Quite often I am asked about how to handle resistance from staff, leaders, and school board members when as superintendent or school principal you decide to inplement a strategic direction such as Baldrige, quality, continuous improvement, process management or whatever systemic approach to improving results you have decided to implement.

I would suggest reading Michael Fullan's most recent work - Six Secrets to Change. Of course there are many sources for this type of work, however, I find Fullan's work to be very insightful since he is actually engaged in the change management work in Canada and throughout the world. However, until you have a chance to read and formalize your own approach, I have a couple of suggestions.

Build relationships - as leader, you need to know your people and what drives them. Be visible an dopen up multiple methods of communication. When you ask someone to change the way they work, you will need to fall back on these relationships.

Establish clear expectations - start with asking people to act before inundating them with theory. In my experience the axiom that you get people to act their way into a new way of thinking much faster than you get them to think their way into a new way of acting.

Make certain to provide support and resources - nothing worse than to ask people to change the ways in which they work without support, coaching, and resources needed to do the work.

Track results as compared against fidelity of deployment - you need to know if people actually make changes you are asking them to make in the way that you are asking them to change. Also, you need to know if the change actually impacts student learning or operational results.

Be transparent about the results - If you get good results from good fidelity of deployment - great!! If you do not get good results then that is a great learning process. Transparency will ensure your relationships stay strong.

Good leaders today need to not only know what strategies will help improve results, they also must know how to manage change. You cannot do one without the other!!! Good luck!!!

Welcome to the first posting for this blog. The purpose behind this blog is to engage K-12 educators and other interested readers in a dialogue about improving K-12 education through leadership. Now many of you may think that leadership and improvement are an oxymoron, however, I hope to be able to persuade you to think and lead differently.

First of all, let me be clear. Iredell-Statesville Schools is a Baldrige district. We have been recognized at the state level with awards and at the national level through Baldrige National site visits. Recently we were notified that we would receive a site visit toward the end of October. I will blog about our experience with state and national site visits. However, the main purpose of the blog will be to talk about how leadership can drive improvement.

Today, I had lunch with Lee Jenkins who is one of AASA and ASQ well know authors and trainers for the use of Deming principles. Our school system has a 3 year plan to roll out training to all teachers and administrators in our system on how to use Lee's L to J method. Lee and I were talking about the true test of leadership - making certain the AIM is correct.

So... whether you are starting, in the middle, or well down the path of your continuous improvement journey, it is a good idea to look at the AIM first. Is your AIM focused on increasing the success of children and teachers or is your AIM focused on winning an award or recognition. Your AIM should appear in your ACTIONS. Our AIM in Iredell-Statesville Schools is to rigorously challenge ALL students to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Our vision is to ignite a passion for learning in students, staff, administrators and parents. Deming had it right - our true purpose in schools should be to increase successes and decrease failures. Every child comes to school with a yearning for learning and it is our job to make certain that we do not dampen that yearning for learning. As leaders, we must constantly remind teachers of that purpose and we need to constantly remind our administrators to not stamp out the yearning for learning in faculty and staff!!!

Feel free to visit our web page Iredell-Statesville Schools and check out what we are doing with continuous improvement and the Baldrige criteria. Also, please e-mail responses to the blog so we can truly create a national dialogue on continuous improvement in education through leadership.