CEO-centric evaluation: turning superintendent assessment into a more powerful tool of partnership with the board.

The setting is Pleasantville, a mid-size Midwestern suburban school district with 9,500 students and a proud tradition of active parent involvement and strong public support for the schools. Mary Vicenzi was recruited by Pleasantville's nine-member school board, which was concerned above all else, unanimously and emphatically, with the need to develop modern management systems aimed at getting costs under control and regaining public confidence, which had been badly shaken during her predecessor's long tenure.

Although a charismatic leader who inspired the trust and commitment of both administrators and faculty, Henry Franklin, the previous superintendent, had allowed financial planning and management, procurement and contract administration and other critical district systems to fall badly out of date--without board members being consciously aware. A series of scathing newspaper articles on district mismanagement broke the back of the relationship, and the board sent Franklin on his way to other leadership opportunities.

Vicenzi got the message loudly and clearly. Nothing was subtle about her new board's expectations. "We want a Mr. or Ms. Inside," she was told by the executive committee during the interview process, "someone really tough who can get this system back in shape administratively speaking. We want a superintendent who will keep his or her nose to the administrative grindstone, getting the system shipshape, while we reach out to the community."

That's what they landed when Vicenzi accepted the post. She was a no-nonsense administrative system builder with the knowledge and tenacity required to put things in good running order. And that's what she did over her first three years on the job. The district's capacity to project expenditures and revenues over the long run had been significantly strengthened, and the systems for financial, contract and human resource management had been thoroughly overhauled and were humming along.

The school district's educational performance didn't suffer because of Vicenzi's administrative focus during this period. Standardized testing results saw significant improvement and the dropout rate fell during her watch. The three reasonably thorough evaluations of superintendent performance conducted by the board's executive committee had uncovered no serious performance problems.

Yet all was not well at the top in the Pleasantville system. By the time Vicenzi was beginning her fourth year as CEO, her working relationship with the Pleasantville board was seriously frayed and close to the breaking point. Several board members had begun talking about the need to recruit a new superintendent. How could things have gotten to this point? Vicenzi had done what she had been directed to do, there were no dramatic community issues bedeviling the district, and educational performance was steadily improving.

A Facilitated Retreat

Pleasantville and Mary Vicenzi are pseudonyms for a real-life school district and superintendent who successfully weathered a difficult period after the board and superintendent revised its superintendent evaluation process to reflect what I term "CEO-centric" goals. These leadership goals dealt with the internal leadership, community involvement and diplomatic role of the superintendent and the creative involvement of the board.

Four years into what had become an unhappy marriage, the board realized that the superintendent's singularly rigid nose-to-the-grindstone approach to problem solving had taken a toll on the human relationships because Vicenzi failed to include input from key stakeholders.

Together the board and superintendent refashioned expectations for superintendent performance that included these critical dimensions.

Fortunately, neither Vicenzi nor her board members wanted the relationship to erode to the point of no return, and so, feeling desperate, they held the first full-fledged board-superintendent retreat in the school district's history. Meeting for two intensive days at a nearby state park lodge with the help of a professional facilitator, they sorted through the relationship issues.

Here is what transpired: A majority of board members said they found Vicenzi's leadership style extremely irritating. As one board member put it, "You're really top-notch at your job, Mary, and you always bring us well-thought-out recommendations, which we do appreciate. But you're too rigid, and you don't leave us with any wiggle room. It's your way or the highway, at least it feels that way. I wonder why you always have to do the ultimate in finished staff work without involving us before it's all polished up and ready for action. I'm beginning to feel like the board's a fifth wheel!"

Several board members believed Vicenzi was neglecting her diplomatic responsibilities, not paying enough attention to winning friends and influencing people in the community. One board member told of a recent conversation with a couple of city council members who said they found the superintendent elitist and aloof, and they resented it. They said that they couldn't remember the last time Vicenzi had sat with the council to discuss school affairs. Another board member cited the superintendent's lack of visible involvement in the chamber of commerce's initiative to create and retain jobs, arguing Vicenzi was paying too little attention to the critical role of the schools in community and economic development.

