Core beliefs of extraordinary bosses

Had I realized Scott McLeod's Leadership Day event was coming up so soon, I'd have saved this posting instead of letting it rip back in June. Anyway, Scott, here's my entry. As you know, good management interests me a great deal more than good leadership. This post reflects that.

It's been so long since I've worked for a bad boss that I tend not to think a lot about what makes someone a good person for whom to work.  I do hear plenty of complaints from family members about their own supervisors, so bad bosses do exist somewhere.

My guess is that most of us have learned how to boss other people by experiencing being bossed ourselves - for good or for ill. (The term "boss" has such a perjorative slant - couldn't we use supervisor, manager, team leader???.)

Anyway this online article caught my eye: 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses by Geoffrey James, Inc. April 23, 2012. While James is writing about the business world, these beliefs seem especially applicable to school library and technology departments. James's words are in bold; mine aren't.

Extraordinary bosses believe:

1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield. Library and technology leaders understand this. Our departments support teachers, administrators, and students. Our own success can only be measured by how successful we make others. We need to be fighting for those we serve, not against other departments.
2. A company is a community, not a machine. Again our success is dependent on the relationships we build with others. Whether it is with our knowledgeable and skilled technicians or our teaching staff or administrators in other departments, our codependency makes us a community. And while we would like to operate sometimes with machine-like rules for everyone, education seems to be a place where effectiveness lies in making exceptions.
3. Management is service, not control. This is tough for many of us technology folks whose primary goals are security, adequacy, and reliablity. The more control we have over our applications, networks, and equipment, the better we seem to meet these goals. But we too often lose sight that security, adequacy, and reliability are simply a means to providing good service - and too much control can be counterproductive if the technology is not easy-to-use, convenient, and available.
4. My employees are my peers, not my children. There are two ways of looking at treating people like children. Of course, treating anyone "like a child" is demeaning - even to children. But as more and more of the people who work for me are of my own adult children's ages, I often think about how I would like my sons and daughters treated by their bosses. I hope they have supervisors who help them grow, support their learning, enable their advancement, encourage them to tackle ever bigger responsibilities, and to find ways to make a difference. How much does a good mentor really differ from a good parent?
5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear. For those of us in libraries and educational technology, this one is pretty easy. The vision has to be no more complex than remembering what we do is always centered on helping kids learn. Period. As much as I would like to put the fear of god into a couple of people around here now and then, I have no clue about how to be scary.
6. Change equals growth, not pain. Change has been constant and unavoidable in both libraries and technology for twenty years. If the new is painful to you and the members of your department instead of it being exciting, you are all a bunch of masochists and have stayed in the field too long. Go work at Wal-mart.
7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation. Good managers understand that making decisions makes a job interesting and fulfilling. All technologies ought to help people solve problems and make good decisions and then carry them out. (Librarians, this is why information literacy skills are the most important things that technology can help teach!) If a computer can do your job - it should.
8. Work should be fun, not mere toil. If the boss doesn't look forward to coming to work everyday (and I mean every day), how one expect others in the department to look forward to heading to the office? 

Core beliefs or attributes you appreciate in extraordinary bosses?

Related posts:

• What tech skills does a school CTO need?
• Changing role of the CTO
• The secret to successful supervision

Tony's brave tech prognostications

Minnesota teacher and tech guru Tony VonBank on his Cloudcation blog offers these very specific predictions about educational technology for the next three years. (My reactions are in bold.)

A growing backlash against Khan academy. Watch instead for teacher-created materials to be organized and become popular. (Easy to use tools like Jing, personal YouTube channels, and personal teaching styles are already resulting in teachers jumping over Kahn videos and simply making their own. Or using others videos as supplementary materials.)

Nexus 7 tablet to take market share as the first generation of 1:1 iPad models are replaced with lighter, cheaper and powerful small tablets. (I keep hoping for that $200 miracle machine. But I've been hoping for a looooong time.)

School conversations moving from PLC to PLN as more educators see the power of the global information commons. (I am not as confident about this one. The opportunity has been there for 10 years and I don't think 5% of our staff have a true PLN.)

Facebook for education, and Twitter for education accounts. (May be wishful thinking but it would be great.)

Edmodo will continue to replace Moodle as the preferred classroom connection site. (Especially at middle school and primary levels.)

Mobile interactive learning solutions will begin to replace expensive Interactive Smart Boards. (Absolutely. It'll be cheaper to get an iPad than a new IWB. What will we do about all those lessons in Notebook, though?)

eTextbooks will become cheaper and more widely used. (I doubt it since publishers have their fearful little heads way up their .... I have greater hope for teacher-created sources of classroom support materials, organized with Moodle or other tools.)

Several objective research studies will be published to cast doubt on the success of 1:1 initiatives in schools. (I believe these already exist. The debate will continue about how "success" is measured - test scores only?)

The number of educators connected with Twitter and other PLN’s will double. (See number 3.)

Congress will introduce at least three bills relating to increasing bandwidth in schools, particularly those in low socioeconomic districts. (Isn't this what e-rate is all about? Introduce maybe; pass, unlikely.)

I love brave lists like these - thanks, Tony. While some of his predictions may be more wishful thinking that analysis, I am good with them.

