I recently read the newly released book The Ride of a Lifetime, by Bob Iger. The subtitle of his book is “Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.”. Needless to say, I could not put this book down because I was eager to digest as much information about his time at ABC and Disney. Remember, this is one of my passions—DISNEY! However, I found more words of wisdom that can be valuable to any teacher and leader or aspiring leader in education.
Although, I could focus on so many of the lessons that were shared in this book, I am choosing to take a theme that is resonating with me and that is that change can be tough but necessary. How many conversations have you had or heard lately about the challenges and changes in our schools and education system? While I think there are both good and bad things being considered or tried, we all can agree that something has got to change. The students are not the same because the world is not the same. Teachers are being asked to take up a lot more responsibility with less time to prepare and plan.
“The decision to disrupt businesses that are fundamentally working but whose future is in question—intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope of generating long-term growth—requires no small amount of courage. Routines and priorities get disrupted, jobs change, responsibility is reallocated. People can easily become unsettled as their traditional way of doing business begins to erode and a new model emerges. It’s a lot to manage, from a personnel perspective, and the need to be present for your people—which is a vital leadership quality under any circumstances—is heightened even more. It’s easy for leaders to send a signal that their schedules are too full, their time too valuable, to be dealing with individual problems and concerns. But being present for your people—and making sure they know that you’re available to them—is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company” (Iger 193).
Mr. Iger candidly discusses the tension and anxiety produced after he concluded that there needed to be some big shifts in Disney’s strategies because there was an obvious “disruption” in the status quo. The quote above are his thoughts after announcing that Disney would create a streaming service for ESPN and Disney. Their initial thought was to reach or connect with the consumers at home and ultimately change their strategies wholeheartedly.
I can see that education systems in place both nationally and internationally are seeing what Iger describes as a disruption. The same antiquated pedagogy is being challenged and quite frankly not always working for our students who are preparing to go out into the real world. Iger says about his company that “we were experiencing in our media businesses…the profound disruption… The future of those businesses begun to seriously worry us, and we concluded it was time for us to start delivering our content in new and modern ways…” (Iger 183).
I want to challenge us, educators, students, parents, community members, and leaders, to think about the disruption that you are seeing via feedback and reflection from the students and self. We are in the business of kids and more importantly for learning and growing (sometimes those 2 things are not the same). How can we polish new ideas to work better? And what are we still doing that is ruining the future of our business, a.k.a. learning/education?
Lastly, there will be growing pains. Some people will not want to take up the charge of making a change. The disruption in their day-to-day is too scary to alter. Training for something brand new might seem difficult. The unknown of what the change will bring is uncomfortable. What if we make a change and it does not work? Do we have to start all over again learning something new? This is where the leaders step-up. Take courage. Colleagues support each other. From the top down, there should be a general understanding that the big changes in strategies will not happen overnight.
“There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it. Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. It’s subtle, but there’s a difference between communicating that you share their stress—that you’re in it with them—and communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate your stress” (Iger 183).
Now is a great time for educators to embrace change. It does not have to be all at once. And most importantly, everyone should be in it together. Iger talks about when Disney bought the rights to Lucas’ Star Wars series. There was a lot riding on getting the next trilogy out and the original loyal fans were going to be eager and difficult to please. High anxiety seeped into the new team with J.J. Abrams, Kathy Kennedy, and Alan Horn. Iger learned as a leader that it was not beneficial nor productive to add his anxiety onto the people working for him on the Force Awakens project. This seems like such simple advice, but I question whether leaders are mindful about how their outward emotions impact their team.
I know that this particular blog only scratches the surface on making necessary changes to sustain any business, and in this case education. In my mind, I am constantly thinking about the need for modern changes in the way we school children. Along with that, I believe there should be candid conversations amongst teachers about what that could truly look like while keeping in mind that it may not be the easiest things to do, at first. But imagine if people could look back at their time going to school, like the CEO of Walt Disney, as a ride of a lifetime.
See You Real Soon,
Erin
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