Interviews

Nothing lasts forever and people come and go.  When they go, we most often must replace them.  The selection of the replacement is always difficult and always involves an interview.  We’ve been interviewing a lot of potential new employees recently.  That happens every summer, more so this one.  At a professional level I understand how important it is to find someone who is qualified, someone who knows their stuff, and someone who “fits.”  Administrators do not want to do this alone; we want a committee to screen and interact with candidates in the interview setting to select a nominee that goes through the reference mill and arrives as a recommendation for a supe to take to the Board.  Grueling.  It occurs to me as I enter the third week of such efforts that there is a reality show component to this process that I have never seen before.  We could call it “Talking with Stars,” or “American Idle”, but “Survivor” probably makes the most sense.  Perhaps even “Bachelorette”.  I have oft compared interviewing to the blind date where both parties wake up married.  You never know exactly how it is going to work out until the new person is on board and functioning.

There are different philosophies regarding identifying candidates to interview.  I’m in the minority on this one, I think, in that I do not believe in recruiting.  I know some great folks in our profession who are highly successful elsewhere, and I have a hard time posting for a position then inviting applicants to apply.  First, if they are happy and functional where they are, why mess that up?  Secondly, if invited and they do not end up the candidate, you are likely to have messed up where they currently are and surely have messed up the relationship you had with them.  Thirdly, if you already know who you want to hire, why put everyone else through the ringer?  And finally, I don’t think it is ethical, but that is just me.  If you put a posting out there and someone is interested in joining your team then they will apply.  If they don’t apply, then leave them alone.  My mental model is this: if I were single, I wouldn’t ask a married woman out on a date.  The best pool of candidates is not those who are successful where they are and love it, they are the people who are successful but are interested in change and new levels of success.   They come to the table eager to please rather than invited and entitled.

Given that our applicants are qualified and not felons, what are we looking for?  Chemistry, philosophy, fit and match.  In my ideal world, every top administrator I recommend is someone who thinks enough like me to get along, thinks enough unlike me to challenge me, and is willing to do so.  I also look for those who are still learning versus those who already know it all.  We must have folks who do not insist on defending their perfection versus perusing their improvement.  Give me someone nimble of mind, open to learning, and willing to explore who will approach the job as a learner not an expert and we are much more likely to be successful.  I also look for someone who has thought beyond the current boundaries of the job description to the basic philosophy of public education, has their own philosophy, and that philosophy evolves with the times rooted in their core beliefs.  I want someone coachable.  A new person joining an established team has to fit.  The team will change because of their presence, and vice versa.  Can we picture them here, will they fit?  Larger systems do not worry about this so much.  We do.  We are small, tight-knit family and the new son or daughter-in-law better like Christmas at Grandma’s and homemade ice cream on the 4^th or they just won’t make it any more than if they have purple hair, piercings and tats.

Candidates are an interesting crew.  Rarely do they ask the right questions, in my opinion.  I think candidates should interview their potential future employers.  What is the prevailing philosophy here?  Who would be my boss?  Tell me about them.  What are they like, what do they expect, how long have they been here and how long are they likely to stay?  Are folks here more interested in safety and control or risk taking and improvement?  What matters most here?  What are the sacred cows and how do I avoid milking them?  What will be the variables used to measure my success if I come here?  Will I fit here?  This is a people business and if the people in this business are not compatible, then children suffer and that is not good.

So, after the give and take of the interviews, the follow-up one-on-ones, and the recommendation, a name goes to the Board for blessing.  What if the candidate has last minute jitters, insecurities, cold feet?  That is normal before any marriage and only the candidate can answer the question, “Is this what I really want to do?”  I have taken candidates to the Board for approval only to get a phone call the next day saying “I’m not coming.”  My response always is, thank God!  If you have doubts, if you have listened to your guts and you do not think this will work for you I deeply appreciate your courage to tell us now.  I have done that before when offered jobs and have always been glad when I did so.  That’s another reason not to recruit.  People who place their own names in the hat are much more likely to actually show up and do the job than those recruited, selected, and then lobbied into signing.

