TRENDS IN TALENT

Kevin J. Ruth, Ph.D. | President | RU STRATEGIC www.rustrategic.com

 The past five years have seen independent schools dive deeply into the ocean of 'survive versus thrive,' as Pat Bassett highlighted in his address at the President's Breakfast at the NAIS Annual Conference in February 2013.1 Schools that comprise the median of NAIS schools have rebounded to where they were five years ago, more or less, resulting in the notion that the patient is ambulatory and off the respirator, in terms of attrition, charitable gifts from parents, and the ratio of applications to enrollment. When it comes to independent school leadership talent, however, we are not as attentive to detail. We simply don't have concrete metrics to track talent over time; we are largely anecdotal. As a result, talent development takes a back seat to more pressing concerns. Yet, here we are, in the midst of the most vibrant (tumultuous?) environment for leadership succession planning in a generation, if not ever. For all the talk of sea change that permeates educational discourse today, we should note that such verbiage denotes almost exclusively the advancement and rapid deployment of educational technologies. The far subtler conversation, the one beginning to form the backbone of discussions among current (and former) heads of school, trustees, and independent school associations, deals with talent. There is growing acknowledgement that the leadership landscape for schools is vastly different from just ten or fifteen years ago. The genesis appears to have taken root before the five-year period mentioned earlier, yet that period has served to illuminate more brightly the cracks in our own leadership pipeline. When it comes to developing, managing, and seeking talent to lead independent schools, why do we continue to proceed as we always have? A cursory glance at any number of head of school position descriptions from search agencies shows a dearth of long-term thinking about leadership. The majority of descriptions tend in one of two directions: either toward maintaining business as usual, or toward a reactive reasoning. In either case, there is a marked absence of low-time preference for leadership talent.2 One wonders how our schools will look if we continue on this same path. As Manju Mary George writes, "One of the things we must do differently is to redefine what we mean by 'skilled managerial talent.' [...] Identifying and nurturing [...] talent will demand going much deeper [...] and expending more effort than we do today."3 Following her assertion, if we are to expend that effort and nurture the skills necessary for success in leading the schools of today and tomorrow, we must pay attention to the interplay of three components: 1) talent development, 2) talent management, and 3) talent search. We will return to these components later, but for now, while keeping them in mind, let us paint a broad picture of the talent landscape, meaning the requirements for current and aspiring talent.
1

February 28, 2013. For a PowerPoint of Pat's remarks, please visit www.nais.org, and search "President's Corner." 2 The term 'low time preference' indicates a more-than-average emphasis on the health of the organization in the future. 3 Manju Mary George, "Out of London and New York" Stanford Social Innovation Review 11.3 (2013), 18. She is co-founder and head of corporate development for Intellecap, a consulting and investment banking firm based in Hyderabad, India.

 The Talent Landscape In 2005, shortly before the advent of the financial crisis, Philip E. Tetlock, the Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, in which he detailed his findings from a twenty-year study of 284 professionals who made over 28,000 predictions of future events. In short, he found that the predictions of these "experts" were hardly better than chance; what's more, basic computer algorithms resulted in more accurate predictions. As if that weren't enough to make us question the reliability of experts, it turns out that non-experts (in a given field) are better predictors than the experts themselves.4 It should come as no surprise, then, that the most accurate predictions come from those individuals with good judgment and broad perspective...not from specialization. Vikram Mansharamani, lecturer at Yale University, posited in a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog that increased specialization limits agility, which is the very characteristic (in talent) that we should be striving to augment.5 The leaders we require today are those who can meet the demands of being flexible, efficient, and rapidly adaptive in an environment that looks vastly different from the traditional silos of schools. For more than a decade, much of the world has been working in teams and across functional boundaries, yet that is not how school works. We tend to favor specialists over generalists, and that choice leads us to structure ourselves in similar fashion, in terms of organizational design (look at your org chart!). As Briefings on Talent & Leadership underscores, in talking about Mansharamani's post, "specialists are great at working well-defined problems within constrained domains, but because they 'toil within a singular tradition,' they also try to 'apply formulaic solutions to situations that are rarely well-defined.' Generalists, on the other hand, are great at making connections across domains and working on problems for which the parameters are not clear."6 In Mansharamani's own words, "in today's uncertain environment, breadth of experience trumps depth of knowledge."7 The notion that specialists tend to "apply formulaic solutions to situations that are rarely well-defined" is one that Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had the prescience to identify at almost the exact moment that schools began to focus myopically on survivability. In his compelling work, The Design
4

