Juggling the Job

I watched a short video by Ben McCollum, University of Iowa basketball coach, this week and it really resonated with me. In it, he shares what it feels like to be around first-place people and a first-place culture.

“I went to Northwest Missouri State, and my first practice with Steve Tappmeyer—best coach I've ever been around—I sat there and I'm like, ‘This is what first place feels like. This is what a first-place culture feels like. This is what first-place people feel like.’”

That was his wake-up call. He began to recognize some characteristics that separated those people from everyone else. They had an extreme work ethic. They had an edge—a competitive spirit. And they brought energy.

McCollum also quotes legendary Georgetown coach John Thompson: “You can tame a fool a lot quicker than you can resurrect a corpse.” The point wasn't that you want foolish people on your team. It was that you want people with some fire in them. People who want to compete. People who care enough to push themselves and the people around them.

Then McCollum adds one more characteristic that I think goes well in schools: energy givers.

He explained that, over time, they discovered that chronically moody players simply didn't make it in their program. If you continually brought low energy and sucked the life out of the building, you weren't going to fit. He wanted to be around energy givers!

There is a school leadership lesson in all of that.

What does first place feel like in your school?

I'm not talking about being ranked first in the state, having the highest test scores, or hanging another banner in the gym. In fact, a school could accomplish some of those things and still not have what I would call a first-place culture.

I am lucky enough to visit many schools all across the country, and you can feel a first-place culture almost immediately. I'm talking about walking into a school and feeling that the people there are pursuing excellence together.

Generally speaking, there is an energy to the place. People work hard. They care about getting better. Teachers talk about instruction. Teams challenge one another. People celebrate success without becoming satisfied by it. They don't wait for the principal to tell them everything that needs to be done because the standard has become something they own.

First-place people raise the standard through what they do.

However, if that kind of culture is going to exist in a school, it usually does start with the principal.

Culture Is More Than Getting Along

In my book, Juggling the Job, I wrote about the difference between having a good culture and having a learning culture. When I ask educators about their culture, I often hear some version of the same things: We're a family. We love kids. We get along.

I hope so, but those things should be the starting point of a great school culture, not the finish line.

A first-place culture asks more of us. Everyone—students, teachers, and leaders—are expected to work on their practice. Improvement becomes part of the culture rather than something we talk about during professional development days.

To me, that sounds a lot like McCollum's description of first-place people. They aren't satisfied simply because things are going well, instead they have an edge to them. However for a principal, creating that edge doesn't mean walking around demanding that everybody “work harder.” It means creating clarity around what matters, modeling the work yourself, and building systems that make improvement possible.

One of the things that I believe made my time as a middle school principal successful involved our PLCs. We redesigned our master schedule so that our core teachers had common collaboration time during the school day. It wasn't easy. It required tradeoffs throughout the building. But if we were going to say collaboration mattered, I believed our schedule needed to demonstrate that it mattered. But that wasn’t the end of the story. I couldn't simply hand teachers the time and walk away.

Instead, I dedicated time each week to join, and sometimes facilitate, those PLCs. We shared lessons, visited classrooms, looked at data, and talked about teaching collaboratively. Over time, teachers weren't merely attending PLCs because the schedule told them to. They were using that time to improve their craft and help one another improve. That's an important distinction.

A First-place culture isn't created by what the principal says is important. It is created by what the principal repeatedly makes important.

The same is true of classroom instruction. If principals say teaching and learning are their highest priorities but rarely enter classrooms, people notice. That's why I have encouraged principals to protect instructional-walk time on their calendars. When I was a principal, I tried to reserve an hour each day for instructional leadership. The practice wasn't just about increasing the number of classrooms I visited. Protecting that time communicated something else, that this work matters here.

First-place cultures have standards. But standards become culture only when leaders consistently model, reinforce, support, and protect them.

High Standards and Servant Leadership Belong Together

There is another side to the development of a first-place culture that I think is especially important for principals. A first-place culture cannot simply become a culture of pressure.

If all people hear from the leader is more, better, faster, eventually the competitive edge McCollum describes can turn into exhaustion. The principal's responsibility isn't just to raise expectations. It is to help people become capable of meeting them.

That's where servant leadership enters the picture. Sometimes servant leadership gets confused with being nice, keeping everyone happy, or making people's jobs easier. I see it differently. Serving people means helping them become better.

One way to do this is to look for the internal experts already in your building. Every day, talented people walk through your doors carrying skills, experiences, and knowledge that can make the entire school better. The principal doesn't need to be the person standing in front of every meeting or leading every professional learning experience.

When we became more willing to step aside and let others share their expertise, something happens: leadership capacity grows. People aren’t merely receiving the culture from the principal anymore. They are helping create it.

First-place people don't need all the credit. They make the people around them better, and first-place principals understand that their job isn't to be the hardest-working person in the building while everyone watches. Their job is to create a building full of people who believe their contribution matters.

The Principal Sets the Temperature

Schools can be exhausting places. There are difficult students, frustrated parents, initiatives that don't work, lessons that flop, test results that disappoint us, staffing challenges, and about a thousand other things that can drain the energy out of a building.

The principal doesn't have to pretend those things aren't real. But the principal does have an enormous influence on what happens next.

• Do we complain or problem-solve?

• Do we blame or learn?

• Do we protect our own territory or help someone else?

• Do we accept good enough, or do we ask what getting a little better might look like?

• And perhaps most importantly, what does it feel like to be around us?

First-place cultures are built by first-place behaviors repeated over time. Work ethic. Energy. An edge. Service. Learning. High expectations. The willingness to receive feedback and the courage to give it. The humility to recognize someone else's expertise. The discipline to keep improving even when what we're doing is already pretty good.

So maybe the question isn't, “Are we a first-place school?”

Maybe the better question is:

When someone walks into our building and spends time around our people, do they feel a first-place culture?