Susan Marshall’s Media

For the past two years I have had the privilege of teaching an MBA Leadership course at a private college where enrollment is almost exclusively female. We had one brave male in class the second year. He added a great dimension to our discussions because of his willingness to share his perspective and because he did it with a delightful sense of self-deprecating humor.

But he was no pushover. When women presented him stale stereotypes, he pushed back, challenging their limited thinking and expecting more of them.

This notion of expecting more is a hallmark of my teaching and it always gets me in trouble with new students. They start grumbling Week Two. By Week Four grumbles are full-blown complaints to the program director. I’m too tough. I expect too much. My grades are too low.

Sometimes a brave soul will approach me to let me know that my approval rating is in the tank. Usually, though, the program director makes the uncomfortable call to tell me of the student unrest.

I never like to get this feedback. It makes me feel bad. Upset. Embarrassed. Disappointed. When students are angry with me, I wonder why I bother.

I teach in the dead of winter in southeastern Wisconsin. When we leave class at 9:00 p.m. it is dark and cold—sometimes bitter cold—and sometimes my 40-mile drive home includes a battle with snow, ice, and wind. I hate it.

Safe again at home, I sit on the floor with one arm around my dog, a glass of wine in the other hand. My cat rubs against my back, purring for attention. My mind is conflicted. I feel excited for these students but wonder if I see more than what’s there. Am I more invested in their success than they are?

I never stay up late; dark thoughts spin into darker ones and lead to no place good. I think of an email my best friend sent some time ago, quoting William Least Heat-Moon from his novel “Blue Highways.”

“Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.”

So I say a prayer that in time my students will understand that our work is meant to make them better and I crawl into bed.

By Week Eight, the feedback has turned into amazed gratitude. They have learned so much about themselves. About capacity they didn’t know they had. About courage they haven’t dared exercise. About the way expectations call forth their best, despite their vigorous protests against them (expectations).

We work hard in this Leadership class. We laugh, we cry, we argue. Sometimes students say mean things, hurtful things, because their frustrations run deep and their fear of retaliation rides the surface of every emotion. I wonder about this.

It can’t just be this class or the pressures of school and jobs that have made them this angry and scared. Surely this is something that has deeper roots?

Indeed it does. For many of these students, life has been one long series of doubt. “Who do you think you are?” “What makes you think you can do this?” “No one in this family understands what you’re doing–do you think you’re better than we are?”

These are working professionals who want something more from their jobs, their careers, their lives. They’ve signed up for an advanced education that they believe will help them get it. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

My message to these students is that the answer is up to them. At first they rail against this message. They don’t want to have to be pushed to the limits of their current knowledge only to discover that there is so much more to learn. They are already tired. And no one is giving them credit for being in school on Tuesday evenings in the dead of winter (or the balminess of summer) to advance their learning.

But when they begin to realize that this is a very personal investment in uncovering their capacity, developing it, and contributing it in ways that matter most to them, they start to focus less on what others think and more on what they have set out to do. They embrace the idea that the outcome is truly up to them.

This is a magic moment for them. And for me. It is why I do the work I do. The gift of seeing that light in their eyes, that energy in their walk, that steadfastness of their determination is like no other. When we can touch one another with our ideas, our vision, and the force of our energy, we understand at a visceral level what is possible. And when that happens, there is no going back to the formerly well-defined and carefully protected comfort zone.

Teaching leadership always teaches me that people have more potential than they realize. Spread the word!

I have been following the debate over the fate of MPS schools and felt it was time to share an insider’s perspective on what a particular public school reform looked like at the tactical level.

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the failing public school system in New York City in 2002, he was prepared to initiate new learning and exert strong leadership. Opposition was intense from a variety of sources and crucial conversations were the order of the day, day after day.

As part of the school reform movement, the New York City Leadership Academy was established with funding from private and business sources. Jack Welch, Caroline Kennedy, Richard Parsons and others were key contributors, both financially and as business resources.

The purpose of the Academy was to equip principals to be Transformational Leaders—the primary change agents at the heart of the school reform effort.

I was selected to be a facilitator for the New York City Leadership Academy—one of only two in the nation brought in to support local Academy staff. For two years I had an insider’s view of the things principals struggled with as they grew into their leadership roles.

Trust was an enormous issue. The fundamental issue, really. The fact that business leaders were teaching educators how to ‘do’ leadership rubbed many the wrong way. Teachers’ and principals’ unions were fiercely opposed to the effort and presented their point of view in capital letters. But the current system was broken and everybody knew it.

Schools were grossly underfunded, classrooms were severely overcrowded, and there was a chronic shortage of teaching supplies. Successive waves of non-English speaking immigrants challenged everyone’s ability to communicate. Violence in schools was shocking. Graduation rates hovered under 50%.

I heard stories of death threats against Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein, and Leadership Academy CEO, Bob Knowling. I was personally confronted face-to-face by a screaming principal on the first day of our second year. She was twice my size and ANGRY! Fortunately, we had a year’s worth of work and success to point to. This bolstered my confidence and allowed me to stand my ground with some grace. I still have the ‘Thank You’ card she wrote a year later.

Fear was the common denominator among the 600 principals we taught. Fear of their new role. Fear of retribution from the union, colleagues, teachers, or the system itself. Fear of their own shortcomings.

As Transformational Leaders, principals were expected to do things they had never done before. Create a vision for their schools and articulate it with conviction and consistency. Create and manage a realistic budget. Actively coach teachers and begin to weed out the bad ones. Become more accessible to parents and community members. And do most of this work using new technology within an administrative and operational system that had changed.