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 54. 5 For Mansharamani's June 2012 blog, please see http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/all_hail_the_generalist.html. He refers to the work of Thomas Malone (MIT Sloan School of Management) work in the July 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, in which the latter talks about the "age of hyperspecialization," a term that refers to a time of a growing number of individuals who will perform very specialized tasks and work in complex networks. While Malone's assertion carries serious merit, Mansharamani argues that individuals with agile minds will be needed to see the concatenations among the various networks. 6 "Generalist Managers Make a Comeback" Korn Ferry Briefings on Talent & Leadership 4.13 (2012) 11. This article is part of a regular feature in this publication, The Latest Thinking. 7 http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/all_hail_the_generalist.html.

 of Business, Martin, who knows non-profits as well as for-profits, contends that the cognitive and behavioral norms of an organization act against it, when it comes to forging ahead with innovative solutions to pressing challenges.8 Why? The overwhelming majority of organizations exhibit a knowledge culture that derives from an overt concentration on deductive and inductive reasoning (the way our schools have trained us to think), when encountering new challenges and trying to make sense of them. Organizations tend to force these new challenges into what he calls the "knowledge funnel," eventually simplifying the information into an easily replicated algorithm whose structure makes sense to us. What we have neglected, he suggests, is the application of abductive reasoning, which allows us to consider what might be. It takes a mind with broad perspective to begin to move an organization (schools) in this direction. Martin's work on pushing the limits of how we think in organizations is convincing, and other researchers and practitioners are providing even more context that allows us to see it better. Francesca Gino, associate professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-author of "Paradoxical Frames and Creative Sparks: Enhancing Individual Creativity Through Conflict and Integration," notes that "research indicates that a broader attentional span and diverse knowledge foster the generation of new connections."9 Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, gives a nod to Martin and Gino both, noting that the organizational model [of silos], while still dominant, is failing because of increasingly specialized repetition: We are moving rapidly into a world defined by change, which is the opposite of repetition. Whereas repeating parts fit together with repetition reinforcing repetition, we are now tipping into an equally coherent world where change begets and accelerates change. When one system changes, it bumps all those around it, and then they bump all those around them. [...] Value in this world comes not from providing the same thing over and over to a client, but from managing kaleidoscopic change processes that are busily bumping one another. Because one now needs to see and seize ever-changing opportunities, the new organizational model must be a fluid, open team of teams. [...] You cannot afford to have anyone without the skills to spot and help develop change opportunities. That is where the value lies.10 In many ways, then, the desired leader of independent schools for today and tomorrow is akin to a data scientist who is able to spot and decipher patterns among myriad interactions, thereby identifying new areas of growth and value creation. That view is
8 9

Roger Martin, The Design of Business. (Harvard: Harvard Business School Press, 2009). Rotman Management (Winter 2013) 84. The paper mentioned was published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Elsevier, 2011). It is available at francescagino.com/publications.html. 10 Bill Drayton, "A Team of Teams World" Stanford Social Innovation Review 11.2 (2013) 34. Emphasis ours. Ashoka is an organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs. See ashoka.org.

