Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

Game time adjustments #11

Are the right people on the bus?

Fact:   Sometimes?

If you hire right, you will be putting your school on the right road to success. If you hire right, your defense against the dark side will be strong.  And of course, the converse is also true.  I hope that you recall past conversations about how I believe that each school, just like in Star Wars, has a force within it along with both a dark side and a light side (good vs. evil). If you do not hire the right people, your problems will be magnified and your population on the dark side will dramatically increase.  Because of your poor hiring practices, those that thrive on the dark side will outnumber those that want to live in the light. In my school, I want everyone to be a Jedi that thrives on the light side.

I implore all leaders to take the hiring practice seriously.  It may be the most important thing that you do. And yet for many school administrators, hiring is an afterthought. I know of principals that put very little time and thought into this process.  These principals just do not see this as an important task.  For them hiring is just another boring chore.

Some principals may actually relinquish this responsibility to others and readily adopt the attitude that he or she can personally work with anyone.  But is merely working with someone good enough?  I do not think so.  Remember that you are looking for future Jedi.  Do not settle!  Hiring and grooming future Jedi should be your top priority. 

Jim Collins in, probably his most well-read work, Good to Great suggests that it is essential that you need to get the right people on the bus. Yet, perhaps more importantly, that the people that are on your bus, are in the right seats.  To help ensure a well-functioning organization, the leader must have the right people in all of the right positions.

Now that you have the right people on the right seats on the bus, how do you get the wrong people off of the bus? Believe me, getting the wrong people off of the bus in a public-school setting is the real challenge.  That’s right, we cannot easily fire people, especially a tenured teacher.  Removing the wrong people is much easier in the corporate world. 

Most school leaders either do not have the budget capability or the ability to transfer money easily within his or her school budget to make the hiring of the right people or creating the right position for them a doable task.

Getting the right person on the bus might not be that hard.  Finding the right position for them may be a bit more difficult, and to jettison the dead weight might just be impossible.  The dead weight will be a drag on your entire journey.

This excess baggage comes at a cost.  To remove a tenured teacher, although it has gotten a bit easier over the last several years, is still a drain on the system.  It is a time consumer and time waster.  There is also an emotional toll that it will personally take on you.  Getting the dead weight off of the bus will be stressful, emotionally painful, and ugly.  And yet it must be done.  Upon reflection, I sometimes took the easy way out on this task and allowed these non-producers and malcontents to linger on the bus.  I let expediency rule the day.  I wish I could have a “do-over” on this.  Please do not make my mistake. The dead weight will ruin your journey to excellence.

Perry Belcher, the co-founder of DigitalMarketer.com put it this way, “Nothing will kill a great employee faster than watching you tolerate a bad one.”  Write that down, and make a small poster of it and hang it up in your office so you can see it daily.

If I was Yoda now, I might say, “tolerate not, a bad one.”