Imagine a scenario where your central office staff perform their regular jobs, but with the help of executive coaches who provide real-time tools to improve their performance. This is the professional development model being pioneered by the Boston Public Schools and The District Management Council. Instead of sitting in a classroom receiving a typical leadership development program that motivates, but falls short when a participant is back on the job, Boston managers are being asked to bring real performance challenges into the classroom.
For example, a food service manager participating in the program might say "My goal is to reduce our department's deficit over the next 12 weeks by increasing breakfast participation from 40% to 80% in five schools in the district." During the program he will strive toward this goal using a clearly defined and replicable process along with support from a peer group and an executive coach.
This type of professional development is now going on in the Boston Public Schools where senior managers went back to school at the same time as the students. The senior managers sit in an actual school building, partially set aside for professional development, as they participate in a brand new initiative called the Boston Public Schools Management Institute. The Management Institute, now being replicated in Springfield, Mass. and soon to follow in other districts, is borrowing a successful example from the private sector and other non-profit settings and bringing it into the district setting to tackle challenges in transportation, food service, school safety, human resources, business services, budgeting and other operational areas.
Let's go back to the food service manager. At the Management Institute, he works with a coach and a group of peers to plan and execute his "performance challenge", in this case a reduction in his budget deficit. The challenge should be designed to improve performance in a real-life, high priority aspect of the manager's job. It should be an aggressive target, yet one that is achievable over the course of the program, 12 weeks, in this case. The challenge must be specific, measurable, and results -oriented so that it will be clear when success has been achieved. Accountability is a critical component of the program. Participants "go public" with their challenge, formally committing to achieving results to their peer group and to the team that must be involved in achieving the goal. The idea is that the process of going public will commit managers to their goal, help to enroll the support of others, and create some peer pressure that helps motivate them towards achieving the challenge.
This notion of a "performance challenge" - a focus on driving results in a real live work situation - is the component of the Boston Public Schools Management Institute that differentiates it from more traditional leadership development programs. In typical leadership development programs, professionals tend to feel energized by ideas and concepts during their coursework, only to find themselves stymied by the same old obstacles when they go back to the workplace. School districts face substantial performance challenges as they try to meet demands for improved academic achievement against an increasingly difficult set of budgetary and political pressures, and the Management Institute is designed to directly address these challenges. School districts are complex organizations with as much as 40 percent of the budget going to non-instructional items. Imagine if all these district departments ran more smoothly and efficiently? Principals would receive better customer service, freeing up their precious time to focus on instructional issues. An increase in operational efficiency would also free up additional funds for diversion into classrooms. The ultimate goal of these operational improvements is an increase in student achievement.
As a result of the current economic crisis, there is even greater pressure to show results with even fewer resources. Managing through the crisis and meeting these performance challenges will require leaders at all levels to conceive of and implement substantial change in the face of major obstacles. During such challenging times when there is real urgency for performance and dwindling resources, it may seem like the wrong time to invest in leadership development on the hope that something of a transformative nature actually will happen. However, the DMC firmly believes that one of the few remaining opportunities to increase operational effectiveness is leadership. We believe that the potential leadership capacity of most organizations is seriously under-tapped. Unfortunately, many classical leadership development programs can ultimately disappoint when it comes to cultivating the kind of leadership that delivers results back on the job.
The Boston Public Schools Management Institute is based on an approach championed by the District Management Council and road-tested by management experts Doug Smith and Charles Baum (DMC Senior Director). They have used this approach across more than 50 industries over three decades, codifying the lessons in several books as well through leadership programs that span a wide variety of sectors. Their programs have achieved positive impacts in affordable housing, journalism, social and economic development, and a variety of business sectors. The success rate measured by results and new skills learned and used typically exceeds 80% and the value of the impacts compared to costs of the programs easily exceed 25:1.
The core concept is that the most powerful way to develop leaders is not to teach leadership and hope for the best, but rather to ask people to lead and achieve real performance results in their organizations over a designated time period. It is a pragmatic, common-sense approach to leadership development grounded in a direct tie to performance results. Central to success is carefully selecting and defining each participant's performance challenge. The performance challenge must be realistic and compelling, but not "easy." It must be carefully defined to be achievable, and it has to matter. It also must be a source of inspiration and commitment, and should stretch managers out of their comfort zone.
In September, 2009, the DMC kicked off the BPS Management Institute with 75 managers to help achieve these kinds of goals. The participants span the array of operational and financial management positions shared by school systems of any size: they are director and managers from human resources, school safety, food service, transportation, the budget office, information technology, and others. The goals of the program are to:
Embed core leadership skills throughout the BPS leadership team and across all departments
Strengthen managerial skills
Develop leadership opportunities
Increase efficiency, effectiveness and engagement
Ensure and improve accountability
Achieve immediate performance driven results.
The Management Institute has four critical components:
1) Formal professional development. About 20 hours of professional development in a traditional classroom setting provides a focused set of frameworks, tools, and language that managers can apply to their daily work and performance challenges. In Boston, topics include communications skills, having difficult conversations, giving feedback, managing meetings effectively, work planning, goal setting, management styles, 80/20 thinking, and teams.
