It happens every year, most recently last month. I got a call from an unusually persistent headhunter urging me to apply to become dean of a fairly prominent school of education, this time in a city I know well. It would be a nice gig with big goals, big bucks, and unusual power over budget and personnel.
On paper, I would make a great dean. I am on speaking terms with multiple sides of the education wars, and write the sort of essays policy-makers like about how schools of education must reform to stay relevant, meeting the changing needs of society, and ... insert your own catchphrase here.
While it is nice to be asked, as Dirty Harry put it, "a man's got to know his limitations." I'm no dean. I'm the guy who second-guesses deans.
And after years of second-guessing presidents, deans, school superintendents, and leaders of all types, I know that leadership generally and leading educational institutions in particular requires a special kind of cat herder.
If I were dean, I might promote yes-men and yes-women while firing more capable and candid subordinates. Each person I fired would bring me that much closer to a heart attack: a good leader puts the mission ahead of employees, and I am not sure I can. When criticism comes, and it always does, I might take it personally, freezing out rather than hearing out critics and the press. Even the best leaders face attacks since every decision makes temporary friends and permanent enemies. That's doubly true in educational institutions since educators do not like being led and since schools and colleges manage a community's most precious assets, its children and its sports teams.
My friend Paul Hewitt, who was an award-winning school superintendent back in the 1990s, found some days so stressful he would carve out time to watch the kindergartners' plays, just to remember why he got into education in the first place.
As a leader, I would start all kinds of reforms, but lack the persistence to implement them. Leaders face hundreds of e-mails and dozens of decisions daily, but I lack the capacity to keep more than six things in my brain at once, and at any given time three of those are family related. Anyone who has seen my office, with piles of paper and stacks of half-done projects, knows that I am no dean.
That's actually the point. You can't tell if someone can lead from their resume, or even from a few job interviews. You have to know whether the person has an executive temperament on a day to day basis. You also have to see who they hire. Good leaders -- Springdale Superintendent Jim Rollins comes to mind -- attract top talent. If God forbid, Jim gets hit by a truck tomorrow, Springdale Public Schools will be in good hands.
I thought about all this as my local school district in Fayetteville sets about to hire a new superintendent. Our very capable school board is slow to hire a headhunter, and rightly so. Only the best headhunters know the people behind the resumes and the organizations behind the people. To know if someone is trustworthy, puts the kids ahead of themselves, pulls together rather than falls apart under pressure, and exhibits all the other characteristics required, you need a feel for his or her current organization.
The best headhunters have that. They also are good recruiters. The best leaders are probably not on the market since they like their current posts. As Paul puts it, "the person you should hire may not even know they want to apply. Sometimes you may have to call them and convince them" to accept a new challenge. That's work for a headhunter, but also for school board members, and all of us who know great educational leaders.
Once those leaders are identified, ideally, the hiring process should proceed quickly and perhaps quietly, respecting the delicate positions of those leading other school districts while applying to lead here.
There's the rub. In a college town like Fayetteville, we want an open hiring process. Yet a too-open process might scare off the best applicants, people who are not on the market but, with the right pitch, could be had.
These trade offs have no easy solutions, so we second-guessers need to remember that leading, and picking leaders, is harder than it looks.
Commentary on 02/23/2014