Guiding School Culture

Examples projects include:

• Redesigned employee and faculty guidebooks to reduce the faculty/staff divide by organizing material and policies in a way that demonstrated similarities and provided clear, logical rationale for any necessarily differentiated roles or standards.
• Reduced patterns and cultures of distrust by clarifying organizational structure, job responsibilities, and decision-making processes—building trust and collegiality by encouraging every employee to understand their own decision-rights, sources of authority, and areas of accountability.
• Breathed greater intention into old traditions and retuned and redesigned them as forward looking and instructive shared experiences for students.
• Developed an innovation program founded in design thinking that helped transition students’ mindset from traditional, goal-oriented learning to a learning culture that supports innovative, exploratory, deeper learning.
• Focused and shortened the mission and vision statements at an elite school, making it more memorable and quotable, creating an on-campus echo chamber which focused even ornery employees on the school’s central purpose.
• Studied, clarified, and provided a system to balance faculty workload across a wide variety of assignments, building a greater sense of equity and personalization into duty schedules.
• Redesigned the language and logical structure of the core curriculum, providing crystal-clarity on which course design, assessments, advisor comments, and grades could be based—and allowing the admissions and marketing departments to share a crisp, clear message of difference.
• Facilitated the creation of values statements and guiding principles that built organizational alignment and serve as meaningful, daily touchstones for administrative and programmatic decision-making.
• Renovated a school’s governance systems, evolving them beyond mere procedure to bring a mission- and purpose-orientation to the board’s documentation and performance. Consulted on how administrator reports and pre-read materials could be structured to improve the meaningfulness, efficiency, and effectiveness of board meetings and trustee time.
• Embedded key patterns and statements into student culture—through symbology, marketing influence, and formal policy—to the shift student mindsets from a focus on the accumulation of personal social capital to a culture of community responsibility and service to others.
• Recommended key adjustments to student rules and policies—particularly those focused around disciplinary responses—to reduce the occurrence of “snitch culture,” restorative justice, and promote respect, honor, and concern for others.
• Identified limiting beliefs and coached leadership to adopt new mental models, breaking a logjam of dysfunctional organizational patterns.
• Created comprehensive handbooks for faculty and staff, ensuring a clear understanding of both the spirit and letter of the rules, ensuring consistent implementation and enforcement which directly improved the students’ sense of fairness and equity at the school.
• Designed material support, messaging campaigns, and wayfinding systems (signage, maps, seasonal banners, etc.) as a platform to transform an unapproachable school into a more inclusive, welcoming culture.
• Improved the rate of trustee and board development through the development a comprehensive trustee handbook that covers the entire arc of trusteeship, setting clear expectations before election, making on-boarding more consistent and efficient, and promoting trustee excellence by serving as a repository of institutional memory.
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Each of these innovative, system oriented solutions began with a clear understanding of the problem and a clear articulation of the goals. Contact us. We’d love to talk about your project.