Highline Superintendent Susan Enfield: Energizer-in-Chief Extraordinaire
Our readers will recall that the March 31 post at this blog, “Crises Demand Energizers-in-Chief at All Levels” (https://boardsavvysuperintendent.com/crises-demand-energizers-in-chief-at-all-levels/), describes chief executives such as superintendents who wear the Energizer-in-Chief hat in tackling the twin challenges of education and …
Virtual Board Standing Committees: More Than Just a Half-Way House
“Could our five-person school board be realistically divided into two, much less three, standing committees? Wouldn’t a committee with only two board members lack credibility?” I expected the question, which came right after I’d presented my slides on board standing …
Energizer-in-Chief Redux: Stakeholder Relationship Management
“Incredible. We must be talking about 40 or more stakeholders.” This was one of the responses to the question I asked in the daylong governance work session I was facilitating, after the breakout group dealing with stakeholder relations had completed …
Crises Demand Energizers-in-Chief at All Levels
“The fog of despair hung over the land. One out of every four American workers lacked a job. Factories that had once darkened the skies with smoke stood ghostly and silent, like extinct volcanoes. In October the New York City …
Top-Flight Performance Won’t Always Keep the Relationship With Your School Board Healthy
When I walked in Rich’s office for our weekly project review meeting, I found him slumped at his desk looking distraught. When I asked him what’d happened, he just said “take a look,” handing me a form. It was the …
Making Superintendent Evaluation a Relationship Adhesive
As always, I learned as much as I taught from the superintendents participating in the preconference workshop I presented on February 12 at AASA’s National Conference on Education in San Diego – “Cementing the Board-Superintendent Governing Partnership.” The diverse, high-level …
Bake Your Board Cake First, Then Worry About the Icing
A sorely disappointed superintendent and I were talking a couple of months ago. She, her school board, and her senior administrators had gone through an intensive weekend retreat a six weeks earlier. She explained that it’d been put together to …
Implementing is a Far Cry From Authorizing in the K-12 Governance Business
One of the more egregious errors I made early in my career as a K-12 governance consultant and coach was allowing myself to be pressured into facilitating a daylong board capacity building work session involving all board members and the …
Kick Off 2020 By Updating Your Superintendent Governance Strategy
Preparing for a recent superintendent coaching session, I fine-tuned the process that I’d developed several years ago for updating the Superintendent Governance Strategy. All really board-savvy superintendents know that governance (encompassing the work of the board and the board- superintendent …
Innovators-in-Chief in Action: Disney’s Robert Iger and Iowa City Schools’ Steve Murley
“What can I do to get my board meaningfully engaged in leading innovation and change in my district?” I hear variations of this very important question quite often from superintendents in my one-on-one governance coaching sessions and educational workshops. There’s …
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