Pretty much every 400-level leadership class tells us that a key responsibility of leadership is managing organizational culture. When your organization is a school, that task gets a little tougher. There are so many constituent groups who influence and are influenced by that culture. Managing it involves working with students, teachers and staff, parents and families, members of the community and countless others. Without sounding too much like “Old man Schrimpf”, these days “members of the community” means something much different than it used to. Now members of the community can be the family that lives across the street from your school or the family who lives in Australia but follows your school on social media. Without question, culture management is critically important, and really difficult.
Pretty much every 400-level leadership class tells us that a key responsibility of leadership is managing organizational culture. When your organization is a school, that task gets a little tougher. There are so many constituent groups who influence and are influenced by that culture. Managing it involves working with students, teachers and staff, parents and families, members of the community and countless others. Without sounding too much like “Old man Schrimpf”, these days “members of the community” means something much different than it used to. Now members of the community can be the family that lives across the street from your school or the family who lives in Australia but follows your school on social media. Without question, culture management is critically important, and really difficult.
In my experience, school culture, or “the way we do things around here”, really comes down to a few key components. The first is the goal. This is how we want all of our stakeholders to describe things. The second is the reality. This is how they actually describe things. The third critical components are all of the things that are currently taking place that are helping moving reality closer to goal. The fourth are all of the things that are moving it the other way. Another way to think about this fourth component is pain points. Every organization has things that are occurring, many on a regular basis, that are moving it further away from goal with respect to culture.
One of mine can be easily summed up in one word, “traffic.” I know you are probably waiting for me to explain the deeper, metaphorical meaning of “traffic”, but I literally mean traffic, as in cars. My school serves over 920 families from across the city of St. Louis. And we get them all to and from school every day without a single school bus. All of our families bring their children to school every morning and picking them up every afternoon. More impressively, all of this happens within a 15 minute window every day. As testament to my mastery of understatement, things can get a little hectic from time to time. Simply put, for some, this is a pain point.
So in an effort to bring some joy to a sometimes joyless process, I started wearing a set of markerboards around my neck like a sandwich board. Every day I write a different message on them and stand out in the middle of the street and welcome our students and families. Sometimes the messages are funny, like the time I confessed to sending both my kids to school without brushing their teeth because their mom was out of town. Sometimes they are more uplifting, like when my message was, “It’s Your Day, Own It.” There is nothing quite like watching frustration lift from someone’s face and seeing it replaced with a smile after they read one of my signs. And in the interest of sharing that joy with as much of our community as possible, I also tweet a picture of myself wearing my sign every day @schrimpf_m.
I didn’t write this to encourage principals to all run out a make signs (that’s my thing anyway, get your own). I did write it to remind them that managing the culture of their schools is probably the most important thing that they do. There are as many school cultures as there are schools, but in all of them there is one certainty. There are things, small and large, that are taking place every day that are moving them closer and further away from where they want to be. But if school leaders can open their eyes to the things that are moving them in the wrong direction, they can begin choosing a few and working to find ways to make those same issues into something great that actually adds to rather than detracting from school culture.
I’m not naïve enough to think that my signs have fixed everything when it comes to our traffic. I still get honked at from time to time. But I know I get a lot more smiles and waves than honked horns these days. I know that people tell me that they love my signs and look forward to seeing what I am going to say next. And for me, that is a win.
Mike Schrimpf is the Assistant Head of School at Premier Charter School in St. Louis, Missouri. He works primarily on curriculum development. Follow him on Twitter at schrimpf_m.