Yes, the reality show should be called “Survivor.”  But this show is for real.  People move, end friendships, make new ones, and engage in a highly intense effort to help kids be successful, a task that requires a tremendous amount of energy and teamwork and support.  Joining our team is no easy decision. 

Being invited to is an honor.

Collaboration and Competition

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life is very tough.  For example, I am a terrible competitor.  I do not like me when I compete, do not like what I become, what I am willing to do and say for the sake of winning.  I hate the feelings I have when I am in the midst of competition.  In fact, I do not like winning and I hate losing.  If I win, you lose and I have never felt good about that.  For me to feel good when I win, I must ignore what you must be feeling when I beat you and I cannot do that and remain human.  So when I win, I really do not win and feel worse.  From early in my life I knew that if there was something I had that others wanted it always made me feel better to share, that if I desired something that others had I could ask, but if they wanted to keep it I could learn to live without it.  I don’t feel that way if I play Solitaire because a win there is not another’s defeat.  Hurting others hurts me, and when I win I often hurt others.  Where is the victory in that?  I deeply worry about the joy I see on the face of the victors.  That thrill of victory, of vanquish, of conquering others is frightful and exists only while we remain immune to the feelings of the defeated. 

The roots of these feelings come from childhood I suspect, though that sounds very Freudian.  I was the oldest of 4 and when playing with my siblings I typically won.  There was no real fun in that, no real joy, because I could win every time.  And when I did, I saw the looks on the faces of my brothers and sister.  Why would they even play with me if I always won?  I learned that if I “let” them win, I felt great and they felt great as long as they did not think I had thrown the game in their behalf.  What a totally different feeling.  In time, even playing my best at whatever, they could win and I would feel terrible, defeated by younger siblings.  I do not like hurting my brothers and sister.  I do not like being hurt by my brothers and sister.  There is no feeling so good to merit hurting each other.  So one of the most difficult questions in all theology and philosophy and psychology emerged and haunted me as I matured:  So, who are my brothers and sisters?  Who is in, and who is out?  Does the victor merit the spoils, all the spoils including the quality of life of the losers?  I do not like win/lose scenarios.

As you can imagine, I gave up playing football in high school because I did not like hitting people, hurting people for a purely invented number, fictitious points accumulated based on turf advancement and lines crossed.  Is there a score so important that it merited the pain of others, the ruined knees and ankles and shoulders?  I ran track.  Felt good, just me against the clock.  I liked practice more than meets.  At meets for a time I could ignore the looks of pain on the faces of those in my heat when I won.  Until I lost, and then I was hurt by the victory dances of the winners, celebrating their best was better than my best after I had just given it my all.  Was I really a loser after all those hours, all that effort, all that ceaseless running in circles?  Yes, I was.  And eventually, even achieving my personal best against the clock was not motivation enough to keep trying, to continue to run in circles.  It also gradually dawned on me that track was structured to have fewer winners than any other sport.  50% of the football teams that compete will win.  If 100 sprinters compete, only 1% will win.

I gravitated to the collaborative efforts and found them in fine arts.  I learned that a group working together on a common score or script, each performing their part to the best of their ability could result in a tremendous sense of accomplishment.  Nothing touched my soul as standing on the stage, receiving the applause of everyone present for a performance where all the participants had done well.  Goose bumps.  I loved band, choir, theatre.  I loved the hours of rehearsal to get it just so, and then share it.  A performance was a place where everyone wins, all the performers and the entire audience.  Watching the faces of the spectators leaving a band concert and leaving a football game tells me the story:  half leaving the football game are miserable, mad, depressed and sad.  100% of the faces leaving a concert are happy and content.  What a spectacular feeling.  How does this happen?  Collaborators work as hard as those who compete, but they work for each other, they worked to help each other get better, they collaborated.  Win/win.  (It is still amazing to me how competition has crept into the fine arts in high school forever changing the nature of collaborative performance, but that merits another post.)