 supported by research from the Korn/Ferry Institute, highlighted in Briefings on Talent & Leadership's feature The Latest Thinking, in which the author suggests that talent is the real engine of growth.11 "We have entered the era of 'smart growth,' in which growth is slow but change is fast. [...] A resounding number of CEOs believe these conditions will last for the rest of the decade, if not longer [...]."12 That has an immediate effect on leadership teams, since existing leadership teams (the ones that operate in Roger Martin's knowledge funnel) may still be wired for what is termed 'easy growth,' the period when, more so than ever before in history, it was easy to gain access to money (ever-higher tuitions, boundary-pushing fundraising, etc.). For many independent school leaders, including a number of those who might have been defined as aspiring heads just five to ten years ago, 'easy growth' was the norm of independent schools; it was ubiquitous. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, folks believed that if they "could just hold on to [the] basics [of how we do school] long enough, the tide would turn."13 As one CEO from Asia explained in this Briefings article, "my team is still waiting for the tide." So are a number of independent school teams, one might argue. The thrust of the aforementioned article is that organizations "must make a mental leap, moving away [from old notions of markets] toward the idea that growth emerges from certain leaders. In fact, it is increasingly hard to find markets that grow at a double-digit annual pace. Instead, organizations must look within for a leadership team that can carve out growth where others may see no hope."14 One may well ask which leaders can do such a thing. As Korn/Ferry points out, "those who drove high performance in easy growth will not automatically excel in smart growth."15 That statement is most curious, in light of search committees' conservative nature when it comes to selecting a new head of school. With all the uncertainty swirling about in today's globally-oriented society, committees tend to favor candidates who are most familiar with the easy growth model, the knowledge funnel model, because they feel that such candidates represent the safe path forward. Korn/Ferry promotes a slightly different approach, based on their research that shows two sets of characteristics that indicate smart-growth readiness: leadership maturity and learning agility. The former is "an individual leader's ability to operate effectively at high levels of complexity, ambiguity and scale."16 Another way to think of leadership maturity is to consider "someone with experience in complex situations who handles challenges with grace."17 The latter represents "an individual leader's ability to operate effectively amid disruption, speed and volatility. [...] Think of agility as an indicator of a fastlearning executive, someone who knows what to do when s/he doesn't know what to do.
11

"Growth Now: Focus on Minds, Not Markets" Briefings on Talent & Leadership 4.14 (2013) 8-10. This feature is a synopsis of a recent report on smart growth by Korn/Ferry leadership and talent consulting managing director Indronil Roy. 12 "Growth Now" 9. 13 "Growth Now" 9. 14 "Growth Now" 9. 15 "Growth Now" 9. 16 "Growth Now" 10. 17 "Growth Now" 10.

 Given a fast-changing environment in the smart-growth era, agility will be the other differentiator among leaders."18 The authors go on to say that the "aggregate maturity and agility of a leadership talent pool point toward a company's [school's] ability" to be successful.19 An outstanding example of the intersection of this maturity and agility can be found in Arvind Gupta's work. He writes that "the fact is, successful [...] innovation in the 21st century requires more than just a new product, offering, or business model. It calls for a new organizational approach to change: Adaptive Innovation."20 Although we are talking about schools instead of large-scale companies, Gupta's assertion is compelling. At the heart of adaptive innovation is the notion that the organizational system enables designers (that could be teachers, kids, administrators...) "to rapidly integrate thin-sliced information from in-market testing to create and test meaningful prototypes that lower overall [...] risk. Through rapid cycles of learning and creating, organizations can then evolve a solution even as they change direction many times."21 If a school were truly interested in innovation, what kind of a leader would it want at the helm, if not someone who exhibits leadership maturity and learning agility? After all, such a leader would model those characteristics for all others in the school community. Changing direction many times as the way to arrive at a solution is not something to which we are accustomed in independent schools. It might work in the classroom, where design thinking is beginning to take off, but it is highly uncomfortable at an organizational level. Why? As Roger Martin shows, our cognitive and behavioral norms in organizations are informed by a bias toward reliability. Put simply, when contemplating a new challenge, we tend to look to the past for data points (sometimes quantitative, sometimes qualitative or anecdotal) to help us form solutions. We place those data points, our questions, and unknown information into the knowledge funnel, and we expect a reliable outcome (solution). What tends to be missing, however, is validity. There is not a natural correlation between reliability and validity, as the latter can shown to be accurate only over time. In other words, schools are great at making reliable solutions, but they may not be valid (correct over time). For instance, we might create and fund an initiative that champions a certain kind of reading program, only to discover five years later that well-regarded university literacy programs have disproved its effectiveness. What organizations need to do is to move toward a normative environment that balances reliability and validity, rather than one that operates at one extreme.22 Looking Ahead The next twenty to twenty-five years in the world of independent schools promise to be full of iteration, excitement, and challenge. Knowing that, shouldn't we be attentive to the
18 19

"Growth Now" 10. "Growth Now" 10. 20 Arvind Gupta, "Adaptive Innovation: Create, Learn, Repeat" Rotman Management (Winter 2013: 97100) 98. Gupta is a product designer and part of the Asia leadership team at IDEO. He is based in Shanghai. 21 Gupta, "Adaptive Innovation" 98. 22 Martin, The Design of Business.