Another issue that emerged was the growing perception that Vicenzi wasn't a visionary-enough educational leader to rally the troops to greater effort. A board member commented that she had gotten calls from administrators in a couple of schools claiming the superintendent was never to be seen in the classrooms or hallways, that she was becoming a mysterious and somewhat sinister behind-the-scenes CEO.

The retreat achieved its primary purpose. This professional marriage was saved. Armed with detailed input, Vicenzi was able to re-focus her priorities and become the kind of CEO that the school board now obviously wanted. But the point of this true story isn't the value of retreats as a relationship-building tool (although they can be useful). Rather, what's notable about this story is that the issues threatening the relationship had not been identified and dealt with in the board's three evaluations of the superintendent's performance. The reason was clear, as the board's executive committee realized when it examined the design for evaluating Vicenzi's performance: The evaluation system was too general to uncover issues that were CEO-centric.

A Sharper Tool

A CEO-centric evaluation approach basically answers this question: What particular leadership targets will our superintendent devote significant individual time and attention to achieving over the coming year, beyond his of her overall responsibility for district performance? What, in other words, will our superintendent's particular "value-added" contribution be in terms of leadership over the next 12 months?

How could the Pleasantville school board have taken its evaluation of superintendent performance to the next level, making the process a sharper tool for partnership building and maintenance?

While most school boards take seriously their responsibility to monitor and evaluate the performance of their chief executive, few have fleshed out the evaluation process sufficiently to realize its full potential as a tool for building a cohesive board-superintendent team. The challenge is to go beyond evaluation of districtwide educational and financial performance, taking a close look at the superintendent's own leadership targets and paying close attention to the human dimension of the partnership.

Indeed, teamwork is the name of the leadership game at the top, and the long-term health and vitality of the school district heavily depend on the board and superintendent building and maintaining a partnership that is close, positive, productive and capable of withstanding the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Unfortunately, board-superintendent leadership teams are all too fragile, prone to deteriorate rapidly if not explicitly developed and meticulously managed.

This dangerous fragility is the result of a number of factors:

* The changing and challenging environment for public education hurls an unending stream of thorny educational, financial and political issues at the team, subjecting it to never-ending stress and testing it to the max;

* Superintendents and board members, tending to be high-achieving "Type A's" who are headstrong, demanding and impatient, are not the easiest group to meld into a cohesive partnership;

* An adversarial tradition in public education militates against board-superintendent teamwork. Many board members bring to the boardroom the attitude that their pre-eminent job is to "watch the critters so they don't steal the store," while many superintendents believe one of their primary responsibilities is to protect educational decision making and administrative prerogatives from board meddling. Teamwork doesn't naturally flourish where these attitudes have taken root.

* School board members and superintendents often bring to the boardroom a tenuous grasp of the governing business, being unsure exactly what the leadership work consists of and how to go about getting it done. If we don't know what teamwork should be producing at the top, then building a cohesive board-superintendent team is that much more difficult.

The latter point has been dramatically brought home to me over the years as I have asked participants in large workshops on governing to show by raised hands if they have had a comprehensive course in graduate school on the work of the school board. Even in groups of 500 superintendents and board members, I've never seen more than six of seven hands.

Defying the Odds

Team building at the top in school districts is no small challenge. It is accomplished in the face of daunting challenges. But there are high-functioning board-superintendent leadership teams in school districts around the country, so we know that the odds can be successfully defied. These leadership teams tend to share four characteristics.

First, a board-savvy superintendent brings to the partnership in-depth governing knowledge and a positive attitude. Board-savvy superintendents not only know what is involved in doing governing work at a high level, they also see the board not as an adversary to be corralled and watched carefully, but as a precious asset to be fully developed and deployed on behalf of their district.

Second, a school board's members are actively involved in doing high-impact governing work that makes a significant difference. School board members who feel strong satisfaction in and firm ownership of their leadership work make far better partners than board members who aren't sure what they should be doing on the governing front and consequently feel little satisfaction or ownership.

Third, a school board standing committee is explicitly responsible for managing the board-superintendent partnership.

Fourth, a well-designed process for board evaluation of the superintendent is implemented in a full and timely fashion.

The Pre-eminent Factor

Board evaluation of superintendent performance is the pre-eminent factor in building and sustaining a board-superintendent partnership that can meet the tremendous leadership challenges in today's rapidly changing world.

