Years ago, I was blessed to be in a position to hold seminars with groups of educators designed to discuss and build leadership skills both informally and formally, internally – for the individual and externally for the school. As we discussed leadership skills and qualities, we would talk about new tools being put in our toolboxes as leaders. This year in Teach & Serve, I have decided to talk about many of those tools.
PROBLEM SOLVING
Real talk: there are many, many things “they” do not tell you when you apply and interview for a formal leadership position. One of the tools I find I should have considered more fully before stepping into my first formal role (I became a department chair in the mid 1990s) was problem solving. All these years later, when interviewing anyone for anything, I try to include a question about solving a complex issue. This is not my brainstorm, this is simply a good question to ask anyone as they join a staff and has come into vogue in recent years.
I wish I had been asked this early in my career if only to then have begun to consider what a valuable tool problem solving is.
From being confronted by a veteran teacher complaining about “forced charity” when he snapped his wallet open to give me a five-spot for a colleague’s baby shower to developing a formal plan of teacher observation where there was none to dealing with a world-wide pandemic, the problems a leader is asked to solve are varied. Some are big, some are small, some are easily addressed, some are impossible to unravel, some are unimportant and some can break the back of your institution.
Leaders cannot say “that’s not my problem.” Ever.
Leaders embrace problems and problem solving is a critical tool in the toolbox.
I have come to understand that, as principal, I do not have to solve every problem on my own, but every problem in the school is my responsibility.