 cultivation of leaders who can handle what those years will bring with deep insight, aplomb, and grace? Lynda Gratton, professor of Management Practice at London Business School, author of Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here (2012), and a member of the Thinkers50 list of the world's most influential management thinkers, opines that: the ability to collaborate across boundaries will become increasingly important, because that is how innovation happens. Clearly, the capacity to work virtually will be a core skill, both for individuals and institutions. [...] Creativity is going to be crucial, because it leads to innovation and value creation. [Additionally,] in a world where more and more people are acknowledging their diversity rather than trying to fit into a [...] stereotype, there is an opportunity to be more authentic about who you are. This has implications for how individuals learn and develop, and also for how they learn to work with others who may be different from themselves."23 Helmut K. Anheier, professor of sociology and dean at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, sees four possible scenarios for non-profits by 2025. Among them, he feels most strongly about what he terms the NPM Scenario, in which nonprofits "become a set of well organized quasi-corporate entities that take on the tasks and functions that previously were the purview of the state [...]."24 In their current form, charter schools may be only the first step in the evolution of this scenario, insofar as education is concerned. It will be interesting to observe, over the coming years, whether charter schools gravitate toward more hybrid models that allow them to minimize bureaucracy, standards-based assessments, and the like. Such a movement would be in keeping with Anheier's thesis that "new for-profit/nonprofit hybrids [will begin] to emerge, not only in the changing health and social care markets but also in fields where public contracting will become more prominent: education and research, environment, energy, and information technology."25 What Does It All Mean? As evidenced by the research cited here, the present and the future require school leadership of a kind that we have not nurtured intentionally in recent years. We need to be purposeful about nurturing talent that will result in outstanding leadership in the years ahead. Our work must be prescient, the result of an approach that blends reliability and validity when it comes to identifying the outcomes we'd like to see so that our schools will thrive always.

23 24

Karen Christensen, "Questions for Lynda Gratton" Rotman Management (Winter 2013: 72-74) 74. Helmut K. Anheier, "The Nonprofits of 2025" Stanford Social Innovation Review 11.2 (2013) 18-20. The designation NPM stands for 'new public management.' 25 Anheier, "The Nonprofits of 2025" 20.

 To do so will require systemic change, though not of an insurmountable magnitude. Following are three realms in which we can make changes that, in a short time, will bring about the results we need. (1) Talent Development Talent development starts at home. Knowing that aspiring heads of school need broad exposure within the life of a school, sitting heads would do well to consider how they might provide that exposure in ways that are meaningful, rather than superficial. For instance, instead of inviting the aspirant to sit on the development committee, why not ask him/her to assist the director of development by undertaking a project that brings him/her into contact with the trustees who sit on that committee? What's more, when the project has been completed, why not identify a way that s/he might become involved in the work of philanthropy, even if it is making one Annual Fund solicitation in-person? We can envision the duplication of that scenario across the school, making for a truly vibrant, in-house professional development program for the aspiring head. Eventually, after two or three years, s/he will have gained rich experience in all areas of the school, providing a more complete picture of the myriad moving parts of a complex organization rather than fifteen to twenty years of deep familiarity with one part. That kind of familiarity may come, regardless, but at least it will be coupled with meaningful breadth. Outside of one's own school, there are numerous leadership (talent development) programs from which to choose. The one that holds the most promise, in theory, should be the NAIS Fellowship for Aspiring Heads, given that its title alone suggests a singular purpose. Yet, in its current guise, it falls woefully short of preparing aspirants for the role.26 For example, based on research we conducted in late 2012, governance issues play a role in 75% of headship failures. With such a staggeringly high correlation between headship failure and governance, it should stand to reason that the Fellowship year would include a fair amount of work in the area of governance, from familiarization with board life and responsibilities to experiential weekends that are meant to mimic board retreats in schools with governance issues. Yet it doesn't. We talk about preparing our students for entry into the real world; what about our aspiring leaders? We owe it to ourselves, now and in the future, to redesign such programming to be far more impactful than it is currently. (2) Talent Management a. Aspiring Heads Most aspiring heads have earned the title of high-performers (HiPos) in their respective schools. The typical characteristics of today's HiPos are: they are driven to excel, they can catalyze learning into action, they are comfortable with taking risks, and they know how and where to spend their time. The first thing that sitting heads need to realize is that they must figure out how to retain their HiPos, so that they might cultivate them purposefully and diligently for leadership. In that vein, then, heads need to help HiPos
26

