The Serial Thinker Blog

Managing Attitudes: A True Leadership Test

 

When the situation sucks, it is up to the leader to focus the negative emotions in a positive direction. Being little Suzie Sunshine and denying the suck is bullshit and will turn your people against you immediately. Whether they say it out loud or not, what they're saying in their heads is, "Shut the fuck up. This sucks and you can't blow enough sunshine up our asses to make it suck any less." Going negative is also a bad call. While it will gain short-term agreement from the people on your team it will lead them into a non-productive mindset focused on the suck rather than on the tasks that must be accomplished. 

So what should a leader do?

Acknowledge the suck and drive on. 

Yeah, this situation sucks, and there's not much that we can do to minimize or change the suck, but we have work to do, so how can we join together, like the warriors that we are, and beat this bad bitch into the ground. THAT'S what a leader does. 

No Food Police in Schools!

The image was pulled from a blog post about how the school used these notes to 'inform and educate' parents about healthier food choices. One one hand schools complain about not having enough time to provide basic education and on the other we forge into areas we don't belong. I have colleagues who micromanage their students' snack choices just like this -- not to help manage allergic reactions -- but as an extension of their own food preferences. If the kids bring it from home, it's none of our business. 

 

 

Workers Replaced by Robots. Thanks Union!

Also in today's news -- a robot has been developed that can pick apples. Guess who is going to be displaced? That's right union organizers, the workers who you priced out of a job by lobbying for an increased minimum wage. Now it is more cost effective to buy a machine than to employ humans. I hope you're satisfied.

Obamanomics in the Classroom

Imagine the uproar if I sent this letter to the parents of my Accelerated Math Students.

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Dear Parents,

In an effort to mirror the seemingly popular Obama economic plan I am going to revamp the grading policy in my classroom. If your student earns grades that are in the top ten percent of the class, I am going to redistribute 39 percent of his or her score to the "less fortunate" students in the class. This will create a more level playing field and will create opportunities for the students who find it more difficult to achieve in school than your students do. Your child may do extra credit work to boost their end of term grade, but any additional work will be scored at a special "capital gains" rate with 55 percent of score from this extra work being redistributed to their classmates.

To ensure that there is not an achievement divide between the students in my classroom, a performance cap of 85 percent will be imposed upon all work submitted. Any score that exceeds 85 percent will have the overage redistributed to students who performed less well on that assignment. This will prevent a small group of students from earning far more points than their classmates thereby avoiding a chasm between the "haves" and the "have-nots". If, at any time, a student's total grade points equal more than 2.5 times that of any classmate, his or her grade points will be adjusted to eliminate this disparity.

By the end of the grading period this redistribution strategy should place all student scores within one standard deviation of the mean creating a more equitable overall grade distribution.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

 

Miles To Go....

I was raised with the philosophy that there is no such thing as working too hard. That any challenge could be overcome with the proper amount of effort and desire. As I sit here at my desk night after night working away at the endless stream of papers, assignments, projects, and other obligations, I feel like a latter-day Sisyphus pushing an endless stream of papers from one side of the desk to the other, condemned by the gods never to reach the bottom of the stack.

In a wicked twist of mathematical irony this would actually seem to be true. If one calculates the time required to perform all of the necessary duties and divides it by the time available one would find that there that there is literally an insufficient amount of time to do everything.  Ugh.