2) Real life challenges. Participants work on a real work priority. They set a goal and try to get results toward that goal as a core activity of the leadership development program. This typically involves cycle times, cost, revenue and quality. The goal must be aggressive, urgent and compelling, achievable with existing people, and resources and, measurable. Participants must get really specific and funnel from a high level objective to a specific, measurable, aggressive yet achievable, relevant and time bound goal.
3) Peer group meetings. About 20 hours of peer group time is facilitated by an executive coach. The groups are comprised of 7 to 10 people, allowing participants to meet one another, leverage their experience across the organization, get feedback, and also to create accountability for performance. The group will help with all steps of the process: defining the performance challenge, creating a work plan to drive results, enrolling the necessary team, identifying early process and outcome wins, measuring and monitoring progress, and ultimately seeing results and planning the next performance challenge.
4) One-on-one coaching. Four to six hours of one-on-one time with the executive coach will help the participant get individualized feedback, discuss personal goals and difficulties, and continue to build momentum outside of the peer group sessions. The coach will push the participant to use the process, and will often ask questions such as, "Why does it matter?", "Who does this matter to?" and "How would you know if you were successful?"
The success of the Management Institute lies in the selection of an appropriate performance challenge. The challenge must be urgent and compelling and central to the organization's agenda, but it also needs to be measureable and bottom-line oriented and therefore related to cost, revenue, cycle time or quality. It must be achievable during the span of the Institute, which can range from 12 weeks to more than 12 months, depending on the department and the level of the participant in the organization. People must be willing to try it within the framework of existing resources, but is also must be a stretch, slightly outside the comfort zone of what is usually done.
Some examples from other industries demonstrate the difference between non-specific activities-related goals and specific outcome-related challenges that are clearly measurable. Consider the difference between these two goals borrowed from an affordable housing leadership development program:
"Re-engineer our processes to be more efficient and effective"
"Within 15 months, cut in half the time to build a house and increase the percentage of people we offer housing solutions to by 15 percent."
It is easy to see how the first goal is too vague, and would be difficult to tackle. How will the organization know when they achieved it? How will it be measured? The second goal may not be easy to achieve, but it is easier to "attack", easier to define and explain to others, and it will be clear whether or not this goal has been achieved. In the pursuit of a performance challenge, it is important to be able to know if you have been successful or not.
Here are some sample performance challenges for school district managers:
Food and Nutrition Services: Reduce food cost at the 10 most expensive schools by 15%
School Safety: Reduce incidents 30 percent at lunchtime at six high schools
Human Resources: Reduce the number of daily calls on teacher certification by 15% by increasing self service options
Transportation: Decrease cost per mile and number of miles driven by 10 percent in a given zone.
Let's go back to the food service manager who has a challenge, his budget deficit. Instead of simply setting the goal of "creating a more efficient food service delivery program," he can use a concept called "funneling" to work towards setting a more specific, achievable goal. Funneling is a process whereby a high level goal can be translated into progressively more specific and actionable goals. As you iterate upon the goal, moving down the funnel, a specific and measurable performance goal can begin to emerge. The high level goal of "creating a more efficient food delivery system" can be funneled down to "resolving a budget deficit" and then funneled again to "decreasing costs at the most expensive schools" and finally funneled into "reducing food costs by 10 percent at five of the most expensive schools."
There are important litmus tests to determine whether you have created an appropriate funnel for your goal. First, ask yourself whether the goal at the bottom of the funnel measures activities or if it measures results. It if truly measures results or outcomes, then it is likely to be an appropriate performance challenge. Second, you should ask if the final goal is SMART. If the goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, then it is probably an appropriate challenge.
After most traditional leadership seminars, those in attendance usually measure the success by how they feel. Did the seminar make them happy? Were the speakers interesting? Was the food delicious? If the answers to these questions are "yes" then it is considered a successful training.
With the BPS Management Institute, the outcomes will be much more specific. For the first group of 25 managers that go through the Institute in Boston, there will be, at a minimum, 25 performance challenges whose outcomes can be measured. There will be tangible and measureable results that align with the DMC's goals for their member school districts of creating operational efficiency, cost savings and increased student achievement. In this case, the operational and cost levers will be directly pulled by the achievement of the challenges, and the increased efficiency will free up resources to drive student achievement.
Ask Yourself
Do managers in the central office possess the management skills to do their jobs more efficiently in an increasingly complex environment?
Do managers set realistic, achievable performance challenges that have obvious outcomes or are the performance challenges vague, immeasurable, and activities-related?
How much of the school budget is devoted to non-educational issues? How much of a principal's time is devoted to non-educational issues?
Could your school system free up funds and personnel by creating efficiencies in the central office?
Pay-for-Performance Programs: Strategies, Structures, and Funding
By Nicholas P. Morgan & Daniel Schiff
Read the BPS press release. 
