Build or Buy?

The cover story in this weekend's NY Times Magazine, "Building a Better Teacher," intrigued me. I'm interested in the country's educational system from any number of perspectives: as a parent, as an employer, as a citizen, I am a stakeholder. Recent studies have illuminated the significance that the quality of the teacher has on the educational outcomes, far outweighing other factors such as curriculum (teaching to the test), class size, race, class, or ability. 

"Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year."

One popular response to this data is to create strategies for employing more of the 'good' teachers: raising salary offers to attract the best and the brightest from industry, making it easier to remove the ineffective teachers. The downside is that this is not scalable. The country has 3.7 million teachers. If you only select those who are naturally talented and skilled in teaching, how do you staff this many positions?

Doug Lemov, featured in the article, advocates a different strategy, to build rather than buy teaching skills. His extensive observation-based research indicates that excellent teachers -- those who have measurably superior student results -- all employ specific behaviors that enable them to engage students in learning. (If you're interested, I suggest visiting the article online so that you can watch the short videos of teachers employing some of these behaviors. I can't say that I've ever witnessed classroom experiences like these.) His book Teach Like a Champion will be published in April, and I can't wait to read it. 

I think it's possible that there is something to learn from this to inform management development programs in industry. To achieve consistently high performance requires not just great processes but also great managers and leaders. A high performance company can only afford managers capable of achieving high performance through others -- just like, I would think, a school could only employ highly effective teachers to enable their students to achieve high scores in standardized tests. One way to get there is to buy the talent, and performance manage out any manager who is not a great manager. This isn't an easily scalable strategy, and it limits how much the company can promote internally, which increases employee turnover, which further limits the company. The other strategy of course is to build great managers. Lots of companies, including the one where I work, have waded deep into this strategy. The challenge  remains how to do it effectively.

I've read my fair share of business books that attempt to teach management skills, but in reading this article I was struck by the thought that there could be a taxonomy of behaviors that differentiate effective teachers (managers). Teachers need to hear not just 'get control of the class' but how to do this with reproducible behaviors such as hand signals, timing of transitions, cold calling (asking for student responses). I'm not suggesting that managers treat their employees like children; I am suggesting that adult human beings probably respond to body cues and verbal communication no differently than they did when they were younger. I don't think that people become different in kind as they age. If as children we need positive feedback, clear instruction, physical engagement, and context in order to learn, why should we not need the same as we mature?

Although mentoring is thought to be a highly impactful means to develop managers, I am now questioning that assumption. A person who is naturally talented may have little awareness of his own behaviors that enable his success. Talent allows a person to remain unconscious of the skills that increase effectiveness. If the mentored student is not highly observant himself, and the mentor isn't conscious of his skills, the only lesson learned may be to emulate the mentor. The effective manager undoubtedly demonstrates consistently behaviors that support others to succeed with his management; with awareness, he could help other managers learn how to do the same.

To make something reproducible, you must be able to define and describe its process. A taxonomy of management development would provide that nuts and bolts description: how to write an e-mail, how to communicate direction, how to conduct a performance review. If this seems too reductive, perhaps you're holding onto a hope that management is an art. Leadership may well be. Management, however, should be reproducible and scalable, and very definitely not driven by personality or unpredictability. When I watched the videos of effective teachers in action, I realized that these were undoubtedly people of great talent and expertise in their subjects, but what differentiated them from other teachers was the level of engagement between them and their students, and how attuned they were to each other. When we in business speak of alignment and employee engagement, surely these images impart the essence of those meanings. "Joy and Structure" - what could a company achieve that melded both of these seamlessly into its daily work?