Learning from Business

I'm a big believer in learning from the successes and failures of organizations whether they're public schools are other types of businesses. Today's lesson comes from WEASEL Corp.

About a year ago, an upper level manager at WEASEL Corp. decided to let the worker bees in her division decide an issue by voting. There were two perspectives on the issue and both sides presented their case.

After the vote, the WEASEL manager wanted everyone to agree that there wouldn't be any complaining about the decision since there was a vote. Those on the losing side objected since they knew problems would arise as a result of the decision.

Sure enough six months later there were complaints, but not from the opponents of the decision. The complaining came from the people who had voted for the decision and now had buyers remorse. Those who orginally opposed the decision weren't complaining because things turned out exactly how they expected.

One of the lessons learned from this story is that some people support a position in deferrence to authority at the peril of the organization. In this case, people voted for the option favored by the WEASEL manager because they didn't want to be seen as opposing management. Those types of people are dangerous for school administrators because they may not raise issues that turn out to be problems later on.

School administrators should surround themselves with people who will tell them when they're about to make a mistake. That's not to say that administrators have to always follow their advice. What it means is that administrators should gather information from diverse perspectives to base their decisions.

It takes a confident administrator to listen to those who disagree with them and then use their counsel to make decisions.