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The APS Scandal: An Important Strategic Lesson for Every Business

By Michael Wilkinson, CMF
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies, Inc.

 

If you run a business, or manage a department, or lead a team or anything else where you are trying to achieve results, avoid shaking your head when reading about the Atlanta public school cheating scandal.  Avoid thinking, “What is going on over there?  What is wrong with those people?” For, wise leaders will look below the surface and recognize instead a valuable and important strategic lesson for anyone who leads.

As a master facilitator and outside consultant, I worked with Dr. Beverly Hall on a number of initiatives over her decade-plus as superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.  I was highly impressed with her intelligence, her commitment to excellence, her steadfast drive for transformation and achievement and, most importantly, her passion for the children.  If it wasn’t about helping young people succeed, she wasn’t interested.

Dr. Hall brought with her a strong message of accountability and reform to the school system, with rewards for those who performed and consequences for those who didn’t.   She was attempting to bring about wide institutional transformation.  And to her credit, the teachers, principals, and system staff got the message.   Dr. Hall was clearly on the right track.  Our business community recognized an education champion focused on results and therefore support for her efforts poured in.

So how could such an impressive leader with such a clear focus and strong convictions have her administration and her entire legacy be destroyed by the actions of so many? Herein lies the important lesson for us all.

Without a strong, values-based message to balance the performance-focused culture, the APS scandal shows us that some will take whatever steps necessary to achieve the performance targets.  As a result her administration became mired in accusations of principals altering the answers on students’ standardized tests, and members of her administration covering up and impeding investigations. Without a strong values-based culture, even those who are out to do good can be detoured by a lack of a common set of understood and embodied values.

What type of steps might have prevented this scandal?  Along with the performance message that Dr. Hall delivered, it would have been equally important to emphasize a set of values and guiding principles that, once accepted, were non-negotiable.  While the performance-focus would indicate what would be done, the guiding principles would have indicated how.  Guiding principles describe both the values of the organization and the behaviors that are expected in living those values.

While every organization’s guiding principles will be different, below are the six guiding principles we use inside my organization.  The acronym “POINTR” helps us remember them.

  • We take Personal responsibility.  If we have an issue, we take responsibility for getting it solved (as opposed to complaining to others or withdrawing); when we make mistakes we admit our responsibility.
  • We believe in Ownership thinking.  We spend the company’s money as if it is our own.  We are careful to spend our time only on activities that bring value to the company.
  • We seek continuous Improvement.  We strive not to make the same mistake twice.  When a mistake is made, not only do we correct it, we seek to understand why the mistake occurred and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.
  • We meet our clients’ Needs, not just satisfy their requirements.  We strive to understand our clients’ real needs to ensure that we provide solutions that work.
  • We maintain a positive, Team environment.  We are positive in our communications and we support each other with assistance, information and guidance, as opposed to being concerned only about self and bringing negative energy into the workplace.
  • We do the Right thing, even when no one is looking.  We strive to maintain a high level of integrity and consistency in our interactions with our clients and each other.  Dishonesty is not tolerated.

If you have a performance-based culture in your organization, be sure to learn this lesson from APS –

Without a strong, values-based message to balance the performance-focused culture, some will take whatever steps necessary to achieve the established targets. 

Don’t let what happened to APS happen to you.  And by the way, it may be already happening.

 

Michael Wilkinson is the Managing Director of Atlanta-based Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company (www.leadstrat.com/) and author of the newly released book, The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy.

 

Side Bar – How to create your Guiding Principles*

While there are a number of different approaches for developing guiding principles, the Drivers Model uses a scenario-based approach, as outlined in the steps that follow.

 

1 Educate on guiding principles. As with prior components, start the discussion of guiding principles by educating your team on what guiding principles are and the specific format used.
2 Identify the behaviors you want. After introducing the guiding principles concept, provide a scenario in which your team members visualize someone in the organization who exemplifies the organization’s values and culture. Have your team members identify the behaviors that make that person exemplary.
3 Identify the behaviors you don’t want. Once you’ve identified the behaviors that you want, the next step is to identify the behaviors you don’t want. Describe a scenario in which team members are orienting a new hire. Ask them to indicate what behaviors they would tell the new hire aren’t tolerated, aren’t liked, aren’t acceptable, and might even get the new hire fired.
4 Identify the values. With both key characteristics and intolerable behaviors listed, have your team group these into logical categories. These categories typically represent the values of the organization and serve as the starting point for your guiding principles.
5 Draft the guiding principles. To draft the guiding principles, you’ll take each of the value categories and create guiding principles, using the “We believe (value)… Therefore, we will… (behaviors)” format as a template. To conserve time, you might do the first guiding principle as an entire group and then use breakout groups to create the remainder of them.
6 Develop the transformation plan. The final step in the guiding principles process is to determine the strategies you and your team will use to transform the guiding principles from paper to action. Start by reviewing strategies that other organizations have used. Then, have your team brainstorm strategies that could be used, and then select the strategies that you’ll use.

*From The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy by Michael Wilkinson



Side Bar – Moving From Paper to Action*

It isn’t unusual to walk into a corporate office and see values and guiding principles mounted on a wall, in some cases in a picture frame or in others, etched in marble. The organization is displaying for all to see the principles it holds dear. However, having a set of clearly defined guiding principles is just the start. You win the race by making the guiding principles integral to the way the organization operates on a daily basis. So, how do you get the guiding principles off the wall and into the hearts of all workers, so that those principles are a part of what they do every day?

Below are sample strategies for you to consider for moving your guiding principles from paper to action.

 

Dissemination
  • Create an acronym that can make it easier for people to remember the values and guiding principles.
  • Have an engaging roll-out process that gets people working with the values and guiding principles.
  • Provide a copy of the values and guiding principles to every associate.
  • Post the values and guiding principles for easy reference.

 

Recruiting and on-boarding
  • Include a “values match” as a criterion for candidate evaluation.
  • Include a one-on-one review of the values and guiding principles with all new hires.
  • Have new hires write (a page or less) about what they’ll do, and not do, to embody the guiding principles.
  • Have managers and peers evaluate each new hire after thirty and ninety days to ensure a values match.

 

Reinforcement, reward, and recognition
  • Have the value of the day (or week or month) pop up on the organization’s intranet.
  • At staff meetings, have people identify times since the prior staff meeting when someone has embodied one of the values; provide an award for top performance.
  • Distribute customer feedback about a person who demonstrates one of the organization’s values.
  • Include a 360-degree review of each employee annually against the values; provide recognition and reward for highest scorers.

 

*From The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy by Michael Wilkinson

www.leadstrat.com/