III. Leadership/Management Style

Findings

The leadership of the school is responsible for setting the tone for the institution based on established criteria provided by the legislature and the Board of Trustees. The position of the Executive Director is a critical job as this individual must guide the school forward while never losing sight of the day-to-day operations and needs of the school community. To paraphrase a popular statement, "A school is the length of the shadow thrown by the director." At NCSSM that shadow must be tall and wide, encompassing a mission that includes internal development as well as external promotions of its valuable educational product. The leadership is successful when it is viewed as fair and considerate of the diversity of those who are led, and values open exchange of ideas and dialogue in order to make this forward progress.

The Commission's six-month study suggests that the Executive Director lacks important communication and leadership skills needed for an innovative, academically intensive, student-centered school like NCSSM. These needs are all the more important as NCSSM moves from a unique educational experiment to a more mature academic institution and from a single campus to a model of technology-based distance learning for multiple public school sites in North Carolina.

The residential or core campus must not be neglected or its importance downplayed as the school's outreach efforts are strengthened. If the "home base" is not healthy, it cannot be an effective model for academic outreach.

In general the Commission finds that the Executive Director has not been able to forge a community of faculty, administration and students strongly committed to a well understood and enhanced mission of excellence based on trust, respect, leadership support and responsiveness to the needs of all -

There is still some anger about how the director was hired and received during the early times when he first came to the school. Not only do too many of the long time faculty and staff refuse to let go of the past, but this distressful fact also applies to the Executive Director.

These broad conclusions are based on specific observations and discussions with NCSSM faculty and staff both in public and in private. Repeatedly, the commission heard about the "old" versus the "new" which causes real concerns about the ability of the community to work together as a team. Recognizing that critics may be more willing to speak out than those who are neutral or supportive, we found few positive commentaries about the tone and tenor on campus. While there has been some improvement recently, there remains on campus a fear of punishment/retribution for open, candid disagreement with the administration.

Specific concerns about the Executive Director include:

Recommendations

  1. The school was developed on principles of openness, inquiry, intellectual vigor, discovery and debate. The board needs to look at this and determine innovative ways to make sure that NCSSM retains its cutting edge reputation and indeed strengthens it.
  2. The leadership must set the tone and the example for the campus to follow. Any compromise on issues of fairness -- whether real or perceived -- or any reluctance or slowness in tackling the complex issues relating to diversity leads to low morale, lack of clear purpose, and drifting.
  3. Some community building is now underway. However, the implementation of the recommendations of the community building report has been moving at a distressingly slow pace. This could be interpreted as it having a low priority with the administration and the board.
  4. Team-building needs to be emphasized for the entire staff and faculty.
  5. Regular employee climate surveys need to be initiated. There should be concrete mechanisms for consideration of all suggestions and reporting on decisions made on each one. The surveys should identify what is going well and what can be improved. Results should be discussed with all units; in addition, action plans should be developed. The surveys should be totally anonymous. They were not in the most recent one, thus resulting in a low response and leading to a feeling that the survey results were not candid or honest in all cases because of the ability to identify the respondents.
  6. The Executive Director needs to address the perceptions of some faculty, staff and parents that minority faculty and staff are treated differently, that minority students are treated more harshly, and that he has not been vigorous in recruiting and retaining minority staff and faculty.