Tag Archives: Daniel Coyle

A conversation about culture

I had a great conversation last night with colleagues, Principals and Vice Principals, at our Professional Development Dinner. We broke into table groups based on the books we had read, or in my case listened to. Culture Code is a great book, and one that I listened to while on my treadmill this summer. I really enjoy audio books but this is one that I wish I had a hard copy of. It is filled with gems of ideas, but I didn’t bookmark them and it is too hard to go back in an audio book to find specific sections unless they were bookmarked.

Luckily for me, the book was just a launching point to a great conversation. I tried to summarize some key ideas at the end of the talk and this was what I came up with. I’ll start with a quote Bryan shared with us, (I’m not sure of the source):

“You have to belong to a place before you can transform it.”

We talked about the challenge of coming into a place as a new leader and how people need to feel safe before they are willing to trust and work with you. Until you build a relationship it is challenging to meaningfully lead and offer up your strengths. We also discussed 5 other ideas that we thought were really important:
  1. Agency – We all want to have agency and feel empowered. If we don’t help to give others agency, they won’t feel valued.
  2. Listen! Be present – Give people your full attention. This is especially important when someone comes to you with something that is urgent to them, even if you don’t think it is urgent.
  3. Listen! Rather than solve – Don’t try to fix or share a similar example. Coming from a teacher background, we all want to help fix the situation, we all have experiences that are relatable, but we should start by truly listening and recognizing that it is better to be heard than to be related to. 
  4. Show vulnerability (as a colleague and a leader). Be willing to say ’sorry’ and to let your staff know that you don’t know everything. 
  5. Willingness to go to the hard places. It’s not enough to gloss over things and hope they go away, or to make decisions because they are popular. 
 
Final thoughts:
Culture doesn’t develop on its own, and if it does, it’s probably not the culture you want. Building a good culture can be a slow process and yet destroying a good culture can happen very quickly. We had a great conversation at our table and I am glad that I work with an amazing group of leaders who have made these kinds of conversations part of our learning culture.