More often, leadership development for district administrators relies on research conducted by business schools. One example of this is when superintendents read books with their staff from the business sector in hopes they may glean important knowledge and skills helpful for their job. How many district administrators do you know who have read Jim Collins, Good to Great?[i]
The coupling of the research on business and the leadership of school districts imply that the business and education sectors can learn from one another. Yet, how do we know if this is true? Can public sector employees in education really apply the lessons learned from private sector business to their day-to-day management?
A number of institutes of higher education seem to support the link between the business and education sectors. For example, schools of education at universities like Stanford, have programs that offer joint degrees in both business administration and education.[ii] As seen at Harvard, some universities now use the case study method of studying problems in education, therefore mimicking the case study format used in business schools.[iii]
Also, many in education use research from other sectors like the field of medicine to support innovations in education. For example, City, Elmore, Fairman and Teitel wrote Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning, which posits a structure of learning for district administrators and others involved in education that is based on “rounds” completed by medical practitioners.[iv]
These universities and researchers may be onto something – school districts administrators will need inter-disciplinary skills to tackle some of the larger problems in education.[v] If research on the private sector sheds light on problems and helps unearth some improvements in district leadership, than so be it. Similar to the way Bio-mimicry uses knowledge and skills imparted by the natural world to create sustainable designs in our human engineered world, then the education sector should not turn its back on research from any sector that may improve district leadership’s capacity.[vi]
While applying business principles from the private sector does sound appealing, the business principles should be applied to education with caution. Most findings in research related to business in the private sector need careful translation into the public sector. For example, check out Jim Collins monograph to accompany Good to Great titled, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great, Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer.[vii] As Collins notes, research findings from the business world must be viewed within the constraints and context of the pubic sectors like education.
As district administrators sit down to read the latest book from the business sector on change management or even Robert Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss,[viii] they should keep these hints in mind:
1. Pay attention to context: Examine the structures necessary to apply the findings from business to your educational organization. If certain structures don’t exist in your educational organization, you may need to put those structures in place before you can apply what you learned from the business sector.
2. Compare the bottom line: In education, the bottom line is often student achievement. How does that compare with the bottom line in business? Many times the bottom line in business is revenue generated, which differs in its nature than student achievement and those differences need to be noted.
3. Be careful of business jargon: Research in business often refers to the words used in the private sector like “customer” or “dividends.” Yet, these words can have different meanings for different people in the education sector. Take precautions to know how the connotation of the vocabulary used in the business research applies to the education sector.
[i] Collins, J. (2001) Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t. Harper Business.
[ii] Stanford School of Education, Leadership Degree Programs. “About Joint MA/MBA.” Retrieved on January 17, 2012 from https://suse-ldp.stanford.edu/ma-mba
[iii] Childress, S. Elmore, R. F., Grossman, A.S. Johnson, S.M. Eds. (2007). Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
[iv] City, E.A., Elmore, R.F., Fairman, S.E., and Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning. Harvard Education Press.
[v] Full disclosure, I participated in a book club last year with various district administrators and professionals working in the business sector as a means of learning about the trials and tribulations of organizational change and management. About half the works we read used research about the private sector to make their point.
[vi] “Biomimicry Institute: Inspiring, educating, and connecting bimimics throughout the world.” Retrieved on January 17, 2012 from http://biomimicryinstitute.org/
[vii] Collins, J. Good to Great and the Social Sectors, A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great, Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. Harper Collins.
[viii] Sutton. R. I. (2010). Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst. Business Plus.
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