02.17.15Jay Mathews and the Folly of the External Ed Leadership Search
Jay Mathews has a great column out this week called: Why national superintendent searches miss the best people for the job. He uses Montgomery County MD’s superintendent search as a case study. The district is paying a search consultant to comb the nation to find the best candidate.
Jay wisely observes:
School boards as smart as Montgomery’s would do better looking for a replacement among the skilled people they already have.
I couldn’t agree more. Districts rarely look to promote from within but doing so does three things:
1) It allows you to hire the candidate you have the greatest amount of data on. No matter how good the search, it will never yield the sort of understanding that 5 or 10 years of working with someone through thick and thin reveals about them. This is not a trivial matter. As you may recall from the book (then movie), Moneyball, one of the reasons Billy Beane and company believed so strongly in drafting players out of college was because it gave them more data on the candidate and thus increased the likelihood of a correct decision.
2) It sends a strong message to your organization. Which kind of place would you rather work in? One where talent is constantly recognized and tapped for promotion and where the governing body constantly expresses faith that the people on the team can solve the challenges the organization faces…Or, a place where you can never get to the top unless you move to a new place and where “world class expertise” is always something that comes from the outside. Hiring from within tells your people you believe they are talented and that you want to keep them, thereby increasing the quality of people you get, top to bottom. And having quality people top-to-bottom just might affect performance more than the quality of your superintendent—not that it’s a choice.
3) It’s hard to have a consistent organizational culture when you keep replacing the top person and thus shifting the culture. Great organizations have a way of doing things that people ascribe to top-to-bottom. The only way to keep that culture alive is to have the best representatives of it constantly leading—and to have leadership that understands and values it.
At the organization I work for, Uncommon Schools, we almost always promote from within—it’s hard to think of a time we didn’t—and that to me is one of the greatest reasons for our success. It also allows us to find new hungry talent and to take all that money we’d be paying to search firms and pay our employees with it instead. The message is clear: we believe in our people and our culture and can’t wait to choose the best among us and let them lead. It’s worth noting too, that the curse of the superstar CEO, as described by Rakesh Khurana, has been widely discussed in management circles for years.
Good article. Although I’d want to qualify point #3. Preserving a “consistent organizational culture” is fine when you have a culture worth preserving: a healthy, productive work environment that generates results. I think it’s safe to say that many (most?) school systems don’t fall into that category.
yes. very good point. thanks for making it!
I think that’s true, but I also think it’s worth considering that this might be a solution to and not a cause of the problem.
Consider that the average tenure for a superintendent is three years, that means that just by the time that they should be really gearing up and making quality changes and starting to see the results, they leave. Hiring from within is one way to make sure that new programs don’t go by the wayside just because leadership changes. I think we see an example of this with Kaya Henderson in DC. Since she was already in place in the District when Rhee left, instead of coming in with all new programs she expanded on and improved on what had been put in place.