Click here to listen to this week’s JAM – Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch.
Management guru Peter Drucker has been credited with saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” His point? While it is critical to have a clear strategy and vision, those will fail miserably if a leader ignores the culture of the organization. I have long believed that Drucker was right – the most important role I play as a leader is to create and nurture culture. All organizations have cultures. Successful leaders pay attention to understanding the culture they inherit and then finding ways to build, nurture, and shape that culture to help the people and the organization thrive. The development of a clear vision and mission, core values, short and long-term strategic initiatives, and collaborative structures that enable people to work together successfully are essential for moving an organization forward. During my fourteen years at Hillbrook, I have worked hard to ensure that these core cultural markers are clear to employees, families and students, and also that we find a balance in our culture between preserving who we have been and what we have historically done well, and allowing space for growth and innovation. A historian by training and an innovator and changemaker at heart, I find that I deeply value understanding and honoring our history, while also ensuring we are consistently looking into the future and making sure we will be just as relevant 10, 20 or even 100 years from today.
The creation of the new high school thus provides a really interesting opportunity and challenge. We are consistently reminding people that we are not developing a brand new school, rather we are expanding on an existing school. The mission, vision and core values of our high school will remain the same as our existing JK-8, yet they will manifest themselves differently in a high school setting. In addition, while we love the many traditions on our JK-8 campus, we are excited at the high school to create new traditions. As a school, we have always empowered students to help us design and implement these traditions. I vividly remember our 2nd grade students leading the younger JK-1st grade students in a collaborative session to design playground rules on our newly remodeled playground a few years ago. With older students we know there will be even more robust opportunities for them to help us design and co-create these new traditions, something we are eager to chronicle in the year ahead.
We also are thinking a lot about hiring. Clearly, most of our teachers will be new teachers to our school, as our current JK-8 teachers have committed their careers and their training to working with younger students. We are hopeful, however, that at least a few of those teachers will join the new high school faculty, becoming culture carriers who can help bridge the culture between our existing campus and the new program. There’s that word again – culture. I know that over the next few years, it will be critical that I and other leaders in our community keep paying attention to it.