Back to School for Collaborative Leadership.

Paul Houston, AASA's executive director, often talks about how effective leaders of the 21st century will be superintendents of education rather than superintendents of schools. They will be community leaders operating on behalf of the instructional and learning needs of children and their families. They will rally the resources, prick the conscience and focus the energy of individuals and institutions from every sector of their communities so as to educate their children.

Superintendents of education will be boundary-spanning advocates and administrators for whom the schools will be only one locus of their work. They will be measured far less by the effectiveness and efficiency of the administration of their buildings and staffs and far more by the educational achievements of their students (even, perhaps, by the things students accomplish long after they have left formal education).

They will be collaborative leaders: If you follow the workday schedule of today's superintendents, you will find that many already are.

Learning on the Job

Superintendents have three influential constituencies: boards, teaching and nonteaching staffs and the individuals and institutions that comprise their communities. Superintendents are the conduits, catalysts and executors for ensuring that education reflects the will of the board, the skill of the teachers and the best investment of the entire community. This challenge, which is almost never without conflicting self-interests between competing constituencies, is the most compelling collaborative responsibility of educational leaders.

But we must contend with a harrowing little secret as we reach out to build partnerships or are called upon by our peers to take the lead in communitywide collaborations. None of us was taught how to be a collaborative leader. Most of us find ourselves limited by our lack of training and perspective. We tend to draw on our intuitive interpersonal skills. We've never been taught the complex interpersonal skills and inter-institutional management principles that are needed to build and sustain effective collaborations. There are no doctoral curricula in collaborative leadership and there are few places to turn for training.

As we prepare to become 21" century superintendents of education, the challenge will be to grow the art of collaborative leadership into a science, to identify the teachable and learnable skills of collaborative leadership, then to role model and teach them.

Core Principles

What follows are four core principles of collaborative leadership that have been inferred from work in hundreds of nonprofit and educational agencies. As short excerpts from Collaboration Skills for Educators and Nonprofit Leaders, they certainly do not constitute a formula for success. They are offered to promote your thinking about what you can do to build and manage productive collaborations:

* Principle 1: Develop and refine a common vision or shared goal around which people can rally and find their own self-interests with ongoing renewal and depth of self-identification.

Take your time in clarifying the purpose of your collaboration. Set your sights on a purpose that is worth your while, that will earnestly benefit from collaboration and is large enough to warrant the collaborative investment of others.

Is your purpose clear and achievable? Is it important (that is, is it a big enough lever to make a significant difference)? Can you explain it clearly (can you sell it) to the collaborative partners you are going to need? If these criteria hold, then patiently carry that purpose forward through the iterative process of expanding and refining it until it reflects the interests and needs of those partners you want to bring into the collaboration.

* Principle 2: Try hard to see the collaborative purpose and your own leadership style through the eyes of those you would lead.

Through their eyes you will see how to attach their self-interests to your vision and the ongoing operations of the collaboration. You also will learn what they need to get out of their collaborative relationship--and out of you--in order for them to invest in the collaboration's success.

This demands knowledge and skills that span the boundaries of sector, gender, ethnicity, race, preference and more. It demands the heady confidence to see yourself as others see you and the will to make adjustments so as to build more effective relationships.

Building Relationships

* Principle 3: The success of the collaboration rests on your ability to build, manage and maintain essential relationships, one at a time.

As collaborative leaders, we are responsible for creating an environment in which the talents, leadership skills and problem-solving capacities of our diverse partners may flourish, emerge and benefit our collective strivings toward our shared goal. Pick your partners thoughtfully and cultivate their relationship. Becoming collaborative partners is not unlike becoming a little married.

* Principle 4: Become the institutionalized worry because when it comes down to it, if you don't make sure things get done in the collaboration (from big decisions to routine clerical and maintenance responsibilities), then they won't get done.

Until you hire paid staff, the work of the collaboration will always be everybody's second (or third) priority--except perhaps yours. Every partner is, first, an officer in their home institution, a teacher in their own classroom, a parent of their own children.

As central as the mission of the collaboration may become in their lives, we can never count on another to care as much for the success of the collaboration as we do. The buck stops with us (even as the glory will go to all the collaborative partners). So roll up your sleeves and pay attention--more attention than anybody else.

Hank Rubin is founder and president of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership, 202 S. State St., Suite 1302, Chicago, Ill. 60604-1905. He is the author of Collaboration Skills for Educators and Nonprofit Leaders, published by Lyceum Books.