What Heads of School Could Learn from the TSA
I will not be the first to say that the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is really in show business rather than the security business. Seth Godin and multiple other bloggers before me have called what the TSA does "security theater," designed to show the traveling public that it is safe to fly post 9/11. As someone who passes through airport security several times each week and on multiple continents, I completely agree with this assessment. In effect, the TSA does relatively little, but spend an enormous amount of money and human time creating a "set" where the theater can play out quite convincingly for most people--at least for casual observers.
Heads should learn from the TSA. Paradoxically, there is much that heads (and their teams) do that achieves terrific results, but goes relatively unnoticed because it seems so routine: going extra miles to help students with university admission, making sure students don't fall through cracks, etc. Quite the opposite of the TSA, heads rarely, if ever, call attention to these things and I am beginning to think they should. Too often I hear board members criticize something as not being done (let alone done well), when in reality the head does quite a bit of that thing.
Great heads, like great chefs, can make it look too easy. When it looks easy or is invisible, people assume that it isn't getting done.