For school improvement, are you primarily focused on creating value or on completing tasks?

/ mkessenburg

Photo by Jasper Garratt on Unsplash

Focus primarily on creating value! Why?

(1) Because both creating value and created value helps you and others get flourishing.

(2) Because focusing primarily on creating value increases the likelihood of deep change, of improved processes and practices, of people flourishing in terms of 5 elements of flourishing: passionate purpose, resilient well-being, healthy relationships, transformative learning, and helpful resources.

(3) Because focusing primarily on task completion increases the likelihood of nominal change, of stagnation, and of people moving toward obsolescence and irrelevance. “As Dr. W. Edwards Deming has pointed out, there are two kinds of organizations in this world today: those that are getting better and those that are dying. An organization that stands still is dying. It just doesn’t know it yet” (Fundamentals of Project Management, loc 2184).

(4) Because focusing on creating value is a best practice.

Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash

What can help you focus primarily on value creation? Here are 7 things that come to mind for me:

(1) Get the right people involved and working collaboratively. “The first rule of project management is that the people who must do the work should help plan it” (Fundamentals of Project Management, loc 409).

(2) Collaboratively clarify the value to be created in your scope statement, for example:

Value to be created for an improvement goal for increasing compensation and benefits:
(A) We experience increased compensation and an enhanced benefits package that includes a wellness program, a pension/401K, and more funds for professional development.
(B) We have increased retention.
(C) We are better able to attract more qualified candidates. 
(D) We are flourishing (for example, in terms of professional growth), able to stay in Christian education for our careers, and able to retire well.
(E) Feeling more valued, we experience increased passionate purpose in terms of commitment to the mission and to helping each other holistically flourish in Jesus. 
(F) We experience increased morale and unity.

Note: 

  • “Without a clear and shared picture of the value you’re trying to create, the project is doomed” (Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, loc 561).
  • “It’s a strange world, but often projects are called successful if they end on time and stay on budget. Oddly enough, achieving an important, worthwhile, or useful outcome is rarely mentioned! It’s as if you were to make dinner on time and on budget but serve up lousy food nobody wants to eat. But you could still claim, ‘My project succeeded!’” (Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, loc 279)

(3) Collaboratively specify the outcomes and key deliverables needed to create the value (instead of specifying the activities to be completed). For example:

(3.1) Outcome: We experience increased compensation and an enhanced benefits package that includes a wellness program, a pension/401K, and more funds for professional development. (Note: This outcome comes from the above value statement.)

(3.2) Key deliverables:

  • Revised compensation and benefits plan
  • Wellness program
  • Pension/401K
  • Comparison of old/new professional development funding levels
  • Policy requiring the annual review of compensation and benefits policies, plans, and processes.
  • Increase of business office staff by .5 in order to implement and monitor compensation and benefits, and to stay current with best practices regarding compensation and benefits.

(4) Collaboratively assess progress in terms of outcomes achieved (instead of action steps completed). This is similar to assessing what students actually learned (instead of the number of assignments students turned in or the number of lessons teachers taught).

(5) Collaboratively determine the experiments you will use to try to increase the achievement of the outcomes and key deliverables (instead of determining the action steps needed to be completed to achieve the goal). Note the difference in mindset: With an experiment mindset, we try something to see if it helps us create value; with a task-completion mindset, we complete tasks, mistakenly believing that task completion will necessarily result in goal achievement. Not good.

(6) In school improvement meetings, ask “What value are we working to create? How much of that value has been created?” (instead of “How many tasks have been completed?”) Remember, what gets talked about gets focused on.

(7) Work with a coach. Interested? Feel free to contact me. I provide free coaching for international Christian school leaders on a time-permitting basis.

Image by freepik

How about you? How do you feel about primarily focusing on the value to be created? Are you primarily focused on task completion or value creation? What can help you focus primarily on value creation? 

Here are some related resources:

Bottom line: For school improvement, focus primarily on creating value! 

Get flourishing!

Michael