Management 101

For the last decade I have taught high school students government and economics. The previous thirty years were spent in service with the Central Intelligence Agency, holding a number of managerial assignments of steadily increasing importance. As Director for the CIA’s Office of Training and Education I administered the design and delivery of a wide range of managerial training.
In both careers I was responsible for subordinate productivity – adults in my previous life and students in my current one. Getting workers to perform well is one tough assignment. Boosting worker productivity has been the subject of countless books, business school classes, and professional seminars. Analogously, studies abound on the best way to improve student performance.
To my way of thinking, there are but a few core principles for enhancing worker productivity:
• Keep the supervisor-worker ratio at manageable levels: the supervisor must be able to appreciate the nature of each worker’s contribution and to develop individualized strategies to boost the productivity of each of his subordinates.
• Provide material incentives: the supervisor has to have the ability to match pay to performance. Pats on the back clearly help, but workers will slack off if hard work does not impact on weekly pay packets.
• Provide the supervisor with hiring and firing authorities: workers who fail to pull their load need to be replaced by those who will.
• Reward supervisors who boost worker productivity: promotions and bonuses should incentivize managerial best practices.
Having worked as a supervisor for over twenty-five years, I can attest to the importance of these tools, and to the difficulties of motivating subordinates when they are not in place.
Educational institutions are in the business of equipping young men and women with the various skill sets required to be productive employees in an increasingly demanding work environment. Classroom teachers effectively serve as first line supervisors. In recent years, these supervisors have come under increasing scrutiny -from politicians and educators alike- for the manifest failings in documented student performance. Most of the criticism has been heaped on the training and motivation of the individual teacher. Everyone seems to be seeking ways of cloning super-teachers.
Applying basic management principles to the educational environment may provide some insight in why it indeed may take a super-teacher to meet the current spate of student success criteria.
• Teachers are assigned two to three times the number of ‘workers’ to supervise as their counterparts in industry. Moreover, the ‘workers’ are adolescents or younger vice mature adults.
• Teachers have no say in the students assigned to them and no power to ‘fire’ those that were not willing to work. Teachers can’t even remove students from the classroom when they interfere with other students trying to do their jobs.
• Teachers are faced with meeting ever higher productivity targets – student test scores-- along with ever more time consuming performance measures that take time away from teaching the requisite skills.
• Teachers have no means to explicitly reward quality performance: students, they are told, had to be motivated by convincing them it was in their own best interest to maximize production. They could give productive students a shout-out or higher performance grade but nothing more.
• Teacher remuneration has nothing to do with their success in these endeavors: pay is based on education, training certifications, and longevity. Worse yet, productive teachers risked being saddled with a more challenging batch of students in the next cycle.
Any business would be hard pressed to succeed under these constraints. The situation becomes even more problematic when one factors in the uneven quality of educational administrators, often counterproductive parental involvement, and limited funds for improving the learning environment. Cloning super-teachers is oxymoronic: they are super teachers precisely because of their uniqueness. If education is to have its own Stakhanovite movement, it will first have to address the fundamental disconnects between today’s teaching environment and management best practices. At the end of the day, teachers lack both the tools and incentives provided to their business world counterparts when seeking to boost student achievement.