As a people, as a nation I wonder if we should be promoting competition or collaboration.  Should we prepare young people to be on a competitive team or a high performing collaborative team?  Most will argue we need to prepare them for both, but mostly to be on a competitive team. 

We are and have been restructuring public schools to be competitive, not collaborative, and it is taking its toll.  I trace it back to the earliest school reforms in Texas.  As a teacher it gave me great joy to share my plans with others, to see all our kids do well, to learn from fellow teachers, to collaboratively plan for success, designed in a way that no kid would lose.  I celebrated the test where all made a 100!  I celebrated the growth I both received from and provided to my colleagues.  That ended with the Career Ladder, when teachers started getting ranked like football teams, and those who were winners received more money and quickly stopped sharing their secrets.  We moved from a culture where all teachers worked hard for the same cause together to a competitive team where a few would be rewarded.  And the reward was minimal, but the damage was done.

We moved to rating schools, rating districts and announced that parents whose kids attended a losing district could go elsewhere.  School districts stopped sharing resources and started competing for resources.  Vendors began to hawk wares to promote student success so your kids could win.  And the system was designed so that there were few winners and mostly losers.  If as educators too many of us figured out the system and began to win, the Legislature with a competitive mind set would change the rules to create fewer winners and more losers.  The competition got steeper, the standard of success got higher.  Now I feel like I used to feel in track: I run as hard and as fast as I can, practice till the cows come home and somehow still can’t win.  Where’s the joy in that?  If I do win, and other systems lose should I feel joy?  Should I celebrate their defeat on behalf of their kids?  If I know something that will help other adults help children should I share it or guard it?  What in the world are we doing?

Collaboration is harder than competition.  Life is pretty simple, jungle-like if you will, when there are good guys and bad guys, us and them, eat or be eaten.  Collaboration assumes we all come to the table, we talk, we lay our cards on the table and we are willing to risk sharing what it is we want and believe so that we can find a win/win.  That is hard and it is risky.  If any of the players are competitors or ambitious or withhold cards, then the collaborator will lose, not really knowing what the game is. Still, when well meaning adults can be honest about what they want, what they fear, what they really seek, then I deeply believe there is a way to find win/win.  I’ve seen it happen too many times.

As a school system we are improving.  We are improving because we collaborate.  School Board and supe, supe and administrators, administrators and teachers, teachers and aides; District Team, Campus Teams, Cabinet, all of us working for the success of the kids.  All the kids.  We will not do better if we compete with each other.  The tide will raise all ships, big and small, experienced and rookie, gifted and disabled.  We must work together, we must be mutually supportive.  My mental model for the accountability system is not preparation for the big game; it is preparation for the symphony of learning where we each achieve virtuoso levels while performing in and with a group.  We ensure a quality education for all.  We want all to win.

Teaching kids must, absolutely must, be from a picture bigger than win/lose.  We must think about promoting every child to win, every student to be successful, every teacher to be effective, every school to be high performing and every district to be a winner.  We cannot be competitors for a future where some kids win and some do not.  If so, we all lose.  I believe the path to achieve at that level is collaboration.  I am not inspired by my victory and your defeat.  I am inspired by working with each of you.  I am inspired by doing my best to ensure a quality education for all.  Sounds like missionary work to me.

Creative Tension

I awake this Father’s Day morning blessed to have two wonderful children.  What an awesome gift and an awesome responsibility to father children!  Silly to celebrate on a given Sunday in that every day feels like Father’s Day to me.  I bask in that glow, and then my mind turns to work.  Sad, but true.  Crack of dawn on Father’s Day and I am thinking, and worrying and processing things Edna.  My kids will forgive me, because they know that is how it has always been.

