What's the Size of Your Leadership Footprint?

We have all heard of a carbon footprint. Time for Change defines your carbon footprint as the "sum of all emissions of CO2 (carbon dioxide) that were induced by your activities during a given time frame." The challenge with a carbon footprint is to reduce the size of your footprint in order to lessen the impact that our energy use has on the environment (and yes, climate change is real, but that isn't the point here).

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Let's think about the size of your leadership footprint.

What? You might think this is a crazy analogy, but consider that the carbon footprint is basically measuring the impact that your energy consumption is having on the planet. Whether you are a school leader or a classroom leader, you want to have an impact on your students or you wouldn't be in education, so you need to consider the size of your leadership footprint.

Think of your footprint like this - what happens when you are not in the room? As a classroom teacher, have your students internalized your routines, procedures, beliefs, and expectations to the point where they remind one another, help one another, and hold one another accountable? What is the impact that you have on other classroom leaders throughout the building? Do they look to you to set the pace or the expectations for classroom management or academic rigor? For school leaders, how does the vision live in your school? When you are not there, how is the vision reflected in the everyday work of the school?

I think about this idea of evidence of impact all of the time in my work as a school leader. I have watched so many urban schools get started on the process of turnaround, only to lose a key classroom leader, lose funding, or lose a leadership team member and experience huge setbacks as a result. When we experience staffing changes, we have to consider the footprint in order to plan adequately for sustainable programming and ongoing impact. I know that when I left the classroom to pursue administration, the impact was significant because I had a really big footprint as a teacher leader. It is important to plan for the development of teacher leaders so that you can always manage the leadership of the vision while also creating opportunities for classroom leaders to stretch their growing edge.

Consider your best teachers. The ones who have leadership positions in the school, who hold the history of the families, who earn the admiration and respect of their colleagues and the students, and who get results. Those teachers have a huge footprint in terms of how you are moving your school vision forward and implementing positive change. Those teachers are irreplaceable. If you haven't read the report called The Irreplaceables by TNTP (http://tntp.org/), I highly recommend it. It underscores the idea of a classroom leader's footprint. Developing and supporting classroom teachers to have a big footprint in your school is essential in school turnaround efforts. Make sure that you are recognizing and acknowledging those teacher leaders because you cannot afford to lose them.

Evidence of our impact. That's what we are looking for. The size of your leadership footprint indicates the impact that you have on everything in your school. What's the size of your leadership footprint?