A Hippocratic Oath for Leaders

Karin Chenoweth writes about education. In her her new book “Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty and Achievement,” she describes the practices and policies of rapidly improving schools and school districts across America. Her work was recently profiled by Jay Matthews in The Washington Post.

In Miami, one school was full of “classrooms [with] buzzing hives of reading, writing and academic conversation.” Chenoweth asks the school’s teachers how long it would take for a bad principal or administrator to undo their good work. As she tells it, she expected them to say they wouldn’t let that happen.

Instead, they told her a lousy principal could screw things up in less time than it takes to deliver a pizza — 20 minutes was the consensus.

This sounds about right to me.

As a school leader, I like to think that one of my most important responsibilities is “First, do no harm.” In other words, I should not make the lives of our teachers and children worse. “First, do no harm” or Primum non nocere is associated with medicine’s Hippocratic oath, a 2,500 year old Greek prayer, but likely has origins in the 19th century. Regardless of where it comes from, it rings true for classrooms and schools.

Why are poor Principals and — generally — bad management such threats to schools and organizations? I’d like to suggest three reasons and then one simple solution.

1. Culture: Many people become teachers because they like school. Frequently, when you like school, you also like rules. As a result, when an Administrator sets a policy or a rule, many teachers try to follow it precisely. This can be good, if the rule is good. However, it creates a culture of compliance and — when rules are not carefully implemented — has unintended consequences. The long tail of management impacts schools and businesses, for sure.
2. No North Star: Many administrators do agree on the “North Star” to measure their school district or organization’s progress: Enrollment? Academic achievement? Graduation rates? Community partnerships? Because there is not a clear goal, it becomes challenging to compare schools effectively.
3. No Bright Spots: When it is challenging to compare schools, it is impossible to identify bright spots. This is a key distinction. I do not believe the primary value of academic assessments is to identify failing schools. Instead, these assessments can be used to identify thriving schools and to replicate their practices.

This brings me to a modest proposal for Principals and managers, more generally.

Start by leveraging your bright spots.

Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to receive training from a program, The Leverage Leadership Institute, focused on helping leaders to scale results.

Here is the number one thing I learned.

Scale results by studying what works.

Video your best teachers and principals. Interview them. Collect artifacts from their classrooms. Use these tools to train everyone else.

It only takes minutes to undo years of great work, but it doesn’t take much longer to codify great work and share it. Studying what works does zero harm and might do a whole lot of good.