Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

Quick hits #1

How is your talent acquisition department?

Fact:   Are you kidding?  What department?

I hope that you laughed.  It shows that you have a sense of humor.  What talent acquisition department?  As the school leader, you are probably the entire department.  It is one of your many jobs as a school principal.  However, it is probably your most important job. And yet, I do not believe that you may feel as though it is your most important task.  Please do not fool yourself.

But what do you do with that talent once you have it?  Do you develop it properly?  I doubt it.  I will predict, and perhaps I am cynical, that you do very little with that talent.  Any development is purely accidental.  It is merely happenstance.  Any teacher development would have probably happened with you or without you.

Because of your half-hearted effort in this regard, perhaps a better question to you might be, how do you hurt or retard the growth of your new talent?  You do this by ignoring your new talent or by providing useless, time-wasting professional development opportunities.  This is extremely sad because part of the reason that you hired this new person is because they possessed such great potential.

So, when we are talking about new hires, on paper the formula is simple:

• Find it.
• Develop it
• Don’t mess it up.
• Surround it with other great people.
• Get out of the way and watch it grow.
• Be that ever wise “guide on the side” helping to steer your new hires to excellence.

It sounds so simple, but why do we make it so difficult?