Michael Fullan

Collaborative competition is where people are in fact collaborating and learning from each other but they’re also trying to outdo each other. So what comes out of that, because it’s all in the public system, is a kind of mutual allegiance – people giving and receiving help, but with a little bit of an edge of competition. Another big feature of our work is to play down accountability in favor of capacity building, and then reenter accountability later. If you lead with accountability, which most states do, then people are immediately on the defensive and it doesn’t work so well.
 

It takes leaders who are, first of all, instructionally focused. It takes leaders who appreciate and know the capacity-building strategy – at the school level it’s professional learning communities, but this is bigger than that. They have to be good at collaboration. And then it takes the confidence to collaborate outside of your school, both in terms of when you may think ‘Oh, I don’t have that much to offer, so I’ll look poorly in the comparison,’ or ‘somebody might steal our ideas,’ or whatever. So you really have to have a confident leadership which shows at the same time you’re committed to a bigger entity than to your narrow patch of the field. You’re actually contributing to a bigger part.
 

We’ve seen it in business – take Toyota, for example. They’re quite open about sharing their so-called “secrets.” But if you look close, they don’t have worries because nobody can steal their culture. You can only steal surface ideas.

 

I think these principals, the leaders I’m talking about, realize that sharing is a way for them to get better, sharing is a way for them to contribute to the overall development – and because it’s all within the public system, if the overall development gets better, everyone looks good. Parents are happier, politicians are happier, the business community and people invest more in it. It’s a cycle of success – but people have to take the risk … they have to have the confidence and take the risk to enter an unknown territory to give and receive this type of help. And then once they get more experience at it, then they get good at it, and it doesn’t seem so daunting.
 

I think you’re a great catalyst and resource for individual capacity building – this is where you would contribute to aspiring principals, such as the group I’m working with. So in that way, you help districts feed the pipeline of new leaders. But that’s not the end of the story for me. That would be individual capacity building. The other way you would do it is through collective capacity building, which means that the districts have to start laterally learning from each other.  So I can see Houston A+ being a catalyst for stimulating the districts learning and getting together.
 

At the same time, another way to look at it is that if you have a good, proactive superintendent, then I want that superintendent to see this organization as something that they could use to help their agenda. So instead of saying, “How can we help you, superintendent?” I want the superintendent to say, “Here’s a resource that I can use, and I’m going to be proactive about it.” So in that way, the more you do this, the more that the group wants to use you – and you’ve got it made because they’re coming to you instead of the other way around.
 

We’ve turned (my new book), The Six Secrets of Change, into a workshop. If you take the four core secrets, they’re about building up instructional leadership: How to use peers and how to develop collaborative cultures. How to build up capacity without being judgmental. How to make learning the work, where day after day the school is getting better – you’re not just doing workshops, but you’re constantly improving day after day. And the fourth one is transparency of data and practice.
 

So I’ve been working with (the aspiring principals) all day long, trying to get them in the mindset that, “OK, these are the four things that I’ve got to be good at, then I should take all four of these things and think about what my role would be.” So that’s the core of what I’ve been doing, and each of the activities pushes them a little bit further.

For example, I would say to them, your role as an upcoming principal is, number one, not just to improve student achievement in your school, but to develop other leaders. When you finish your tenure at your school, you leave behind more leaders than when you started. That’s a specific thing for them.
 

Second, I have been telling them that we’re entering a period where we’re using a lot more networks, so you have to be good at and committed to giving and receiving help from other schools in your cluster. That’s a widening of the role; it may not be one that you think of when you see the role description. But actually, districts in our work are actually recasting the role description to cover the two things that I just mentioned. That’s part of the principal’s responsibility and skill, and that’s your job expectation, and we’ll help you do it and get better at it. So I’ve been pushing the group into the specificity of the realization that the principal’s role is increasingly important and increasingly sophisticated. Not mysterious, but sophisticated. And that they really have to get better and better at doing these things.