“Who will lead” is a refrain we hear routinely in the media as the workforce changes hands from the Baby Boomers to the Millennials. The leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation reached retirement age in 2011. According to the Pew Research Center, 10,000 Boomers will retire each day through the year 2030. Heads of school who responded to NAIS’s 2012–2013 Governance Study identified themselves primarily as Baby Boomers — 72 percent were between the ages of 50 and 69. Looking at these statistics leads me to wonder how prepared schools are for leadership transitions from one generation to the next.
The Need for Succession Planning
A key role for boards and heads is ensuring long-term leadership continuity for the school. In a 2008 report "Building Leaderful Organizations," The Annie E. Casey Foundation underscored the need for schools to engage in leadership succession planning and outlined three distinct models, which are not mutually exclusive of each other.
- Strategic leader development is an ongoing process based on defining an organization’s strategic vision, identifying the leadership and managerial skills necessary to carry out that vision, and recruiting and maintaining talented individuals who have or who can develop those skills.
- Emergency succession planning, often more of a chain-of-command approach, ensures that key leadership and administrative functions can continue without disruption in the event of an unplanned, temporary absence of an administrator.
- Departure-defined succession planning, an event that kicks off when a leader announces his/her departure well in advance, consists of identifying the organization’s goals going forward; determining which tools a successor will need to have in his or her skill set to achieve those goals; and devoting significant attention to building the capacity of the board, managers, and systems to sustain funding and programs beyond the current executive’s tenure.
Although any of these approaches can ensure that a school has continuity of leadership, I would argue that strategic leader development can provide more long-term benefits by creating a bench of talent that can serve the school for years to come. Strategic leadership development also ensures that continuity in vision and execution is present throughout the school, not just at the top.
As an industry, independent schools have long had a commitment to leadership development, but is that investment strong or comprehensive enough when we are facing so much churn in the workforce? Time, availability of resources, and differing wants and needs of four generations — Silent, Baby Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial — can make it difficult to execute on an effective leadership development program even when the will is there.
Barriers to Effective Leadership Development
A 2013 Bain & Co. study probed the question of why leadership development efforts often fail. Although this study was conducted in public school systems, their findings are relevant to independent schools and can provide a roadmap for putting a holistic leadership development program in place. Overall, they identified five key roadblocks that can inhibit the development of future leaders in schools.
- Schools encourage too few gifted educators to pursue leadership roles. In their study, almost 80 percent of current school leaders noted that in their own careers, early encouragement around the attractiveness of leadership roles was formative in making their decision to pursue one.
- Stepping-stone roles fail to develop leadership skills. Three-quarters of the teacher-leaders in the study said they didn’t feel accountable for the performance of the teachers they supervise, and 56 percent said they aren’t responsible for providing instructional coaching. More than 80 percent of teacher-leaders had a full teaching schedule with no time allotted for leadership responsibilities.
- Aspiring leaders receive inadequate coaching and training on key leadership skills. Most schools have not created a culture in which formal leadership coaching and development are a key part of what school leaders are expected to do and how they are evaluated.
- Leadership roles are not managed systemically as a talent pipeline. Organizations with a focus on talent development design leadership roles with the dual objective of managing today’s challenges and developing tomorrow’s leaders. They evaluate individuals based on both current performance and future potential. Those who fall short on either dimension are moved off the leadership development track. But leadership roles in schools work differently. They are designed and filled with little consistency, without close oversight, and with almost a total focus on today’s challenges.
- The hiring process is disconnected from performance management. At most schools in the study, data on past performance either didn’t exist or was hard to come by, making it difficult to evaluate candidates for current jobs or spot those with the most potential moving through the system.
Leadership Development to Encourage Diversity
NAIS is currently conducting a series of research studies to understand more deeply why more women and people of color are not being identified and nurtured for top leadership positions. As part of the study, potential head candidates were asked what kind of leadership development their schools could provide to assist them in preparing for leadership roles. The following chart identifies what they perceive as the leadership development opportunities that would make the greatest difference, with skills in financial processes and decision making topping the list.
Most candidates in our study also were discouraged about being able to climb the career ladder at their own school. When asked if they felt that their school would consider them for the headship if the position became available in the next two years, only 24 percent of white women, 18 percent of women of color, and 28 percent of men of color saw that as a realistic possibility. Clearly, there are huge opportunities for current school leaders to train and nurture women and people of color for our talent pipeline.
New Approaches Needed for the Millennial Generation
With Millennials now in both teaching and administrative positions at our schools, ready to take the reins from retiring Baby Boomers, there is an opportunity to begin creating a diverse leadership talent pipeline, as Millennials are the most diverse generation yet. Research tells us that a significant number of Millennials want to be leaders. According to the Millennial Leadership Study, 91 percent aspire to leadership, and 52 percent of that group are women.
However, many who study the Millennials warn that we need to approach leadership development with them differently than we did with previous generations because the context in which they will lead is different. J. Walker Smith, executive chairman of The Futures Company, a global consulting firm whose mission is to help organizations profit from change, suggests that, unlike the Boomers, Millennials are coming to leadership in a time of slow growth and need to be trained to lead through that. In an article in Forbes magazine, he also noted: “The fight for data has defined the evolution of business models forever. But we’re about to enter an entirely new phase. So if you want to train Millennial leaders for something, it better be to make them data savvy.”
In considering how to approach leadership development, the Center for Creative Leadership suggests that schools employ the 70-20-10 model—70 percent of development should consist of on-the-job experience, 20 percent from coaching and feedback, and 10 percent from classroom training. This model seems to fit well with Millennials own preferred learning style, which tends to veer away from formal classroom-based leadership development training in favor of more informal learning experiences.
Schools also should consider developing shared leadership models. These structures play to Gen X and Millennial interest in holding leadership positions while also maintaining a work-life balance. The Annie E. Casey Foundation notes, “Gen X and Gen Y leaders… may seek to restructure the executive role, creating collaborative or shared leadership models and job expectations that allow for a healthier balance between work and life. Succession planning in Boomer-led agencies can lay the groundwork for making these kinds of organizational changes.”
An Ongoing Process
Schools will soon experience more rapid retirements in their leadership ranks, leaving them exposed in key leadership areas. Just as heads and boards engage in risk management in other areas of the school, they need to approach talent management and development as an area of potential risk. The time is now to start looking at it as a key ongoing process for the school, not an event. Succession planning done well ensures that the future of a school is not relying on one person but rather a system.