A few predictions of my own:

1. iPads and similar devices will bring teachers using technology with kids who were previously reluctant. See Probablity of Large Scale Adoption.
2. BYOD will pick up steam and bans on personal devices will evaporate in all but the most backward schools.
3. E-book adoption will focus on reference and non-fiction, not fiction. Overdrive is doomed; Mackin Via and FollettShelf are the models to watch.
4. Control/selection of educational applications will shift from the technology department to curriculum departments and individual teachers.
5. Schools will use Chrome-like OS systems but ones hat don't have the ongoing service costs of Chrome. 
6. GoogleApps for Education will just keep getting better and better - and more widely adopted. Knee-jerk fears over privacy and security will subside.
7. There will be a growing public backlash against standardized testing in public schools and a renewed empahsis on performance-based assessments and alternate means of defining successful schools.
8. Online reputation managment will start to focus on building the good instead of avoiding the bad - for both adults and kids.
9. For-profit entreprenuers will focus on combining testing data and technology to poop out "personalized" learning plans for every child. I don't expect them to be very good.
10. The gap in services, philosophy, and effectiveness between schools serving the poor, the middle class and the rich will continue to widen. 

So there is probably a little wishful thinking clouding my crystal ball too.

Readers, your brave predictions?

See also:

• Forecasting trends (Jan 2007)
• Your brave predictions! (Dec 2008)
• Two sets of predictions (Jan 2009)
• How is the future touching your life today? (Jan 2009)
• Three futures: Skinner Elementary, Duncan Middle School,  Dewey High School, and What's the point?
• Miles's Library 

BFTP: My biases

This list of bias appears in a permanent link at the top of my blog. But I seriously doubt anybody clicks on it. Biases are irrational, I suppose, but it's OK to have them so long as you own up to them. Your biases?

My Freely Admitted Personal Biases as of August 2012

(subject to change on short notice)

About education:

1. The solution to all the world's problems will rely on effective education.
2. Libraries and uncensored Internet access are vital to a democratic society.
3. A teacher's primary job is to instill a sense of importance in his subject. Skills will follow.
4. Schools should teach children to think, not to believe.
5. Creativity, empathy, and humor are as important to success as reading, writing and numeracy.
6. An effective school library program should be available to every child.
7. Money alone won’t improve education. Chastisement alone won’t improve education.
8. All citizens should pay for public education. Don't you want an educated person changing your drool bucket in the nursing home?
9. Also see "All 10 fingers, all 10 toes" on my educational wishes for my grandchildren.
10. All kids should be treated the way I want my own grandchildren to be treated.
11. There is no place in the future for teachers. Only co-learners.
12. Like it or not, what gets tested, gets taught.
13. On data driven decision-making: anything that you can get someone else to believe is true.
14. Anything fun in education is automatically suspicious.
15. The best way to show gratitude for a professional courtesy is to pay it forward. Show a person new to the field a kindness.
16. Forprofit education is an oxymoron.
17. Never eat anything you can't translate.

About politics and religion:

1. Both politics and religion should be viewed with profound skepticism.
2. Legislators should not require children to take tests that they themselves can’t pass.
3. Standardized test are more about discrediting public schools than improving education.
4. All political extremists of both the left and right should be put in a compound surrounded by razor wire and armed guards in western North Dakota – and kept there. Ann Coulter and Al Franken should have to share a room.
5. If life isn't fair, why should the afterlife be?
6. The best gifts given are to those who are actually in need.
7. Strength of opinion and depth of knowledge rise and fall in inverse proportion.

About technology:

1. Technology is neutral.
2. Best practices should drive educational change, not technology.
3. Short-term fixes rarely fix anything and usually aren’t short-term.
4. PowerPoint doesn’t bore people: people bore people.
5. Machines are the easy part; people are the hard part.
6. Macs are better than PCs. But both are detestable.
7. More and better are not synonymous.
8. My best decisions are made when I think of myself first as a child advocate, second as an educator, and lastly as a technologist.
9. The motto of most technology departments should be: Solving problems with technology that you didn't have before there was technology.

About race and culture:

1. Swedes are superior to Norwegians in every way. But mixed marriages can work. I’m a Swede, my wife (aka the LWW - Luckiest Woman in the World) is Norwegian.
2. Everyone has a funny accent except Minnesotans.
3. George Carlin and Bill Maher and Jon Stewart are almost always right.
4. Unrecognizable food served in small portions artfully arranged on over-sized plates served by an obsequious waiter is not fine dining.
5. No male over age 10 should wear bangs.

On human nature:

1. Although I may not say it out loud, my grandsons are better than any other children on the face of the planet.
2. I really want most urban legends to be true.
3. Most of us would prefer shallow wit to deep intelligence in our writers and speakers. Thank goodness.
4. Sport stadiums should be paid for by the people who use them; community centers, parks, bike trails, libraries, and swimming pools should be paid for by everyone.
5. Smoking and overeating should be considered poor health choices, not moral failings.
6. Most of us should be a lot more thankful than we are.
7. Most of us should worry a lot less than we do.
8. Change is inevitable - except in human nature.
9. Say something nice about your spouse to your spouse everyday.
10. If you wait for the perfect conditions, you’ll spend your life waiting.
11. It's easier to find something than to find it again.
12. Rules and reasoning only work with the rational.
13. Unless you are the bride, never be the thing people remember most about a wedding.
14. Only English majors and film critics like tragic endings.
15. Nice people ought to get better service.
16. Charitable giving is the best investment you can make. Spoiling your children and grandchildren a little is the second best.
17. The happiest people in the nursing home are the ones with the best stories, not the ones with the most money.
18. If you can't find someone on whom to pass your stress, you're stuck with it.

Lessons learned from bicycling

Johnson's Little List of Library and Technology Laws