Some universities have advancement teams of 300 people, and endowments large enough so that they could survive in perpetuity without having to even charge tuition. And yet their tuition is sixty-thousand to eighty-thousand dollars a year.
In elementary or in high school leadership, much of our energy, talent, and effort is and should be spent on keeping the lights on, on managing budgets, strategic 5-year plans, marketing and data analysis. Schools want boards made up of business experts, lawyers, human resource, and executive experts, who can give and raise capital, and set SMART goals. Well and good. But a school is a school, and should be run as a school, not a business.
The essential starting point for a smart and healthy school is people: first students, then teachers and staff, then the broader community. A school is a web of unique types of relationships. School culture is made up of two things: ideals and bonds. I firmly believe that if a school has a shared purpose/worldview, and healthy relationships within the community, it will grow institutionally, whether or not it has a development staff or endowment.
Schools are transactional in that parents are paying for a certain product. They are not transactional in the same way that company is, because in a school, the product is first and foremost these relationships. Intuitively, I feel most people know that relationships are the most important ingredient in the education of the students. More important than this or that style of math curriculum, more important than whether or not the science lab is well-endowed or not, more important than athletic accomplishments - parents want their children to be surrounded by people who foster a healthy sense of security and connection.
In a business world, organizational health and business smarts go hand-in-hand. If a business was only to have a good product and good marketing, or can be first-to-market like Uber was, then it can and will succeed as a business and stay successful for a long time. Eventually, without organizational health, shared ideals and bonds, even a brilliant business will dissolve or crash. Such a school would not last another year - unless, I suppose, it had massive amounts of money in an endowment. As long as a school has high ideals and bonded healthy relationships - meaning that it inspires and takes care of its people - then it has what it needs to succeed. A school may also need a 5-year strategic plan, a development team and smart executive management.
No matter how smart a business is, it cannot last longer than a Sears-Roebuck or a K-Mart if it is unhealthy. And yet, it can survive much longer than an unhealthy school. In a school, organizational health and business smarts do not go hand-in-hand. Organizational health IS the business: engaged and mission-driven teachers, high-morale students, loyal and enthusiastic parents, and leaders who are humble, zealous and relationship-oriented.
All of this is to say: while schools have to operate “smart” and effective with the help of professional school experts, to be a school-expert means to know how to help your school be a unified and healthy culture. Most school leaders know this, and make efforts to create a bonded school culture. The question then becomes how to do this in the most effective ways possible.
Smart & Healthy Schools combines the genius of Patrick Lencioni’s models - extremely effective in the world of business - with models we have been trained in at institutions like the University of Notre Dame, with nearly a century of combined experiences of our own seeing what works best in school institutions. We effectively help school leaders make their schools grow their “business” - creating healthy cultures for students, while being operationally secure and successful.
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