The Flip Side

Matt Yglesias's terrific post on the Slow Boring website makes a point about political popularity that seems apt for heads of schools.

Ron DeSantis seems to be flopping a bit in the polls right now, leading to heightened media scrutiny of his every decision and personality attribute. When someone is doing well, these things are often examined through a lens of "why is this guy doing well?" and spun as positive. But when someone is doing poorly, it's all read through a very different lens and spun negatively. When Obama was up in the polls, we were told people liked his calm, cool demeanor; when he was doing poorly, he was cold and hard to relate to.

Putting aside the lightning-rod of politics, the underlying dynamic that Yglesias (a left-of-center blogger) transcends the topic. When things go well, people focus on a leader's virtues and strengths, but when things go poorly, they concentrate on liabilities that are often the flip side of those same strengths. Leaders, whether of countries, states, or schools, are rarely all assets and no liabilities. Quite often, the drawbacks are the flip side of one's strengths, as the Obama example describes. You cannot have one without the other.

Few governing boards recognize the above phenomenon; instead, they get swept along by the emotions spawned by seeing that their head of school has a less-than-perfect side. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that the leader's up-side must have been illusory because there is also a downside, maybe a better approach is to step back far enough to consider the whole package. Most humans have multiple facets- some of which are prettier than others. Making the relationship work starts with accepting this fact.