100 Posts in 100 Days
Yesterday, I shared our school’s propensity to use John Dewey’s quote about learning comes not from the experience, but from reflecting on experience.
We have a second idea that we discuss often in our school which was shared with us by Dr. Kevin Mattingly, a Professor of Practice at the Klingenstein Center at Columbia Teacher’s College:
Feedback only matters when it is used.
Dr. Kevin Mattingly
That has me thinking about the most accurate, authentic, and usable feedback I’ve ever received. And because it was so impactful on my development as a leader, by definition, it is another seminal learning experience: a 360 Leadership Survey. (I wrote about other seminal learning experiences, see Posts 5, 6, 7, 9, and 22 & 23)
I’ve taken 360 leadership surveys twice. In this process, I sent a survey about my leadership abilities to a number of people and tagged them in relation to how I worked with them: direct reports, peers, managers, and myself. Each person was provided an electronic link to an anonymous survey. The survey company gathered and organized the results by groups and provided a number of different reports. The resulting reports provides insight into my leadership patterns and strengths and a window into how different groups I worked with viewed me. One way to look at the reports was to see how my self-assessment compared with their perceptions and how the perceptions of the various groups compared with each other.
The first time I did a survey like this, several leaders in my school setting were engaging in the process. We used the The Extraordinary Leader by Zenger Folkman. We conducted the survey process and when our results were available, we attended a 1 day training. The morning session focused on learning the leadership framework, understanding how to read and interpret the report, and a step-by-step guide about how to create a leadership action plan. All of the instruction was without seeing our own results.
Then came the afternoon session. Each participant was delivered a spiral bound, individual report, shrink wrapped in plastic. I remember simply not wanting to unwrap my results, setting it on the table in front of me and just staring at it. Writing these words, I can picture the room I was sitting in with great detail: the rectangular shape of the room, the green chairs, the tables set up in a chevron pattern, the dark walls on the sides of the room, the SMARTboard at the front of the room, and the floor-to-ceiling windows at the back of the room.
In that afternoon, we were given a couple of hours to privately read our results and develop an action plan. The session trainers (there were 2 of them) were available to help us with questions, developing our leadership plans, and, quite frankly, to provide emotional support if we needed it.
It turns out I hadn’t needed to be so worried about my results. The groups I had sent it to had very similar feedback and ratings for me. And they weren’t so different from how I rated myself. That was a good thing because my plan didn’t need to include reconciling differences. It just needed to capitalize on building on my strengths. That is one of the things I appreciated about The Extraordinary Leader. It wasn’t about “fixing” something that was wrong, but it was an asset based approach to further develop my skills. My clear strengths were developing others and credibility and it was from those traits and skills that I developed an action plan.
That action plan lived on the bulletin board right next to the computer on my desk in my office for a couple of years. In fact, it was still there when I was enrolled in a university program and it was a course requirement to take another 360 survey. This time the tool was the Leadership Practices Inventory by Kouzes and Posner.
In this case, I was asked to administer the survey and interpret the results without the benefit of the workshop sessions. Having been through it before, though, I brought some of the strategies and skills I had learned there to this process. I was interested to see what my results would be since my role and the individuals I worked with daily had changed since the previous time. When my results came, this time electronically, I was less worried (but still not completely confident) about clicking the link and viewing my reports.
What surprised me the most was the consistency of my results across tools and across different groups of people. This time, I scored high in “Model the Way”, “Enable Others to Act”, and “Encourage the Heart”. One interpretation I had of my results was that the asset-based plan I had made in the first 360 survey was working for me. I had used that feedback to develop a plan and about 24 months later, I felt like I was seeing results in my data. Feedback that is used.
It’s important to note that in both of these cases, the feedback reports were for me. I had been supported by my employer and by my university to use these tools, but I was not obligated to share the results. They were not used for supervision, for evaluation, or for a grade. They did help me create specific leadership development action plans and it was up to me if I wanted to share them with colleagues or professors. Obviously, by posting in my office, I was willing to be public with my goals.
In looking up information and links for this post, I noted that The Extraordinary Leader has a free, 8 minute self-assessment to help introduce potential users to the tool. I took it. It’s been a long time since the previous two and my context and colleagues are completely different than before. I’m not loving my results on my own self-assessment. I’m also feeling like in the absence of having my direct reports, my peers, and my managers take the survey, I’m not confident in the quality or accuracy of my self-assessment. We have less than a week of school remaining in this year and it seems that everyone, including myself, is ready for a break. But, I am giving serious thought to making the investment and doing one of these surveys a few weeks into next school year. So that I can have valuable feedback that I can use to develop a leadership plan for my current role and school.