Once, on a trip to French Polynesia, I discovered how public school students on the Island of Moorea are required to study and test on the same centralized French national core curriculum as students in Paris. This requirement is held without regard to local history or the magnificent traditions and legends of Oceana—governance in the South Seas is detached from operations and from any sense of place. I found the same thing on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, where Native American students in social studies classes learn that their own traditions are at best a footnote to “real” American history. The existence of disconnects like these present huge strategic advantages in creating the kind of connected, place-based, and adaptive governance possible in smaller organizations. Real human trust is not imposed from afar, it is developed from within.
Assumptions about how to maintain trust range from full control and domination to adoring support and evangelism. So naturally, divergent perceptions can easily become a source of misunderstanding and frustration. Many boards never discuss or identify the assumptions they bring to the table. When board members gather around the table, all presuming they know why they are there, all with different presumptions of what governance means to them, tragic relationships can develop between people.
The most common board and leadership tragedies involve conflating civic, spiritual, and economic definitions of “doing our duty.” Trust is not an end, not a thing, and does not reside in a bureau—and this can confound fiduciaries with conceptions of good governance as data points like production levels of steel or corn.
Governance and Culture
In a little town in British Columbia, in a yoga studio, I learned how in Hindu education, the primary duty (dharma) of fiduciaries is to study the Vedas, ancient scriptures written in early Sanskrit. Later during my trip, in a fish market, I learned from a local school board member that the way to meet district and state shortfalls was to promote marijuana sales and establish a sales tax in support of public education. (For the record, marijuana is obviously a powerful, controlled substance almost all citizens would find unconscionable to advocate for high school students.) These two philosophies bookend a sort of sliding scale spanning the historical parameters of governance and how it reflects culture. Two people could not possibly have more contrary, incongruous methods, and both believed they were doing their parts properly as fiduciaries.How is our trust distinct from every other trust? Trust looks and feels different in large and small organizations, and in every organization. For instance, public school districts are entrusted with reliably delivering massive curricula, funded by taxpayer or tuition-payer money. In large public schools, trust is demonstrated through tightly regulated “scope and sequence” of each curriculum, intensely tested as evidence of meeting that responsibility; it is demonstrated by comps in every area, from teacher remuneration to class size. In those schools, board members who know relatively little about child development or pedagogy often then set benchmarks that students and teachers “ought to” meet.
The large school board cannot easily develop a shared culture in or across groups, and it may not even occur to them to develop a robust, beautiful board culture to benefit students. Trustees in larger organizations change regularly and are often politically motivated.
When Trust Evolves with Culture
At Grauer, independent projects, arts, and experiences in nature that defy standards and measures infuse most, if not all, studies. Knowing that our students cover what they “need”—which could take them a lifetime to express their development—requires an entirely different idea of trust.Leadership at Grauer lies in trust-based relationships that evolve with our culture. This occurs on our 12-member board, our eight-member administrative leadership team, and at teams across the organization. We give up some control and regulation, and this is hard for many people to accept. But instruction, marketing, and policy can all turn on a dime in accordance with student, financial, and other needs. What we gain is spontaneity, creativity, nimble responsiveness to our community, and sensitive commitment to personal relationships are huge strategic advantages. For instance, a new course or a new marketing campaign can launch in a few days, if it meets our needs.
Strategic plans are of course useful in setting organizational benchmarks of all kinds, but we find the best work we do is not benchmarkable. Smaller organizations thrive or dive on real relationships that develop. I would rather see engaged and high trust relationships used as the measure of our success than all of the other measures, including college rankings, AP course pass rates, and any other comps that larger schools and ranking services focus on.
Leadership consultant Doug Katz recently told me how a school’s fiduciary responsibility, beyond the basic accounting of assets and achievements, can be viewed as spiritual in nature: “This is what differentiates leadership in smaller organizations. Naturally, this key index—our priority on Gross Institutional Happiness—will frustrate patrons and fiduciaries more comfortable with the quantitative. We accept this disconnect. We understand the importance of numeracy in the leadership of an organization. We simply do not regard it as the preeminent consideration.”
Like tribal elders, trustees who are leaders of smaller organizations will sustain them best if we will not sever spirit or place from decision-making. Until there is a sense of what is going on between us as trustees, where our assumptions conflict, there is no sense going on. The pursuit of a trust uniquely shared and clearly articulated can be the focus of smaller organizations, and the first agenda item. The leader keeps this on the table, always a fundamental part of the largest mission, even if it will never be fully realized. Trust is a pilgrimage, not a presumption.