Five Starting Points for Capacity Building


What I call A Building Capacity, or ABC, leader will find many opportunities to support employees’ professional growth. I suggest starting with five high-leverage practices:

» Review and analyze the data with the goal of identifying the gaps in performance. In other words, being data-driven is the right place to start, though not an end in itself.

» Work with staff to reach consensus on a unified vision of outstanding teaching and a common language to talk about it. School system employees are products of various schools and came to the district with just as wide a variety of perspectives and skills. That, in itself, is a strength, because it provides expertise to draw on. But without a common set of expectations for what constitutes doing a job well, there is limited ability to pull together as a team and accomplish goals.

» Collaborate with employees to put a system of job-embedded coaching in place. If you can dedicate staff to this function, you have a huge advantage. Because most school systems have limited funds, they rely on current staff. That can be a hidden advantage because, as leaders assume the responsibility to develop their employees, their staff reaps the benefits and so do the leaders. After all, there is no better learning opportunity than when you teach someone else.

» Model by publicly working on his/her own expertise. Carol Dweck taught us that leaders who try to appear infallible inevitably fail because they limit their own learning and set up a false expectation that to succeed and be promoted, you can never be wrong. Leaders who are secure enough to publicly reflect on their own performance communicate that it is everyone’s responsibility to continuously grow — and then a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs. Everyone does improve.

» Share responsibility for coaching, supervising and evaluating employees. In many school districts, large and small, if you ask assistant superintendents, directors and other executive staff who writes their evaluations, they will admit they write their own evaluations (often with a lot of help from their assistants) and then give a polished rough draft to their boss who signs it or adds a few minor touches.

In these situations, no one is modeling for the district leaders, and it’s no wonder that they don’t do a good job coaching, supervising or evaluating principals. Then the principals follow their lead and require their assistant principals and teacher leaders to essentially supervise themselves. However, when leaders model by coaching, supervising and evaluating, everyone succeeds.


— DAVID STEINBERG