Looking Back From The Future’ approaches before? What other culture focused engagement strategies have you used with staff that we could all learn from in building High Performance Schools?

Ride The Waves of Life!

Dr Pete Stebbins

OUT NOW: "iTeams: Why High Performance Teams Fit In AND Stand Out"

Dr Pete Stebbins, PhD is a Workplace Psychologist and Executive Coach. With many years of research and professional practice behind him he has managed to complete and evaluate numerous leadership and team transformation projects providing the ground swell for the common sense approach of the High Performance Teams Framework. Pete is a regular on LinkedIn writing on Leadership, Teams, Resilience & Life Strategy. Contact Pete at: [email protected] or visit drpetestebbins.com