How Struggling Makes a Good Education Leader (by Jim Dillon)

Jim Dillon has been an educator for over 35 years, including 20 years as a school administrator. While he was the principal of Lynnwood Elementary in New York, he developed the Peaceful School Bus Program, designed to prevent and reduce bullying, and subsequently published The Peaceful School Bus (Hazelden, 2008). The program is now being implemented in schools across the country. He is the author of No Place for Bullying: Leadership for schools that care for every student (Corwin, 2013). Jim is currently an educational consultant for Measurement Incorporated. He makes presentations and conducts workshops on a variety of educational topics, including instruction, classroom management, leadership, and supervision. Jim has presented at many local, state and national conferences. Jim's blog, The Peaceful School Bus is a Teach 100 blog.

As author and writer Joan Chittister once said, “The great secret of life is how to survive struggle without succumbing to it, how to bear struggle without being defeated by it, how to come out of great struggle better than when we found ourselves in the midst of it.”

If there was one thing I learned after many years as a principal that I wish I knew earlier in my tenure, it was accepting the process of struggling with a problem rather than always expecting to solve it.

Our culture has a tacit dislike of problems, and most of us have inherited this cultural value, if even subconsciously. We all want problems to go away so we can do our jobs the way we have planned. But as I learned to listen to problems and reflect on what they were telling me and my school community, I saw them less as obstacles and more as opportunities to do greater things. As that realization hit me, I was able to stay calmer in the face of problems and more confident in the process of learning about them.

A lot of leaders feel like their primary job is to solve problems. Many feel as if this will establish their credibility as a leader. Abraham Lincoln said the true test of a person’s character is not how they handle adversity, but how they handle power. This is why effective leaders realize they don’t have all the answers and are confident about their ability to learn from problems by listening to and working with the people they serve.

Effective leaders share the struggle of learning about the problem. They are secure enough not to jump to a quick solution, and confident enough to begin solving a problem without needing to know the ultimate solution.

Leaders recognize that when people work together in addressing the problem, they learn as they go, provided they communicate openly and honestly with one another. Therefore, an effective leader creates a safe environment for people to communicate this way.

This process of struggling and learning is important for a school. It is important for every member of the school community to be involved in the process of solving problems.

Here are two scenarios to think about:

A school’s administration unilaterally adopts a program designed to solve a particular problem, but the staff members within a school have little or no say. Let’s say that the program “works” and the problem is solved. What message does this say to the people in the school—the teachers and other staff members, who had no say in the program, yet are most directly affected by it? It could be interpreted in multiple ways:

• “You created the problem.”

• “You are not capable of solving it.”

• “Your best role in solving the problem is following what the program says.”

This would be a “pyrrhic victory.” While the problem in the school may have been solved, does the school community feel empowered and ready to address other problems? To what would they attribute the program’s success? It is doubtful they would attribute it to themselves.

The next scenario is a school that has a problem and both the administration and the staff members decide to learn about it together. They take their time—some teachers do research about the problem and share their findings with the rest of school. What they learn about the problem leads them to decide (with a transparent decision-making process) to implement a program to solve the problem together. The administration starts to use the program, and after accepting feedback from the school community, makes adjustments according to the teachers’ input.

This second scenario is much more preferable because the school community would attribute success to their own efforts and would view the program as a tool they helped create, not as a solution they were told to follow. This second scenario is the more sustainable approach because the school community would have greater confidence in themselves, and would be more willing to learn from and solve problems in the future.

The end doesn’t always justify the means. Sometimes how we solve a problem is much more important than just solving the problem. All school leaders would do well to think about how their means for solving problems affect all the members of the school community.

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