Hey all!
A friend of mine once shared a thought-provoking comment with me that has a profound effect on my leadership journey. She mentioned it so casually that if I wasn’t really listening I could have totally missed it.
“There is no professional development like working for a great organization.”
Think about that for a second and you can’t help but admit it is totally true! Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot as an undergrad and as a masters student…and of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how outstanding my experience was at REEP. However, your professors don’t give you frequent feedback, constant coaching or high levels of support to actually implement what you learn…and that’s what great organizations do for their people.
Because of that reality, great organizations are learning organizations.  Everyone is constantly learning and growing from one another. Every day in our school, the students are receiving instruction from their teachers, teachers are supporting one another and receiving coaching from the admin team, I am working to provide feedback and growth opportunites to the admin team members and of course we encourage everyone to look outside of the building for growth opportunities as well.
And as the leader of the school, I have to model this learning and growth as well…because that is what great organizations do. Two weeks ago, I took the admin team to New York City to visit some high performing schools there in the hopes of learning from them and bringing it back to Milwaukee. Last week, we took our entire team to a high performing local school. Last fall I brought our team to observe at some great schools in Chicago and before that I had our admin team down to Houston.
As a serving leader in your organization you have a huge responsibility to develop and support every person in the building…and that includes yourself. There is no professional development like working for a great organization. If you hope to lead a great organization, you need to commit to modeling and leading a learning organization.
Zach,
How true! I met with two education leaders at lunch and the conversation of learning organizations just came up. Giving and receiving feedback in a safe environment is so important to improving performance. You can practice giving feedback and you will get better at it. I worked in one organization where feedback and an obligation to voice disagreement (if you had real concerns) was the expectation. Performance there was high. Many people go through the motions when it comes to performance feedback. Or, don’t share what they really think in an effort to “get along”. I hope that you had a great trip to NYC with your team and learned a lot in the process.