Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

Op-ed #12

Hiring season is upon us.  Are you ready?

Fact:

You must be serious in your pursuit of the very best candidate.  Period. Exclamation point!

Discussion:

If you are frequent reader of this blog you already know of my affinity for sports analogies.  Sorry, it is who I am and I find many things in sports mirror many of the things that happen in a school or an organization.  Today’s, blog has me thinking of spring training which signals to me that it is now hiring season for the upcoming school year.  When February turns to March, you have to put hiring on the fast track.

I certainly do not know what specific personal qualities that you may be looking for in your school.  Each school will probably come up with a different rubric of needs and wants.  For example, and I have shared this before, is content knowledge important?  What about pedagogical skill?   Is the person a real relationship builder?  I am at the point in my evolution now that I believe to work in a school one must be a strong relationship builder.   If you can’t build relationships, all of the good content that is at your fingertips or all of the pedagogical skills that you have acquired will be useless.

However, today’s thought is not about that.  Today, I am asking you to take this hiring practice seriously.  It may be the most important thing that you do all year.  And of course, if I was to ask you about your thoughts about this, you would quickly afform my notion.  But let’s dig a bit deeper.  Is hiring, one of your top priorities?  How much time do you put into it? Do you really know what you are looking for?  How many times in an interview have you just gone through the motions?  You sometimes will just take anyone in order for you to check hiring off on your to-do list.  I must now confess. I have been there and done that. And when I did this, it would turn out to bite me on the backside. In reality, I should have stopped my world to get hiring right.  It would have caused me far less aggravation in the long run.  Not only did I suffer, my staff suffered and most importantly, the students suffered.  Please do not fall into my trap.  Other things can wait.  Put the time, effort and enthusiasm into hiring.

Back in early January, I spoke to you on these pages about the “five-tool player.” (Moneyball) The article was about finding the “five-tool” principal. My tools are:  the relationship builder, the communicator, personal accessibility, the ability to follow-through and visionary qualities.  If you look deeper into my archives you will see an article the “five-tool” teacher.

But at the end of the day, you may have to throw all of your tools and metrics out of the window and just go with your gut.  You will probably make a special connection with the successful candidate within the first minute of your interview.

Malcolm Gladwell in a 2008 article published in the New Yorker entitled The Most Likely to Succeed speaks about a certain quality in teachers called “withitness.”  He defines this as the teacher’s ability to communicate with his or her students by a behavior, not any spoken words.  Some have gone on to refer to this as the “eyes in the back of the head” concept.

For your school or organization to grow you have to find people with “withitness.” I am convinced that no matter what tools we want to talk about, those that possess this “withitness” will be your success stories.  They will become your master teachers.  They will become your “Employees of the Month” and your “Teachers of the Year.”

I am sure that there is some metric available to determine the amount of “withitness” in your school.  I can almost guarantee that the more “withitness” in your school, the more successful your school will be.

So, go out and fill your classrooms, halls and offices with “withitness.”  You won’t be sorry.