Another Season of Feedback

As Judy Schechtman and I end another series of leadership institutes for independent school leaders (sponsored by NAIS), we are again struck by the importance to leaders of accurate performance feedback and its relative rarity in the school world. Especially important is feedback about how the leader leads--less about technical or subject matter expertise and more about the ways things are said and done. Lack of congruence between the message intended and that received is something we see in many leader's 360-degree assessment profiles.

We hear far too many classroom and administrative leaders from far too many schools say they rarely receive useful performance feedback, let alone coaching on how to make adjustments that might change how they are perceived by others. Independent schools are feedback-rich environments for students, but can be feedback-lean when it comes to adults. That is an incongruity that needs fixing!