This week’s topic is organizational culture: specifically, the difference between an organizational culture of compliance and an organizational culture of performance. This is a subject dear to the Chancellor’s heart, and one that makes its way into many of his speeches. In many ways, though, I don’t think it’s an easy distinction, especially when you work in an environment like education, which is highly regulated, subject to countless rules and regulations, and bound by complex collective bargaining agreements. How, for pete’s sake, can we move away from a culture of compliance in a world like this? We are clearly not going to stop complying with all our legal, regulatory, and contractual mandates. So what does this really mean?
I think it’s about a difference in the way we approach problems. As a graduate student, I did some research on a concept called “enabling bureaucracy” in schools. (Enabling bureaucracy is a term used in organizational effectiveness research.) What I found was that schools that had enabling bureaucracies had better academic achievement than those that didn’t. Schools with enabling bureaucracies created structures, rules, practices, and attitudes designed to make it easier for teachers to work effectively. There was no lack of organization, clarity, or discipline. There might even be lots of structure and very well-defined processes. But the consistent design principle was to make it easier for teachers to be effective. Principals who created enabling bureaucracies in their schools created clear lines of authority, organized school schedules to support teaching and learning, developed and communicated priorities, did away with (or ignored) needless paperwork, and made sure the school’s procedures were designed so that they did not interfere with teaching priorities.
I suspect that the longer an organization has existed, the more rules and paperwork it often has. This makes sense; we’re much better at creating rules and paperwork than we are at killing them. Most rules and forms just die a slow death from disuse, as the canny operators figure out what they can ignore. Humans are wired to make rules. Have you noticed that whenever something goes wrong, our first inclination is to say: gotta have a rule against this! After a hundred years or so, you’ve got a pretty big rule book. We also like to design our processes so that we’re sure the things we are personally accountable for won’t go wrong (or at least if they do we won’t be blamed)---making sure everybody else out there acts right and doesn’t mess up our stuff (or at least leaves a clear evidentiary trail if they do). I think these are the dynamics that ultimately bring down large organizations.
This is the challenge I see for us: developing and maintaining structures, rules, systems and processes that do good things like provide for clear, timely decisions with all necessary input; capture important organizational knowledge so that it can be shared; give people helpful support and information; encourage consistency and quality; and prevent unacceptable system risks; while keeping student learning as our top design priority. Principals need to be leading schools for student achievement, and teachers need to be fully engaged in creating effective teaching. Everything we do has to be done in a way that keeps these goals paramount. When we can do that, I think we’ll have a culture of performance.