Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

Seth Godin is one of the blogs I always read.  I love the way he constantly comes up with a stream of gems worth listening to:

Frightened, clueless or uninformed?
In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you’re going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.

Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it’s a temporary state.

Clueless people don’t know what to do and they don’t know that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.

And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.

The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared….

Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.

and:

The relentless search for “tell me what to do”

If you’ve ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.

People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: “If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I’m safe.”

When asked, resist.

Love it!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:17 pm and is filed under school leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.