69Chapter Six
Let Your People Fly
On a side wall in Ms. Valletta’s office is a display of cartoons and sayings
collected over several years. She wanted to project an image of someone
who was not totally serious, someone who could see the humor inherent
in her profession. A favorite saying, given special prominence on the wall,
was “90 percent of the job of the manager is hiring the right people; the
other 10 percent is letting them do what you hired them for.”
This chapter is devoted to “letting them do what you hired them for.”
As an educational leader, you quickly learn that you cannot do everything
yourself. The most important responsibility of the school, competent in-
struction, is carried out by your teachers, not you. Some principals try to
do everything. Such educational leaders log impressive work hours, from
early in the morning to late into the evening. They become microman-
agers, checking, revising, and improving everyone else’s work to ensure
that everything comes out perfect. If this is your style, you are welcome
to it. It may work for you and may help support the delusion that if you
control everything nothing will ever go wrong.
School leaders need to learn not to micromanage and to be satisfied
with the less-than-perfect. They need to trust those who work under their
supervision, until such time as someone demonstrates to them that he or
she cannot be trusted to do a job right. Leaders take a risk in doing this,
but it is worth it. They want their staff to feel that they trust them as pro-
fessionals and that their work is valued.
There are, of course, some limitations to this. For example, school leaders
will want to personally compose the summaries of all meetings they attend.
They learn that this is one task they can rarely leave to anyone else.