Leadership As Architecting Conversations

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dave Hassenbaugh, president of Principal Center. the Center for Leadership Excellence in Independent Schools. And Dave's specialty is around building collaborative cultures in schools. So I'm very excited to talk to him today.

[00:33] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:36] SPEAKER_00:

Dave, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:37] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin. It's great to be with you.

[00:39] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how you got into this. You work directly with primarily independent schools and help them develop cultures. How did you get into that, and what is that like?

[00:52] SPEAKER_02:

Great question. I started working with independent schools, and just to be clear, I run a company that focuses on leadership development and building leaders in schools. all kinds of organizations. But in the course of doing some work, I had some independent schools reach out and ask me to come in and do some workshops with them and build leadership, primarily in the administrative side. And this was probably 10 years ago now. And one of the things that I found that was a bit of a surprise to me, though Everyone in independent schools acknowledged that it was the case.

[01:39]

And I've since learned that this is also true in just about any kind of school is really the advent of, I guess, what I would call the accidental leader. And what happens is. You've got people who are very passionate about education and being good educators. And they go to school and they study and they become extremely good educators. And I would call that, you know, from a leadership domain perspective, I call that being a very good performer. You're good at your job.

[02:08]

And the people who are good at their job in any organization, but particularly schools, they're very good teachers. And then at some point, they're going to get tapped on the shoulder to say, hey, you're so good at that. Why don't you become the head of the department? And then when you make that shift from being the excellent performer to being the manager, it requires a completely different set of skills. It requires a different tools, different conversations, the different ability to what I would call be the customer of other people's performance. So you're going from being the performer to being the customer.

[02:42]

And as the customer of the behaviors of other people, Unless you have really been taught how to do that, how to have some of those conversations and how you show up as the leader of that, it really negatively influences the results that you're going to be able to get from those performers. And so what I find in most schools is that you have a cadre of accidental leaders, people who are really good performers who now find themselves in a position to say, OK, now I'm in charge. How do I get that? John and Jenny and all these other people to do what I'm asking them to do to support the vision of the overall school. And so in the course of working with these schools, I found that that was a tremendous need because the accidental leader is such a common experience.

[03:36]

And so I founded the Center for Leadership Excellence in Independent Schools and

[03:41] SPEAKER_00:

as a way to try to help schools specifically build that leadership bench strength in the administration so that they can lead their schools more effectively i think that's a great point about kind of accidental leadership and i've seen that happen kind of in small steps you know like i i became i think science department head in my second year of teaching not because i had accomplished anything fantastic other than to stick around for my second year, but because the person who was doing it before me didn't want to anymore or retire. And yet that was a step on my journey to ultimately become school principal. And I didn't realize it at the time. I had no intention of doing that. But it certainly was not the kind of thing that was preceded by, well, I'm going to be science department head. So let me go take a leadership course and read 10 books.

[04:31]

So when people find themselves in that position, they're responsible for kind of managing the performance of others, as you said, becoming the customer of it. What mindset shifts do you see that are necessary? Because I know people who do kind of purposefully move into leadership positions, as you said, typically are. high performers. Sometimes it's just kind of an accident of circumstance, as I will readily admit it was in my case at that point. But what are some of the shifts that people have to make in order to be effective in that new role, regardless of how they got there?

[05:07] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's a great point. And I call your experience, I refer to that as kind of the lost sheep metaphor, right? So if you think about the old descriptions of when the sheep gets lost, It's not like the sheep wakes up one day and says, you know, forget the shepherd. I'm out of here. I'm going to go do this. They just kind of say, oh, look, over here is a little patch of grass.

[05:30]

I'm going to come over here and kind of nibble on that. Oh, look, there's another one. And you just do it a little bit at a time, and before they know it, They're they're on the other side of the hill. And how did I get here? And it's exactly what you described. Same kind of thing for for a lot of people who become leaders in schools.

[05:46]

It's well, I'll take on the department head thing because I really care about the people that I work with and I think that I'm I can do an OK job. And then they become leaders. Oh, well, actually, you're going to be the chair of this thing. And then, oh, wait a second, you're going to become the you know, I think you'd be good for the assistant dean of faculty. And oh, wait a second, you're the assistant dean of faculty. And now they left.

[06:06]

Now, why don't you be the dean of faculty? And you kind of kind of have that lost sheep approach. And then you wake up one day going, wait a second, I'm. in some cases, way over my head. And so you ask a great question about what is something that leaders can do to bring that. And the first thing that I always start with is it starts with self-awareness.