I have an incredibly high tolerance for what I call creative tension.  That is the space between the identification of a difficult problem and the resolution of that problem.  That space, that in-between time, creates a tension, a pain, a fear, a worry, an angst in an organization that is very difficult to tolerate for most.  I tolerate it better than most.  One of my favorite quotations comes from H.L. Mencken:  “For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is wrong.”  It is between the posing or discovery of the problem and the arrival or discovery of the solution that creative tension exists.  I feel it.  It can gnaw at your guts and we want to rush to confrontation, decision-making, resolve.  If we do so without reflection, without examination of our core beliefs, then we are likely to create worse problems down the road.  I am not willing to seek simple resolve for the sake of releasing tension.  I am willing to sit with it, seek insight, seek discovery, seek information, and then select an answer.  I will also confess I seek divine help and inspiration.  I am not in control, I am not omniscient.  I have a job to do, inspired by the supernatural and addressed with whatever God-given gifts and whatever learnings and experiences I bring to the table.  I am just willing to sit with the tension awaiting resolve longer than most.

Approaching tough problems like this can be very frustrating to those around me who await a decision, I know.  They feel angst.  Fix it!  Resolve it!  Decide and be done!  A newly found dear friend shared recent fortune cookie wisdom with me, “Life always gets harder near the summit.”  How true.  We are in the hard part near the summit.  We, as a system are in the midst of creative tension.  Who will do what?  Who will stay?  Who will go?  What is going on?  What are the changes coming?

I know some of those answers.  I will stay.  I wrestled with it, I have struggled, the Board has struggled and our relationship is not perfect, but it is getting better, more so as we are honest and open and re-build our mutual confidence.  I had to make that decision first, though, candidly it continues to resurface as the Board and I encounter new obstacles and new problems, but for now, I have committed.  If that helps you with your creative tension then that is good.

I know some of you have decided to stay and I celebrate that.  I also celebrate all the hours of talk we have had, the new friendships and professional bonds that we have created.  What a wonderful group of human beings you are and it is my pleasure to work with you for the coming year.  Thanks.

I know who I will recommend for some of our vacant positions.  That is good and it shall be clear as of Wednesday morning, 6/20, who those people are.  I have my reasons for each recommendation, and despite what you may speculate on Facebook, the reasons are grounded in what I see as the nature of the issues we have recently faced and the talents and abilities of folks I know.  I want trust back in this system.  I want you to trust me.  I want the Board to trust me.  I want to trust the Board.  Tuesday night is an important step toward achieving those goals.

For other issues and problems and uncertainties I continue to sit with the tension.  My creative tension over Richard is resolved.  He has left us and will be OK.  He and I will be OK.  It is my hope that we can help him celebrate his new position and that he can help us recover by not attacking from without.  My creative tension over Melissa’s departure is not resolved, but I am working on it and trust her to help me work on it.  I have relied on her as my professional friend and confidant for so long that there is an ache in my heart as she prepares to depart.  I want to be clear with her before she leaves.  I care for and respect her tremendously, will miss her terribly, and want to remain both friends and colleagues.  If we can accomplish that, I will be well.  I believe the same is true for her.

I am deeply concerned about teachers who have decided to leave us, especially high school teachers.  I beseech those who have considered leaving and are on the cusp of committing to that departure to sit with your own creative tension.  Please do not make a significant professional decision motivated by personal pain and confusion.  Career decisions should never be made in pain and angst.  Sit with it.  Edna kids need you.  We want you to stay.  If you were meant to teach in an inner city junior high then that is where you would have been all along.  This calling, this profession is bigger than any one of us.  Be where you need to be, wherever that is.  In that way you will best serve kids.

So, the creative tension continues, but shall be resolved soon.  I sit with it.  I ponder it.  I gnaw at it and it at me.  But I have a job to do and so do you.  Kids will come to school this fall and we will be ready.  Join us, celebrate with us, and remain with us.  It will be worth it.  It will be better!

Now, back to my children to celebrate Father’s Day!