Your Department Should Have a Spine and You Need to Name It
I have a theater director friend with whom I occasionally see theater productions. We have had long discussions about his craft, and one of the themes we talk about a lot is the notion of the”spine” of the play. The spine is an agreement throughout the production over what is actually happening in the play. In some ways, it can be considered the interpretation. Why it exists, where it is going, how we are all going to get there together. He says it is his main job as director to get all of the people involved in the play to come to understand the spine in the same way. He claims that as an audience member, he can see when a director has done that, and just as clearly, when the director has failed to do so.
The summer is upon us, and as school leaders, we will have new people in new places of leadership, or maybe returning people in new places. They will be guiding a department, whether as a new dean, a department head, athletic director, or house head, etc. It is important that they truly understand why their department exists, what their department does, and how all the members are going to work to fulfill the goals that the department has.
When I meet with a new leader, I approach them with curiosity about how their minds and emotions work, how they like to show leadership, how they offer support and how they hold folks accountable. I always want to know about what they believe are their failures, and what they learned from those. But soon, I want to see what they think is the purpose of their department.
If they are new to the school, I would want them to have read the documents where we express our thinking. If the person was about to become the chair of the History department, and was new to the school, I’d want to make sure that they have the description and progression of courses throughout the school, and syllabi of each course. If it were a new dean, I would want them to have read the handbook and other relevant documents before we had our first conversation.
If the new leader has been at the school for a while, but is new to the position, the conversation is similar, but the homework is different. Besides making sure they know the essential documents of their department – just being a member of a department may not mean they know about it in the broadest sense – you could ask them to both celebrate and critique the work of the department. (This is not an exercise in shooting down your predecessor, but is a reflection on the work of the department.) Entering into a critical thinking mode could be a useful prelude to what follows.
After I have a sense of their previous leadership experience, how they tend to respond to certain situations, their communication preferences, etc, it is time to have them focus on the spine of their department’s work.
One of the first things I ask for is a mission statement for the department. We’ve all seen our school’s mission statement, and sometimes we feel proud of what it says, and sometimes it feels like marketing without substance. At worst, it can read like cliches assembled by an AI program that was glitching that day. At best, it can be a series of beliefs that has the entire school pointed towards the right place. I‘ve seen both, and certainly was impressed and inspired by the latter.
So, I ask for a paragraph or so that describes the purpose of the department, the work the members do, and most importantly, the results they hope to get (for example, when students feel safe it’s freeing to their expressiveness and learning and joy ensue). My director friend says that it is important that the spine is active, and that it connects everything. In student life, that might mean that you are thinking of the way in which students are greeted on their first day, the way they learn the values of the school, the way they socialize and enjoy each other, the way they line up for lunch, how they learn about the wide array of humans with whom they share the campus. It can embody both means and ends, so long as those things feel congruent and in line with each other, and with that big goal. Those moments do not specifically make their way into a department mission statement, but they do inform the writer about what’s at stake.
The first draft of the department mission statement is almost always too long, but usually the essential parts are there, and need to be freed of excessive verbiage and cluttered concepts. As the mentor/guide, I can ask questions about whether this might be redundant or if that is really describing a mission. But after a draft or two, the new department head has something that helps them think about their new work.
Once we have a working mission statement, I say the following: “Since you are responsible for setting the tone and direction of your department, what will you do?”
And I mean that - what will you do in the first emails you send department members? The first in-person meeting? What will be your words, your questions, your exercises? How will you get to know each of the members of your department, and find out how they tend to think, feel and react? If you just had the dean create a mission statement for the student life department, should the dean have the house heads make a mission statement for the dorm they are running? Maybe…if everyone has to have a similar interpretation of the meaning of the play to make it work, then certainly the house heads, and the floor parents (and maybe the students) all need to find a way to express their goals for this work. The same is true for teachers, and for coaches, etc.
Remember the admonition that the spine be active, and connect everything. An “open door” policy - inviting your people to find you if they ever feel the need - is not active, and it doesn’t connect. As department leader, you need to actively search out your people, and see how they are doing. Waiting for others to enter your “open door” almost certainly guarantees that any problems will be well developed, and harder to solve, by the time they come through that mythical door.
A departmental mission statement exercise moves from thinking about purpose and meaning, to careful consideration of how one would go about fulfilling that mission. I believe that schools chronically under-coach our new leaders, especially middle managers, thinking that they will figure it out, and assuming that they don’t need help from the likes of us. Or, out of a sense of fear and loss of control, we may hover and be too directorial. The school hired this person to lead for a reason – help them discover the purpose of their new work, and allow them to discover and employ action steps that will allow every member of the department to pull together in the same direction. Help them find the spine of the endeavor.