[06:30]

And self-awareness in the sense that you've got to know what you know and know what you don't know. And admitting that is a huge, huge first step. A lot of the leadership breakdowns that I see come from either blindness or people just don't know, they don't see what's around them because they've only come from that performer perspective, or they refuse to admit what's happening around them and the fact that they may be over their heads. And so the first shift in mindset for leaders that I always teach is really around helping people to recognize that Now that you're the customer of other people's performance, you're the customer of their behavior and the outcomes that they produce, you've got to let go of that perspective that I have to be the super performer, that you have to be the best one to do it.

[07:28]

That's not true at all. In fact, as a leader, and it starts with becoming the manager, whether you're department head or the first time you start managing someone else, you're in the business of leadership. So as a leader, the first thing you got to learn is you are not the performer. What you are is the one who makes and keeps promises. That's your whole job. is that you make and keep promises on behalf of the people you're leading.

[07:59]

So you have a team of people, let's say you're a department head, and you have a team of people in the history department, and there are certain standards that you need to maintain and ways that you go about doing that, whether that's through certain curriculum that you're teaching, through keeping schedules, through balancing workloads, all of those things that are important. What you're doing then as the department head is And ultimately, the same thing happens as you move up the leadership chain. What you're doing as a department head is that you are making a promise to your customers, because everybody's got a customer. You're making promises to your customers that the people you're leading are going to do what it is that you say they're going to do. And the only way That you as a leader have to do that is through conversations.

[08:50] SPEAKER_00:

So promises and conversations. And I'm interested in that idea of conversations because that's not typically a very high authority conversation. or a high hierarchy concept to just have conversations. But I think as we kind of find ourselves even accidentally in these roles, you know, a lot of department heads would, you know, would say, you know, I don't necessarily have the authority to march into my colleague's room and tell them what to do. So it is conversations. Could you talk about how that, how that looks?

[09:20] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Great. That's a great question. And that's exactly it. And that's, In some ways, contrary to the way many people look at leadership and management and developing those skills, we have particularly in our culture, uh, this perspective of the, you know, the boss and they come in and I'll tell you what's going on. And I, you know, I have this, you know, these tools that measure, you know, you, this, that, and the other thing.

[09:46]

And, you know, you come in and you do what I tell you to do, where else are you out of here? And, you know, that, that kind of command and control mindset. And believe me, I was, uh, I was an army officer for many years. And so I'm very familiar with that kind of command and control mindset and, And the reality is, and one of the things that I learned that was the myth of leadership was that that command and control mindset never works. In fact, there's only very few situations when the proverbial and the literal bullets are flying when that is the appropriate course of action. And otherwise...

[10:22]

all you have as a leader is a conversation. So to use your example, you know, if somebody's, you see a colleague that's not doing what it is they say they're going to do, so they're not keeping the promises that they're making. So that you as a peer as a collaborative worker, can coordinate action to produce a shared outcome, and they're not keeping their end of the bargain. How do you how do you engage with that? The only way is to go and have a conversation. It's to say, hey, wait a second.

[10:52]

You had made a commitment to me. I assessed that to be a trustworthy commitment, and it didn't happen. So what are we going to do about that? That's engaging a conversation. So leaders are the architect of conversations. That's how you get stuff done, is that you just make sure that the right people are having the right conversations at the right time to coordinate action to produce the desired outcomes that you need.

[11:19] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it doesn't sound very army-like. When those of us who have not served in the military think about how military command structures work, that doesn't sound like my mental construct of leadership in that setting. Why is it that that is so powerful even when you do have that hierarchical authority, when you have every right to say, I'm your commanding officer, here's what we're going to do? Mm-hmm. Talk to me about the conversational aspect, even within that context.

[11:52] SPEAKER_02:

Sure. It's a great question. And I get that question a lot, again, having had that military background. And you're right. As an Army officer, I could give an order under threat of sending someone to jail if they didn't do what I asked them to do. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of the opportunity to have that power structure at play.

[12:18]

And the thing that good officers really learn very quickly is that while that may be an option, and this also applies to leaders in any organization, but particularly schools, just because the head of school or the principal tells you to do something and they have every right to fire you if you don't follow through on it, the thing that makes someone want to follow through on the promises and commitments are making is if you can tap into some shared purpose, something that they care about. And so care is really at the heart of getting someone to commit to it. So, you know, in the army, I learned very quickly that it wasn't what I said that

[13:09]

that made somebody want to do something. It's what they heard. And if they hear it in a way that taps into and aligns with something that they care about, then they will be inspired to do something about that. Why is it that you think that people will go back and do three, four, five, six or more tours in a combat situation, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan? Yeah. It's not because they were ordered to do it.

