Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

Leadership lessons I learned from my seat on the bench #8

Fact: Aesthetics matter.

If it looks confusing; it probably is confusing. If it looks out of control; it probably is out of control. It is looks chaotic; it probably is chaotic. OK, you get my point.

What something looks like matters. I thought about this quite a bit watching some of the playoff games leading up to the Super Bowl. It was easy to see some of the differences on the sidelines. Some sidelines looked disorganized and chaotic with players and coaches yelling at one another and sometimes out of position on the field. Others sidelines looked calm and organized with their players rarely out of position and ready for play. One team, took a timeout to select an offensive play to draw the other teams into a penalty yet only drew themselves into a penalty. The way this situation played out was embarrassing at best and very costly to the team. I could easily give you other examples of teams with organized business-like approaches as compared to teams that just seemed out of control. The teams that just looked organized and disciplined most times performed better.

As you well know by now, I write mostly about schools and I believe that the axiom I presented in my first paragraph easily applies to these institutions.

If you ever visited a school and felt that the hallways were loud, crowded and disorganized, you would not be hard pressed to make some negative assumptions about that school; namely it was out of control.

As you continued your walk around this school and looked into classrooms and saw students running around, loud, with disorganized student conversations you could probably reinforce your initial observations and determine that not much learning was going on in these classrooms.

Now, I must stop here for a disclaimer. There are exceptions to everyone’s rules, including mine. So, if your come from a school that is an exception, please do not be offended.

As a principal, I always marveled as to how the same group of students in one classroom could be high achieving and motivated and the same student in another classroom were poorly motivated and disengaged. The biggest variable in this situation is the classroom teacher. And let us never forget that the most important factor in determining the achievement of any child is the teacher. It is better for the student to be in a bad school with a good teacher than being in a good school with a bad teacher. I am convinced of that.

The same can be said of my first story today about football team sidelines. I think that you can see it any level. The coach, just like the teacher is that variable. I can be at a high school football game and within five minutes of being there can probably predict the winner by merely looking at the sidelines. In fact, maybe I can make that same prediction while watching the manner in which these players leave the bus.

Parents will many times make a decision about their child’s school by merely watching how the students leave the building at dismissal. Is this fair? Probably not, but it just proves my point: aesthetics matter!