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Leadership with Patience

One of the first and hardest lessons for me to learn as a leader was patience. And it’s still a hard lesson for me 16 years into being a formal leader. When I see something to improve, usually through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, I want to fix it. And if it’s just a logistics issue, that’s usually not a problem. But when it’s a people issue, that takes time. 

My first year in administration, I was analyzing courses students were placed in. There was a new course that the teachers had spent well over a year creating to be a slower paced Algebra 1 course for students who came in under a certain math threshold. It wasn’t designed to be different in its approach, just half as fast.

As I looked at the incoming students, we had a full section of kids placed in the class, but only 4 didn’t exceed the threshold the teachers had created. It made no sense to me to run the class, but rather we should place kids where they belonged. I was excited to not have to run a remedial class and be able to support all kids higher. So I called a meeting with the department chair and just declared we weren’t going to run the class.

That approach quickly appeared to be the exact wrong thing to do. To the math department, this course had been years in the creating from inception to approval to curriculum making. My simple declaration that we were not going to run the class they had spent so long creating was an immediate non-starter. I wasn’t wrong in my goal for kids, I was wrong in my approach with the professionals.

Empathy would have taught me to tread lighter, ask questions, look for modifications to make, try and get them to realize we didn’t need to run it this year. Hubris got me no where. 

Thankfully for the students, we had a phenomenal new teacher that the veteran staff thought they were sticking it to by giving them the “low kids.” In truth, because she taught them differently, not just slowly, the students thrived, we created a summer course of the second year, and the vast majority out achieved their “higher” peers in math from then on.

That staff experience led to more realizations to discuss in future posts!


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