[13:42]

Most of the time when you talk to the soldiers who do that, it's because they care about the people that they're working with. And the same thing happens in schools. People will do what they have to because they care about them. the people that they work with. They care about the students. And so tapping into that and inspiring people to coordinate action to take care of that in the best way possible, that's at the heart of leadership.

[14:11] SPEAKER_00:

Dave, as we think about making promises on behalf of the people we lead, where do we tend to go wrong? And what does that look like when we do it right, when we do a good job of making promises on behalf of the people that we're working with?

[14:27] SPEAKER_02:

I think one of the things that's so crucial for leaders to comprehend and one of the things that, frankly, we spend a lot of time on when I start working with leaders and coaching leaders to kind of shift that mindset is that you're no longer in the, you know, just in the business of doing the performance or doing the teaching. Although many, many people in schools, you know, even heads of schools still teach classes. And so there's, you know, they keep their hands in it at some point. But once you get to the point where you're not just teaching, you're the one who is making promises on behalf of your team. And in order to make promises you have to have conversations both with your customers and with the team or the people that you're leading the really really crucial skill that you need to that and I mentioned this before is really around listening because it doesn't matter you know as I said what you what you say

[15:26]

that will inspire and motivate them to take action or not take action as the case may be. So when you are making promises on behalf of your team, it's not that you can go and sit in a board meeting and say, yeah, sure, my guys will get that done because that is what we call an ungrounded promise. It's not a trustworthy promise because you have nothing to base it on. So to make a promise, And to make a promise trustworthy, you have to actually talk to your people and get commitment from them that they will go ahead and deliver on that promise. And so if you say, hey, we're going to do this, we're going to implement this new curriculum, and we'll have that done and ready to go by the start of the next school year.

[16:18]

Unless you talk to the people who are going to be doing the work and you listen to you listen as the leader from them that they are sincere and able to deliver on what it is that they say they're going to do, you're setting yourself up for failure. And that's where a lot of leaders get into trouble is because they are operating under untrustworthy promises because they either don't listen to the people when they say, hey, I don't know that we can do this. They'll turn around and go, yeah, yeah, but I just told you to do it, so just make it happen. that's not effective because you're, you're setting yourself up and your people up for failure because you didn't listen to, you know, their legitimate concerns. And it's not to say that if somebody says, no, you have to take that at face value either. That's the opportunity to architect other conversations.

[17:11]

Say, ah, okay, wait a second. I'm, you know, you're telling me, no, is it because we don't have the skills? We don't have the time. We don't have the resources. We don't have this. You, you, go into other kinds of conversations.

[17:23]

And so I call these, you know, having an effective leadership conversation. And there's a, a, you know, selection of different kinds of conversations that leaders have to have at some point. So that's one of the first steps of having an effective leadership conversation is identify what is the kind of conversation we need to have. It may be, you know, we need to talk about, you know, capacity and, uh, capability. Do we have the skills and resources to do what it is we're asking you to do? Sometimes you may need to have a conversation about performance.

[17:58]

Sometimes you need to have a conversation about how we're going to work together as a team. So this starts to illustrate a little bit about the power of conversations like having the right kind of conversation at the right time can either set you up for success or or not having that kind of conversation can set you up for failure and this is one of the things that most managers seem to just have never been taught

[18:26] SPEAKER_00:

I think often when we find ourselves in a leadership role, perhaps for the first time, we tend to do what our mental model of a leader says we should do. And depending on how much direct experience we have with leaders, I think it's very natural to tend to try to take control of a situation, to try to be decisive, to try to be a person of kind of bold action and show that we're serious. What do you recommend that people do to be effective in architecting those conversations?

[18:58] SPEAKER_02:

That's a great question because what you are describing here is – a very human phenomenon and leadership is a human phenomenon, right? We only know what we know. So my perspective on what a quote unquote good leader does, uh, is going to be shaped by just my experience with my own managers and the people that I work with and the ones that I liked and, and I, I'm going to try to do more of what they did and the ones that I didn't like, I'm gonna try to do less of what they did. And, and so we have that kind of skewed perspective, uh, and, uh, There's a I guess you call it debate. There's a lot of discussion about What is it? that you know makes management versus leadership and In my view most of that debate.

