Joel Zehring

For a school to become a professional learning community, the employees of that building must develop shared mission, vision, values and goals. To do this, leaders must productively engage every employee in brutally honest discussion. If every single person doesn’t have a chance to chime in freely with suggestions, agreement, and disagreement, then the leaders fail.

Leaders must overcome two key hurdles: logistics and agreement.

Logistics

How do you listen to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people and consider all their viewpoints? How do you sustain large scale conversation? This is where computer-based tools for communication and aggregation can be especially helpful. If we’ve learned anything from the phenomena of Facebook and Twitter, we’ve learned that people are longing to participate in open discussion over topics that they care about.

Agreement

Everyone participating doesn’t mean that everyone has to spout out the same catch phrases right away (or at all). It means that through open, honest, sustained discourse, colleagues throughout the building or organization express, compare, and refine their beliefs and assumptions about learning and education.

One ultimate outcome of this discussion is the development of shared mission, vision, values, and goals.  These elements become the foundation for the culture of the organization, guiding all the activities and actions and discussions that occur on campus. The nitty-gritty, day-to-day policies and procedures of the school flow out of this set of shared and stated beliefs.

I say “ultimate outcome,” but what I really mean is “first draft.” For an organization to really thrive, all the employees must continually re-examine and refine their assumptions and beliefs about learning and education. Employees must remind each other of their shared beliefs all the time and question their own thoughts, words, and actions.

Here are two practical suggestions to facilitate the proces:

• Make sure to set up some simple conflict-resolution practices. When people talk about their deeply held beliefs, things can get heated.
• Ask really good questions. Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept is an invaluable framework for helping people to articulate their deeply held values and beliefs.

This is a response to Scott McLeod’s call for posts for Leadership Day 2009.

No meeting should ever start without the input of every member of your organization. Computer and communications technologies provide an unprecendented number of options for soliciting, collecting, and aggregating ideas from large numbers of people.

• Ask a question. Make sure the question is related to the goal of the meeting. If you don’t have a goal, ask for suggested goals.
• Collect input from any person willing to throw in their two cents. Open multiple channels of communication to get more diverse input. Email, voicemail messages, web forms, blogs, wikis, or suggestion boxes with slips of paper allow people to engage where they are comfortable.
• Aggregate the input appropriately and review the input before the meeting. Without aggregation, the input of your members is overwhelming. Too much aggregation will scrub the input of any authenticity.
• Conduct the meeting. Set an expectation that each participant in the meeting will audibly refer to some idea in the input at least once during the meeting.
• Tell the story of the meeting and publish it. This seeds interest and ideas for the next call for input for the next meeting.

Certainly, there are cases where this procedure would need to be modified. If the goal of a meeting is related to sensitive information, then the questions and stories that are told must be sufficiently vague. Sensitive subject material is not an excuse for closing off the meeting from input.

Ultimately, this procedure for conducting meetings is not about technology. It’s about valuing and engaging every member of an organization. It’s about generating buy-in for policies and programs rather than mandating compliance from the top down. Technology (when carefully implemented) simply accelerates the process of engaging and conversing with large numbers of people.