One of my LinkedIn connections liked a post recently. The post can be summarized as “community colleges don’t have a strategy problem; they have an execution problem.” The author details how many of the goals that have been integrated into community college plans in the last decade or so have not resulted in the expected outcomes.
The post was directed at community colleges, and I have seen this reality firsthand in the 14 years I have worked in them (as a full-time staff member, part-time staff member, and adjunct faculty), I saw it firsthand in the 30 years I worked I K-12 education as well.
Regardless of the nature of the school, strategic goals are defined by committees, often in response to regularly scheduled strategic planning initiatives or perhaps as part of an accreditation visit. A report is presented that contains the goals that will focus the organization’s efforts. Senior leaders divide them up and they go to work with managers and members of their departments to execute them; or (according to the post that motivated this one and my experience over decades in education) not… usually not.
Most the strategic goals are sound. Well, given the data (which is always biased, always cherry picked, and analyzed with dubious methods), they are sound. The people who actually do the work, are generally focused and productive, and are making efforts to improve what they were charged to improve. We still have a failure to execute. Why?
Here is my list of reasons:
- Goodhart’s law—This is commonly summarized “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This idea has been around for decades, I wonder why leaders have yet to realize it.
- Strategic goal fatigue—I once worked at a school where the “on-going initiatives” slide shared by the superintendent at the start of the school year had eight items on it. These were presented after he spent the previous 10 minutes describing the two new initiatives for the year. Not only it is impossible to have so many initiatives guide our work (no educator or leader has enough time to address them all), but that many initiatives ensures some will contradict each other.
- Leader turn-over—When new senior level leaders come on board work on initiatives slows, as those of us who are working on them wait to see if it will continue, or how it will change. We have all been in the situation when a new VP or assistant superintendent concludes you are not working in their initiative because you are not using their preferred tool. We end up reinventing our methods of doing the same thing to meet the new leader’s preferences. Time meeting a leader’s preference is not spent achieving the goal.
- Leader turn-over again—When new leaders arrive, they assume any initiative they are assigned needs a fresh start. In many cases, they ignore the work currently underway. Rather than asking about the current status of any work, they start anew and assume nothing is currently underway. This both results in loads of content being discarded, and it confuses those who are using it, because it is relegated to a never used part of the web (or wherever it is saved) and the “new” version takes attention.
- Chaos—In my experience, some leaders tend to be magnets of scandal. They are incompetent, they say things they should not, they do things they should not, they are caught in lies, the lists goes on and on. When the leaders are caught in scandal (my opinion, most caused by their own decisions and their arrogance), the organization become chaotic. We do not have time to work on initiatives as we are distracted by the latest gossip, and we try to analyze how it will affect our livelihood.
- Failure to leader by example—Policies are adopted and practices are deployed to define the rules we will follow at work. Many of these are defined with the strategic goal in mind; “when we all do these things, we get closer to our goal,” it is reasoned. When leaders do not follow their organization’s rules, others must assume they are not obligated to follow them either.
- Ignoring data—Everyone who makes decisions are “data-driven” but they are terribly sloppy with data. We assume any changes in “data” are the result of our interventions, when they are just noise. If you have two years of decreased enrollment, during which you deploy strategies to improve enrollment, you assume the increase in year three is the result of the interventions, when they change was just the result of regression to the mean.
Looking back on my list, it seems I am blaming the lack of execution on leaders. That is probably because I do blame them. They control the initiatives to which we give our attention; they must manage the initiatives and push back when they are contrary to existing initiatives and push back when they exceed what they can attend to. They need to recognize the existing work in any potential initiative. One sure way to alienate a group you lead is to ignore they work they have been doing. They need to learn how to avoid chaos. They need to do what they are asking other to do. They need to really understand data. Until these things happen, the gap between our strategic goals and our results will remain.