[19:47]

I know a lot of it started With Warren Bennis and saying that the managers and leaders are very different things. I totally disagree with that because most of the discussion is uh, about management versus leadership is done to make somebody look bad. Right. Or it's like, ah, you know, I'm a leader, you're a manager. And so you smoke focus on just the things to do today. I'll focus on the vision thing.

[20:12]

And, and, and that really is a very divisive, um, discussion. So the way that I describe it for, for the people that I work with is management, uh, is authority granted by the institution. Leadership is authority granted by the people being led. So if you are a department head, you have a management level of responsibility. The institution is giving you responsibility to do certain things. You know, performance appraisals, hiring, firing, sometimes things like that.

[20:42]

So leadership is authority granted by the people who are being led. And so when you are trying to inspire somebody to produce outcomes, that satisfy customers, that authority to let you do that comes from the people that you're inspiring to do something. So management is authority from the institution. Leadership is authority from the people being led. And if you are in a management role, you're going to need both. And you're going to want to be able to leverage both.

[21:16] SPEAKER_00:

That's really well said. And I think back to some conversations that I had as a new principal in an elementary school at a fairly young age where I worked really hard on the leadership side and really tried to avoid using that kind of positional authority and that kind of managerial authority. And I remember it being very, very tough to make that transition when I needed to into saying, okay, hey, I know we've had some really powerful conversations. I think we've gotten on the same page about a lot of things in a one-on-one setting. But in this circumstance, what I'm asking you to do in this particular case, it was you need to have your lessons planned in advance and not make things up as you go along. You know, I'm not collaborating with you on this at this point.

[22:04]

This is this is not optional. What advice do you have for people who, you know, who are struggling to, you know, to do as much of the leadership work as possible and yet still pull out the kind of managerial authority when it's necessary and not have that kind of blow up in your face. I'd love to have your perspective on that because I love that model.

[22:27] SPEAKER_02:

That's a great question. The thing that I found to be most effective when looking at that and when trying to coordinate that is, again, having the right kind of conversation. And in that case, when you come in as the, whether it's the new principal, whether it's the head of school, you know, CFO, whatever, you have a set of expectations that are placed upon you about what it is that you're going to produce or how you're going to produce it. And in the case of the example that you gave, which was a great one, you know, as the principal, you are ultimately responsible for you know how the students are being taught and so their lesson plans and curriculum and making sure that that's done well so in order to make sure that the department heads are being effective customers for their teams or in some cases you're dealing directly with the faculty then you have a conversation about clarifying roles and listen you know in order to do this

[23:30]

I've got to make sure that our board understands what we're doing and that we're being really, really effective with our parents and students. And in order to do that, then I'm going to need you to make sure that we're doing this. And these are the standards that I'm using to assess whether we're hitting that well. And based on my assessment, it doesn't seem like, use that example, it doesn't seem like your lesson plans are as robust as they could be so what are we going to do to make sure your lesson plans are robust and with that let's be clear having a lesson plan is not an option you know you're going we need them we found that you know the research has shown these reasons so it's not optional but how are we going to make sure yours are yours are as good as they can be

[24:20] SPEAKER_00:

Right. So even at that point, you're framing it as a conversation. And I and I hear other people talking about this and I would get advice from other principals. And I see people at that point getting very, very directive and saying, OK, here's a Word document. It has eight boxes and I need these filled in every day. And I want this on my desk by 8 a.m. You know, and that kind of.

[24:41]

response rather than what you said, which is having that conversation again, you know, architecting the conversation that needs to happen at that point and saying, here is the the product that I as your customer need from you. I need coherent instruction. How are we going to make that happen?

[24:59] SPEAKER_02:

And you're framing that to in order to get to get. A promise from the person that you're talking to. That's that's the difference. If I give you a Word document and say, I dug on it, I need you to fill this out and you fill out these eight boxes and I need this to be sent to me by eight o'clock every morning or five o'clock before you leave every day. This is what you're going to do the next day. you're not getting, you're getting compliance, you're not getting commitment.

[25:26]

And there's, there is a difference between that. And so by architecting the conversation to say, I need you to really be bought into developing lesson plans that are going to serve you and the students. How are we going to do that? And then in some cases, it may come down to, wow, do you have a template that can help me? Because I don't know. That becomes then a conversation around capacity and capability.

[25:53]

Like, you know what? I've never really designed a good lesson plan, so I could use some help with that. Then the template may help. But if they say, you know what, what works for me is PowerPoint, fine. If that works for you and you do it in PowerPoint and you're more visual to do your lesson plans, awesome. But as long as you're committing to do it, and that's the difference.