Most school boards do a respectable job of evaluating their superintendents in terms of districtwide financial and educational performance, and this is no mean feat in light of the complexity of the public educational enterprise. Many boards make sure their planning committee works closely with the superintendent and senior executives in mapping out an operational planning process that culminates not only in adoption of next year's budget, but also in formal approval of educational and financial goals that provide the basic foundation for superintendent evaluation.

But if a superintendent's evaluation process stops there at the system performance level, the evaluation process will be too blunt a tool, falling far short of its tremendous potential as a relationship builder. Indeed, failing to address the superintendent's more particular leadership targets in the evaluation process and paying too little attention to the health of the relationship itself are invitations to a broken marriage at the top, even when districtwide performance is satisfactory.

Defining Targets

In the case of Pleasantville and Mary Vicenzi, the board and superintendent worked jointly to devise a fleshed-out evaluation process that would do a more effective job of sustaining a relationship. Superintendent evaluation has been sharpened as a tool for partnership development and preservation, building several major features into the process.

The single most important feature of superintendent evaluation that functions as a relationship building tool is the use of CEO-centric performance targets, in addition to the usual districtwide educational and financial targets.

The board's executive or governance committee and superintendent must reach detailed agreement on these superintendent leadership targets before moving far into the new year. The primary source is obviously the superintendent, who should recommend CEO-centric targets to the committee. Another important source is the committee's assessment of current-year superintendent performance, which will surface issues that might merit serious attention by the superintendent during the coming year.

Vicenzi and the Pleasantville board agreed to develop CEO-centric targets in the following major areas:

* Targets directly related to the board-superintendent partnership, including superintendent support for board capacity building and operations and the nature of board-superintendent interaction.

Vicenzi agreed to play an active, leading role in implementing the more effective board standing committee structure that had been designed at the governance retreat. She promised the district's strategic planning process would involve the board earlier and more creatively in the process, primarily through an annual strategic work session at which the board would have hands-on involvement in updating the district's vision, identifying strategic issues facing the district and brainstorming possible initiatives to address the issues. The superintendent committed herself to ensuring the first strategic work session would be a major step forward in terms of board involvement.

* Targets related to external relations and the superintendent's diplomatic role.

Vicenzi reached agreement with her board on two primary CEO-centric targets for the coming year: First, she would speak at least once a quarter to a civic organization in the community, working from a list she and her board compiled. Second, she would become an active participant, along with the board president, in the chamber's economic development initiative, making sure the school system's views were well-represented and the schools were formally positioned in final reports as a critical economic development resource deserving high-priority community attention.

* Targets related to internal leadership and management.

Now that the major management systems had been thoroughly overhauled, Vicenzi could devote less attention to internal management. However, she agreed with the board to focus considerable time on achieving three CEO-centric targets: significantly reducing administrative staff turnover at the mid-level, which had become an expensive problem for the district; working closely with the principal of one of the two middle schools to repair serious morale problems among faculty; and implementing administrator-faculty educational improvement task forces in every building in the district aimed at strengthening standardized test scores.

Overcoming Resistance

Many superintendents will find some resistance to negotiating detailed CEO-centric leadership targets with their boards, primarily because it will have a dangerous feel, appearing to invite the board to cross the line from policy matters into the realm of pure executive management and administration. To many, it will raise the specter of board micromanagement.

Having heard this concern raised countless times in my governance workshops over the years, I well know how strong the resistance can be. My response is simple: A superintendent who wants a close, positive, productive and long-lasting partnership with his or her board really has no choice. The fact is, only by expanding the evaluation process to include an in-depth dialogue on and evaluation of the superintendent's CEO-centric targets can you deal openly with the issues at the heart of a strong relationship.

Not only will an expanded evaluation process not result in micromanagement,

the more cohesive strategic leadership team that is a primary product of the more complete evaluation process will actually work against board meddling in administrative matters.

Doug Eadie is president of Doug Eadie & Co., 4375 Wheatland Way, Palm Harbor, FL 34685. E-mil: [e-mail]. He is the author of Eight Keys to an Extraordinary Board-Superintendent Partnership.