The author is an alumnus of the program (2008 cohort). As cited by many participants, the greatest value comes from the relationship with an assigned mentor who is a sitting head of school. In the absence of a formal training program for the mentors, though, even this piece can lose its potential worth. The minimalist design and the absence of a thoughtful framework leave the program weaker than it ought to be.

 understand that membership in this group requires three things: 1) to deliver strong results in a credible manner; 2) to continue to master new types of expertise (see section above)--technical excellence fades in value relative to strategic thinking and motivational skills; and 3) to recognize that behavior counts--performance gets a HiPo noticed, but behavior keeps the HiPo on the radar.27 In other words, it is the responsibility of heads (as talent managers, in this case) to alert aspiring heads to the challenges ahead by helping them to balance transactional leadership (delivering strong results) with transformational leadership (strategic thinking and motivational skills). b. Sitting Heads Boards of trustees and executive coaches need to be attentive to the developments and dynamics cited throughout this paper. They should exhort sitting heads to learn and exercise the skill sets needed to meet the future; it is a question of investing time and resources in human capital -- the head of school. If boards haven't allocated a meaningful professional development budget for the head exclusively, they should do so, post-haste. An investment in managing the head's talent is equal to an investment in the institution itself. It is no different from endowment investing, in which the purpose is to provide intergenerational equity--the notion that future generations will benefit from their education to the same degree as the current generation. (3) Talent Search Last year, the Media Lab at MIT was seeking a new director, and their traditional search produced hundreds of candidates. They were having a problem finding the right 'fit,' however. Their next step was to rethink the process; they began to look for candidates with the qualities they sought in the next director, such as an ability to connect to highlevel contacts around the world, to be thoughtfully spontaneous, to take calculated risks to better understand a given topic, and to be a lateral thinker. In the end, Joichi Ito was tapped to lead the Media Lab. A man with a talent for lateral thinking, Ito sees the big picture, and, with the support of the Media Lab's founder, Nicholas Negraponte, he is not afraid of pursuing it...to the point of creating an internal movement against interdisciplinary work. This nascent movement is being labeled as "antidisciplinary." As Ito explains it, "Interdisciplinary [means] you have a biologist talking to a chemist. Antidisciplinary means you don't get to say you're a biologist. If what you're doing fits within a single discipline, you shouldn't be here."28 Schools should find it interesting that he doesn't think in terms of individual disciplines, but rather in terms of "one big cognitive model. [...] We have tremendous depth and it may look random if you just walk through, but there are consistent narratives here."29 The lesson here for search committees and search consultants is best teased out in a series of questions. How might you more accurately identify talent, relative to the intergenerational needs of your school? Do you truly want the candidate who has been trained for the world of yesteryear, that of easy growth? When you scan a rsum, what should you be seeking? What items should jump out? When you've been accustomed to 27 A summation of Douglas Read, "Navigating the Realm of the High-Potential Employee" Rotman Magazine (Winter 2013) 29-32.
28 29

Lawrence M. Fisher, "A Renegade in the Lab" Briefings on Talent & Leadership 4.14 (2013) 50. Fisher, 51.

 seeking certain kinds of information for years, how do you alter those habits to help identify characteristics you'd like to see in the next head of school? It's far more about seeking specific qualities and characteristics in a candidate than checking off boxes for hierarchical title(s) and traditional line positions, whether you are looking at sitting heads or aspiring heads. It is not a question of throwing out the former ways altogether, but it is very much a question of balancing those ways with new analytical skill sets and new lenses through which to examine candidates so that, over time, schools position themselves as agile learning environments. The moral of the story for talent search is this: if you are seeking 'template candidates,' you're seeking not only talent that the world of the present and immediate future no longer needs...it no longer produces it. The ecosystem that contains the experiences of, by, and for educational leaders has changed already. For an analogy, consider desktop computers, the production of which has declined precipitously over the past ten years. Mobile device production, on the other hand, has increased dramatically. This pole reversal has affected the design of the internet itself. Anyone worth his or her salt now designs for mobile platforms first, then for desktops. The latter have become specialized and they will continue to fade in the face of the broader utility of mobile. To quote Sherlock Holmes, "the parallel is exact."30 Why, in the work that is talent, do we continue to design for desktops?

30

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Empty House" in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903).