[26:14]

You're looking to get and listening for the commitment from the person you're talking to, not just here's a template, fill it out by 5 o'clock. One gives you compliance, one gives you commitment. Compliance will always start to wane off.

[26:27] SPEAKER_00:

And I think when we become customers of compliance, we pretty quickly stop caring about whatever kind of product we're getting to. I mean, I see people who say to their entire faculty, okay, I want your lesson plans every single week. And I think of principals who do that, an incredibly tiny proportion actually review those plans and talk with teachers about them. It really does become kind of a dead tree issue. It does.

[26:58] SPEAKER_02:

And it doesn't take long for the people who are providing those templates, those lesson plans, to realize that you're not really reading it anyway. So then it becomes just something else that they've got to do to check the box and And it takes time out of their day. They're really not putting the thought into it. They know you're not putting thought into it. So now you've got a series of tasks, activities that are taking place that have no value whatsoever. They're not helping to fulfill a promise.

[27:28]

They're not helping to coordinate action to satisfy anybody.

[27:32] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Dave, I appreciate your perspective on how we can architect those conversations in order to elicit those promises from our teams, from the people we lead that will take us to the results we want. And I really appreciate your perspective on some of the kind of soft skills that will get us there. If you could recommend a book or two to kind of fuel our thinking on that topic, what books would come to mind?

[27:57] SPEAKER_02:

One is a simple book. It's a quick read. It's called Who Will Do What by When by Tom Hanson. It's a great book to illustrate, again, the questions and the clarifying and making effective requests of the people that you're leading. If we say we're going to do this, when will it be done? How will we know we're doing it well?

[28:19]

So that's a good book. Another one that I found particularly powerful is called Stewardship by Peter Block. And it's about getting a different kind of conversation going than just I'm the administrator and I have the control and you're the one who's supposed to do it and you do what I say. It's really talking about a more collaborative environment. So those are two books that just come to mind that I think would be very, very helpful.

[28:48] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Dave, it has been a pleasure to speak with you today and to talk about these leadership issues that really are at the core of our work as instructional leaders, as school administrators. If people want to get in touch with you and find out more about what you do, where can they find you online?

[29:04] SPEAKER_02:

People can always reach me at, of course, Twitter. It's at David Hasenbaugh, and that's spelled H-A-S as in Sam, E-N-B-A-L-G. Always have to spell it. They can also check out www.independentschoolleadership.com, where we have a lot of information about some of our upcoming programs and some of the work that we do specifically with schools.

[29:30]

And, you know, you can also find my email information on that website and on Twitter as well.

[29:40] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Dave, thanks so much for your time. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and your expertise with us on leadership. Have a great day.

[29:47] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much, Justin. And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[29:53] SPEAKER_00:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dave? For me, it was powerful to hear that even in the Army, the most hierarchical command-and-control position, top-down organization that could possibly come to mind in our society. Even there, leadership is really about those conversations. And I really appreciate Dave's framing of leadership around making promises on behalf of the people you lead, on behalf of the people whose performance you're a customer of. and then getting commitments to those promises through conversations, through carefully architecting conversations. Because I think so often we see it as our job to hold people accountable, to kind of be the heavy, to make people follow through.

[30:41]

But I think that degree of commitment that people bring, you know, the kind of commitment that makes people sign up for a second tour of duty. And hopefully what we're asking people to do in our schools is, you know, is... even more rewarding and even easier to say yes to. But imagine that level of commitment that would make someone say, yes, I believe in the work that I'm doing with the people here so much that I'm going to even put my life on the line.

[31:07]

I mean, you don't get that from command and control. You get that from helping people believe in a vision, from having conversations. So I appreciate everything that Dave said on that front. And I also wanted to emphasize something he shared at the end about reading books that are not necessarily written for us as administrators, but are written for leaders in general. I think we have a ton to learn in our profession about leadership in other industries. And one industry in particular that's had my attention for a while, even though I've never worked in it, is the software industry, because it's a very non-hierarchical industry, and yet you often have managers, you often have leaders who are non-technical people who are not writing the software, and they're leading people who have expertise that they don't have.

[31:56]

And that actually is a situation, especially in secondary schools that we find ourselves in as instructional leaders. If you have a foreign language department and you do not speak that language, you have ways to, you have to figure out ways to lead in that situation. without being the expert and without being the heavy. So I think listening to our staff, listening to their plans and informing our school plans together, rather than in that hierarchical way, gets us so much further almost every time.

[32:28] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.