Leadership: Checking in. Not Checklists. Beware of the Checklist Culture.

Oftentimes I find myself reading articles or online ‘hacks’ emphasizing shortcuts to the cultural development of organizations, or increasing efficiencies and the efficacy of our internal logistics systems. If that last sentence didn’t sound like a heaping pile of poop, you were paying too much attention to the wrong things….and that’s my point. In this world focused on productivity, I take no issue with works like Atwul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto in that protocols in the form of checklists can make us safer and our systems more consistent; however some leaders seem to focus on checking off the boxes to build lists of their accomplishments whilst forgetting to check in with others. Checking in truly means following through to support positive change, not simply checking in for accountability.

Checking in with them about you.

Years ago a mentor of mine asked me to define leadership. The simple answer which eluded me was: a leader is someone with followers. A good leader and a bad leader both have followers, but how does one know which one you are? Ask. Mayor Koch did this by walking around NYC asking, “How am I doing?”. If we don’t ask we don’t know, and simply checking off our leadership checklist will give us a false positive.

I’ve got to share a move I picked up from Daniel Pink and Abby Falik in Pinkcast 3.10. Every product we purchase comes with an User Manual, and they recommend creating a User Manual to share with others. I thought and discussed what a User Manual about me could do for the people I work closely with. I did a reflective exercise asking myself about my peccadillos, quirks, and priorities. BUT then I asked my assistant principals and secretary what they would tell someone else joining our team if THEY had to write an Operating Instruction User Manual about me. Thankfully, they were brutally honest and my own reflections were closely aligned to their reflections and feedback. This helped me understand why my immediate team is so productive; my team knows how to manage me as a leader. For the last six years I’ve done an anonymous survey about me with my entire faculty and staff, it’s called the Principal’s Report Card, and I’ve learned so many things about how I and my leadership is perceived.

Checking in with them about them.

Leaders need to check in with others about their followers’ personal and professional lives. I feel like the first piece checking in with them about them needs no further explanation; either you do it or you don’t. Of course, you could be as inconsistent as I am and check in personally some of the time, but we all know that our professional relationships need continuous investment and nurturing. I give myself high marks when I know someone is going through a particularly difficult time, but it is always a struggle to check in regularly with my entire faculty and staff. As a principal leading a school with well over one thousand students I hope that I am visible to them, but I know my faculty and staff is more connected to our students. As such, in trying to understand my connection with my faculty and staff some days I’ve logged every interaction I’ve had with the adults in our building. My daily record of touching base typically averages to fifty-five people out of one-hundred and fifty (or about a third of the adults I work with).

Checking in with people professionally about their work is incredibly important. It’s difficult and time consuming, but the work itself can foster cultural and systemic improvement. When checking in about the professional work our teachers do with students I try to focus on teachers’ pedagogy and planning about the who, what, when, where, why and how their classrooms function. Often this occurs informally via daily rounds and casual observations, and at other times I leverage formal observation cycles for this purpose.

A Checklist Culture

Leaders must guard against collecting data about their organization’s practices that can then be broadcast as evidence that they are doing the right things. In other words, when leaders are busy checking off the boxes they are not always checking in with others. When this type of checklist culture happens it has the patina of efficiency and accountability, but represents a cognitive bias, akin to automation bias, as the checklist is the product and evidence of success. School leaders might be checking off the boxes and creating checklists to celebrate, or to monitor the important work, or even create accountability systems, but these checklists can become a hollow proxy for continuous improvement.

Beware of the checklist culture. Whether the goal of school leaders is better teaching and learning, or the organizational goal is more engagement of students, checking in about you and about them has greater efficacy than a checklist culture.