Our job as facilitators was not glamorous. We were responsible for engaging, teaching, coaching, admonishing, and supporting their learning. As you might expect, we were constantly challenged. Every time a new skill was introduced, someone asked why. Why did they have to learn this stuff? Why were they forced to videotape their Vision speech? Why were we business people there? What did we know about pedagogy? What did we know about education?

As stand-ins for the big name leaders (Bloomberg, Klein and others), we took our share of abuse. But our willingness to forgive bad behavior in the moment and our patience and persistence in running workshops that literally forced participation and practice eventually led to improved skills, enhanced confidence, and a new appreciation of the fact that not only people but systems can change.

The biggest and best answer to the ‘why’ question was: “For the kids.”

To continue supporting a system that failed half of New York City’s public school children was to condemn them to a future of futility. Every one of us who struggled through those two tough years knew we had to change the way we thought, acted, and taught if we were to create a better opportunity for more kids to learn.

You will find people today who scorn our efforts, who say that the schools are no better off, that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are self-interested, power-hungry tyrants. Having worked with Joel Klein, I know this to be patently untrue.

However, having seen the bitter face of fear and its unyielding resistance to change, I understand why people say such things. I know they are not thinking about the future of our kids. I also know that when they can rid themselves of fear and begin to learn and be rewarded for new ideas, new skills, and new practices, they do start thinking about kids. When this happens, it looks like magic.

This is what needs to happen in Milwaukee. I hope our leaders care more about the future of our kids than the entrenched systems that protect and reward adults. None of this is easy. But it is essential.

The special Business Insight section of Monday’s Wall Street Journal highlighted technology as the driver of New, Faster Innovation. The ways in which we can collect data on customer purchases, reactions to new product developments and marketing messages, and the speed with which we can alter our offerings in response to customer demands are remarkable.

Change has never been so easy — or so cheap — says the lead story, and as a result, more companies will be willing to try new things because the price of failure is so low.

As I read, red flags began to pop up. Cranking up the rate of speed at which decisions are made gives me pause. So does the notion that retailers can “cheaply collect terabytes (trillions of bits) of data on customer interactions, the performance of products in the field, employee productivity and other factors.”

Who will peruse such data? Who will make decisions based on it? What if these quick decisions turn out to be precisely wrong?

No worries, says the article. Bad decisions can be changed quickly based on new incoming data.

“Experiments will become far more pervasive and persuasive as information technology improves testing and grows faster and cheaper.” Consequently, traditional R&D will likely be abandoned, conventional wisdom increasingly challenged, and neat ideas put to the test in the blink of an eye.

At the same time, managers will be expected to give up control of good ideas — a classic organizational struggle — and welcome new players into the decision making process.

I can’t help but wonder how all of this new, faster technology-driven innovation will affect organizational performance. If the price of failure is low and we move on unaffected by it, does the value of learning disappear? New Data: New Decision seems a jerky way to exercise excellence.

Still, there’s no sense pushing aside what is already here. The human challenge will be to think fast. Which of course means that we must be willing and able to think period. Critical thinking in the face of increasingly rapid bombardments of data will be essential. And critical thinking is different from assumptive thinking, categorical thinking, and memory.

Technology has been increasing the velocity of our lives for decades. What worries me today is that another forward push of the throttle at a time when school systems are faltering and bureaucratic structures are blossoming might take us to the end of our capabilities to create what’s next. This is not a new worry, I know.

We need to practice being alert, aware, adaptive, responsive, and confident. Innovation is ours for the making at a pace and cost never before so accessible. I hope we can be wise enough and deliberate enough to build great people, too.

Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t say something stupid, then act surprised when they’re called on it.

Words are powerful communicators of what’s inside a person. And since our society has removed almost all barriers of decorum and appropriateness when it comes to saying what’s on our minds, some people reveal a lot more than they realize.

This is amusing on one hand, disappointing on another.

It is amusing when a tall, strapping executive barks rudely and loudly at some underling on a cell phone while putting cream in his coffee at a Starbucks counter. He probably thinks he looks pretty cool and sounds like a leader. I think he must have been one of those kids on the grade school playground who shook his fist at a foe and bellowed, “My Dad’s gonna beat up your Dad!”

It is disappointing because this guy believes that Starbucks or the airport or the sports bar or any other public place is his mobile office. His conversations trump ours simply by virtue of volume and outrageousness.

The coarse vulgarity of so much language in the public square reduces most of it to white noise. There’s a constancy to it that makes it unremarkable. But the blunt savagery of it over time has caused many people to harden against it. When people harden, they lose the ability to see what’s good or to appreciate things that are funny, kind, or caring.

It is embarrassing and shameful to listen to politicians berate each other. Instead of being statesmen and women, they behave more like belligerent toddlers unschooled in either critical thinking or effective communication. Do they realize how silly they look? Do they understand the power they have to reduce the quality of our lives by setting so sorry an example?

Does anyone remember the power of silence? Or how effective a well-considered bit of communication can be not only in the moment it is issued, but long after the moment has passed? We teach others with our words and actions. Let’s take some time to consider the effects of our language, to think before we bray, and to choose words that deliver our intended meaning.

Let’s also pay close attention to what others are saying. When they utter nonsense, let’s ask questions about what they mean. Let’s start forcing one another to communicate more intelligently and with purpose. Not only would we contribute to a reduction in noise pollution, we would also start demonstrating a better way to live and work with others.